Jens Laugesen, OysterJENS LAUGESEN
Published in Oyster, Australia’s cutting edge fashion magazine
Jens Laugesen is the anti-hero of London Fashion Week whether he likes it or not. Every season he goes against every common trend to get under the skin of a flawlessly shallow industry and break it out in a darkly persistent rash. While other designers look to the past for their inspirations, he turns his back on decoration, surface and frippery to explore what visions lie within his own imaginings for the future of fashion. He follows in the Japanese and Antwerp deconstruction traditions in his ruthlessly forward thinking ideology, which makes it a surprising fact that he used to turn in the epicentre of illusion – Parisian haute couture – before turning his back on its finery over function philosophy and packing his bags for London.
Today those bags are well and truly unpacked. Oyster is in his East London home-cum-studio sipping green tea as the city’s Indian summer sun breaks through the second floor windows. We find Jens home alone, his one assistant is on holiday and with a handful of weeks until Spring/Summer 05 is due to be shown, there’s no visible sign of a collection. But Jens is calm. The 36-year-old enfant terrible is no newcomer to this business after all.
Born in Denmark, fashion wasn’t his first dream vocation. “Initially I wanted to study microbiology. I was really interested in the ethical side of it because at that time in the 80s scientists had just started cloning and doing gene manipulation. I thought it was really cool and wanted to explore the new world.” Exploring Paris instead however, he decided his heart actually belonged to fashion and chose to study haute couture at the Chambre Syndicale de la Couture Parisienne. “I was always a creative boy and thought fashion was similar to science in that it was a technical field in which you used standard techniques to fuse your own vision. I knew I had to learn those skills and even though now it all seems a bit formulaic I still incorporate them today.”
Jens graduating in 1991 but instead of designing, he worked as a fashion journalist in Denmark. He then took a Masters in fashion management from the Institut Francais de la Mode in Paris and afterwards embarked on a six-year career within the city’s various fashion houses. Most people would have been content but not Laugesen. “I was a bit tired of the couture world and had a feeling I was going in the wrong direction. I had a really well paid job as head of collections for an international house but it wasn’t me. I didn’t like the clothes, I felt I had no integrity in what I was doing and was managing someone else’s collection when what I really wanted to do was design my own.”
Wasting no more time, Jens relocated to London for the Central Saint Martin’s womenswear MA. That’s right, another degree. Two is enough for most people but again, Jens isn’t most people. “I had been in a world that was not mine where there was a lot of feathers and gold and all that around me. I’d been taught about the Parisian idea of a woman in her corset and to work in a way that didn’t integrate my person so I had to find myself and St Martins was the best place to do it. I went back as a mature student so I wasn’t there to get good grades; I went there for me. The first term we all failed our first project. I had never failed anything in my life before and that was great. I threw two or three projects out after that as well. Something was only finished when I was totally happy with it.”
Despite not being afraid of bad grades, he still managed to graduate with a distinction in 2002. And despite spurning Paris, his final collection was displayed in the windows of one of its boutique Maria Luisa during Haute Couture Week that summer. And – oh yes - despite Jens claims to have not gone to St Martins in order to use it as a springboard for his own label, that’s what happened nonetheless. “It wasn’t the aim to become a name at LFW. That wasn’t the point,” he protests. “I had so many friends who’d been through this hell of starting a label - no money, living like a beast, working from home. It’s not a glamorous or funny life,” he smiles, the irony of his statement not lost on us given our present working home location. “I knew not many people survive and I didn’t think I had ideas interesting enough to be at that level but one thing lead to another.”
Jens was offered a slot at the off-schedule Fashion East initiative and held his first runway show for Spring/Summer 2003. The three successive seasons he won funding from the Top Shop New Generation Award and also designed a diffusion collection for the high street superstore. No small feat for a designer whose ideas of hybrid reconstruction would scare off the more faint hearted Saturday shopper. His design ideology, based around morphing different generic garments into new objects as part of an endless process of destruction and rebirth is shared by other advocates such as Bora Aksu, Miki Fukai and Peter Jensen - all similar St Martins success stories. “On the MA you have to come up with a concept of what to do after the deconstruction of fashion. We live in a fragmented world, that’s just how it is, so it’s about going forward. With deconstruction you end up with a lot of separate elements so I took the basics – the tank, the shirt, the t-shirt, the jacket – and worked them into new forms. The t-shirt is a reassuring shape but if you morph it, it becomes interesting again. It’s about moving things on without alienating people.”
Appealing to his scientific mind, the Dane’s Ground Zero trilogy saw not only garments but whole collections morph into one another. The series culminated for A/W 2003 with his first on-schedule LFW show, an offering inspired by Nick Knight’s images of 80s skinheads. A soundtrack of whirs and clicking noises welcomed the lank haired models to the catwalk as Laugesen’s apocalyptic monochrome vision took shape. Formal tailoring and casual sportswear blurred into an androgynous utilitarian silhouette that included wonky dinner jackets, besmirched skirts and sagging leggings. In short, it wasn’t a pretty sight.
“It was very personal for sure,” Jens says. “The whole idea of Ground Zero actually came from researching music theory. With a sound curve, when it goes down it’s called deconstruction and when it goes up it’s reconstruction but the bottom point where the tension is zero is called Ground Zero. I found all the terms and ideas before the Twin Towers came down so suddenly I had an idea that this was the end of American modernism and the monopoly of McDonalds concepts. From now on people will see an artistic shift. The concept probably pushed away some American journalists but I think as creative people we have the right to work on things even if they’re serious, that’s our job. We can’t just do pretty things. Fashion isn’t about pretty dresses.”
Spring/Summer 04 and the current collection launched his new numbered series ‘Outsized’ and saw both the palette and mood become lighter. By exposing for all to see tailored details that should normally be hidden away on the inside, Jens is commenting on the fact that true design comes from the within. “It’s very basic in a funny way. It’s focussing on one or two key elements and a bigger silhouette. I wanted to do something more readable, more positive. Ground Zero expressed the dark side of myself, my transition thing from the last century. The collections I’ll do in the future will be more open yet bring that hard into the soft.”
And as for Spring/Summer 05, well that’s anybody’s guess as it’s still in a pile of seriously deconstructed pieces in the other room. With 15 stockists worldwide including two in Australia and 10 in Japan however, Jens has his horizons set far further than the next London catwalk. “I’ve got a ten year business plan and at the end of it there’s a big fat cheque,” he laughs, draining his mug of green tea. “There’s only so much I can do on my own so right now I’m in negotiations for further investment. With funding I could make the label more corporate - a womenswear line, a menswear line, a sportswear concept of some kind plus I hope one or two shops. Then you can take that into a fashion house area and build the business. I don’t want a lifestyle brand but an ideology brand, if that makes any sense. Lifestyle is a fake thing but ideology doesn’t come from the surface.” Looks like anyone waiting for his or her Gucci-style Laugesen iPod pouch or Jens dog collar will be in for a long wait, then.
Jens Laugesen
www.jenslaugesen.com
Words Helen Jennings