Titles

In our last post Hans Ulrich Obrist discussed his obsession for the titles of his exhibitions and different schools of titles, inter alia, titles of the artists Gerhard Richter, Gilbert & George and Damien Hirst.

Here are some other artists for whom titles play an important part in their work; in fact, the titles are the work.

1. “I WOULD GLADLY PAY YOU TUESDAY FOR A HAMBURGER TODAY” – Ed Ruscha

‘Art’; ‘End’; and ‘Pity’ are titles of word paintings of the American artist Ed Ruscha who painted these words against backdrops of mountains, clouded skies, or just colour gradients. Later in his career he started to paint comical phrases, including “I WOULD GLADLY PAY YOU TUESDAY FOR A HAMBURGER TODAY”; “I PLEAD INSANITY BECAUSE I’M JUST CRAZY ABOUT THAT LITTLE GIRL”; and “HONEY, I TWISTED THROUGH MORE DAMNED TRAFFIC TO GET HERE”, some of them painted in Ruscha’s own designed typeface named “Boy Scout Utility Modern” – an angular capital typeface, with no curves.

Margit Rowell, the curator of Ruscha’s Show, “Cotton Puffs, Q-Tips®, Smoke and Mirrors” commented, “Ruscha’s work includes paintings, photographs, prints, books and films, but his works on paper are perhaps his richest vein. Through his interpretation of cultural icons and vernacular subjects, such as the Hollywood sign, trademarks, and gas stations, as well as his renderings of words and phrases in countless stylistic variations, Ruscha proposes a modern landscape based on keen observation and wry humor”.

Ruscha’s works remain extremely relevant today: he could be regarded as a predecessor to Twitter as his works are comparable to an “intriguing” Tweet, made in a concise statement or comment of less than 140 characters.

2. “I Shop Therefore I Am” – Barbara Kruger

Kruger became renowned for her – much imitated – graphic style of bold and confronting phrases, which are usually set in white on red in Futura Bold Oblique typeface. The layout of the phrases appear as a threatening letter, and are displayed in a collage manner on black and white pictures. Kruger’s text are often politically charged statements, addressing issues of, for example, consumerism (“Buy me I’ll change your life”), and power (“77% of anti-abortion leaders are men. 100% of them will never be pregnant”).

3. “You Are a Victim of the Rules You Live By” – Jenny Holzer

Just like Kruger, the work of the American artist Jenny Holzer, also deals with the issues of violence, oppression, sexuality and feminism. Holzer disperses her ideas in public spaces which are projected on buildings in the street or shown on LCD displays. Her phrase “Protect Me From What I Want” even made it to Times Square where it was largely displayed on a LED billboard.

At the beginning of her career, Holzer wrote her own texts and became renowned for her “Truisms”, short statements such as “Men Are Not Monogamous By Nature” and “Money Creates Taste”, which were printed on cheap, coloured paper and plastered on the walls in New York in the 1970s and also printed on T-shirts. From 1993 Holzer started to use texts of others, including Lenin and Mao and Nobel Prize winners Elfriede Jelinek and Wislawa Szymborska.

Holzer has chosen Futura Condensed Bold as her signature typeface for the texts that have been projected in many cities throughout the world in the language of the country. Unfortunately, her texts haven’t been projected (yet) on buildings in dictatorial regimes where they could articulate the thoughts of repressed civilians who are not allowed to express ideas, like Holzer, in public but can only think about them in silence.

4. “FRANKIE SAY WAR! HIDE YOURSELF” – Paul Morley

Paul Morley also used the T-shirts as his medium. For the band Frankie Goes To Hollywood he created a series of popular “Frankie say” T-shirts based on a controversial T-shirt that the fashion designer Katharine Hamnett wore when she met Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s. The text on Hamnett’s shirt read: “58% DON’T WANT PERSHING” voicing the British public resistance to basing nuclear weapons in the UK.

To promote the Frankie Goes To Hollywood protest song ‘Two Tribes’ Morley designed a T-shirt marketing campaign. Set in a bold typeface, the slogans were “FRANKIE SAY WAR! HIDE YOURSELF” and “FRANKIE SAY ARM THE UNEMPLOYED” that sold 250,000 copies fulfilling Morley’s desire for the song to become ‘part of public language’.

