What started off as an invitation to create 50 fur wigs for every model in Margiela’s Fall/Winter 97/98 runway collection, designers Ines Kaag and Desiree Heiss have since re-defined the everyday object and the way we look at and use them, with their inspiring, multi-disciplinary brand Bless. Despite working together for years, Ines and Desiree have never lived […]
Monday’s Muse: Ines Kaag and Desiree Heiss
What started off as an invitation to create 50 fur wigs for every model in Margiela’s Fall/Winter 97/98 runway collection, designers Ines Kaag and Desiree Heiss have since re-defined the everyday object and the way we look at and use them, with their inspiring, multi-disciplinary brand Bless. Despite working together for years, Ines and Desiree have never lived in the same place or worked from the same office. With a creative repertoire that reaches as far as ‘a make your own shoes-kit’ to ‘live in our Bless apartment’, both offering a slice of the BLESS experience, each object encourages a fresh approach towards usability which is undeniably admirable.
“… we love to create things that throw us back into the wide angle of possible experiences back when you were a child. We love the moment to stand and get lost in front of these items and get excited when they finally reveal a new way of perception. The passion of our profession is the questioning and its consequence; thus offering solutions, which we prefer to shape in products.
We are interested in creating products for ourselves and all the other people that can relate to and find them interesting. In that sense we are happy if there are people who like them, buy them, wear them, use them.”
I have, for years, followed the unconventional presentations of their collections – one time a game of soccer or a ‘workout computer’, the next, a room full of friends and wooly sheep; “Some people consider it not a very good way of showing clothes, and there are people from the high end of the fashion industry that don’t believe in our system because there aren’t models or our models aren’t aesthetic enough. But our clothes are designed to function on real people and maybe our friends are too big, too slim, to tall, too normal but we prefer to see our clothes on them.”