Written by Thierry Somers

Picture: Barbara Kruger “I Shop Therefore I Am” (above)

“Frankie Say…” T-shirt designed by Paul Morley and modeled by Frankie Goes to Hollywood.

If you have a suggestion for a great Exhibition Title, including the reason why, please let us know.

Hans Ulrich Obrist

‘DO IT’ is not only the title of an exhibition that Hans Ulrich Obrist curated in 1997, but it also sums him up. The Co-Director of Exhibitions and Programmes and Director of International Projects for The Serpentine Gallery is one of the most prolific, hands-on, art curators in the world, who merges science, architecture and literature into his work. He is the founder of the breakfast club ‘Brutally Early Club’, where people from the arts meet people in science, architecture and literature professions at 6.30 in the morning. “If you want to understand the forces that are effective in visual arts, it’s important to understand what is happening in other disciplines”, as Obrist quoted the art historian and museum director, Alexander Dorner, in a story in our fourth edition of 200% (“Expanding the Notion of Curating”), as to why Obrist has such close ties with other disciplines.

For that story Obrist provided us with lots of interesting material that didn’t fit into the subject of our story, but is still worthwhile sharing, for example, his obsession for the titles of his exhibitions, different schools of titles, inter alia, titles of Gerhard Richter, Gilbert & George and Damien Hirst, and whether the relationship between an artist and a curator may be comparable with the relationship between a novelist and his editor.

In this interview, Obrist gives his viewpoints on these topics, and also discusses what he considers have been the major developments in the art scene, and what museums could do with all the hidden treasures they have in their vaults that can’t be shown to the public due to space constraints.

200%: How do you come up with the titles of your shows?

Hans Ulrich Obrist: For my house museum shows the artist Douglas Gordon invented the titles: ‘Retrace Your Steps, Remember Tomorrow’ for the Sir John Soane’s museum, ‘The Air Is Blue’ for the Luis Barragán show in Mexico, and ‘Ever Still’ for the Lorca Show in Granada. For the other shows I came up with the titles in dialogues with others.

‘Cities On The Move’, which I co-curated with Hou Hanru, was inspired by a conversation we had with the Italian philosopher and politician Massimo Cacciari. ‘Do it’ was a collaboration with Bertrand Lavier and Christian Boltanski. ‘Utopia Station’, was a collaboration between Molly Nesbitt, Rirkrit Tiravanija and myself for the 50th Venice Biennale. Molly and I had worked on an exhibition ‘Utopia’ and Rikrit worked on ‘Station’ and our ‘Utopia’ and his ‘Station’ became ‘Utopia Station’, so very often my titles are shared space.

Titles are key; they can become self-fulfilling prophecies. If we call a show ‘Cities On The Move’ or more recent our Serpentine Show ‘Indian Highway’, which I co-curated with Julia Peyton-Jones and Gunnar Kvaran, it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy that these shows are going on tour, which is what they did. Thus, titles are more than titles: they are a production of reality.

200%: The titles of your shows are usually very short. Is there a reason for this?

Hans Ulrich Obrist: Yes, Gerhard Richter told me that titles should be iconic, normally very short. When we did the show in the Nietzsche Haus in Sils Maria, where Nietzsche wrote ‘Also sprach Zarathustra’, I suggested ‘Circulus vitiosus pictus’ instead of ‘Circulus Vitiosus Deus’ (Nietzsche’s Ethics), but Richter said “no, that’s too complicated. In a few years, it is not going to be good”. The longevity of a title is also very important. A title has to work in twenty or fifty years, and Gerard asked me “where is this show?” and I answered “Sils Maria” and he said “too long” and he reduced it to ‘Sils’, which became the title of the show. We then applied this methodology to the next book we did together, which was Gerhard Richter ‘Text’. The working title was ‘The Daily Practice of Painting’, and at some point Gerhard asked me “what is it, as a matter of fact”. I replied “It’s text, it is your writings”. So we called it Gerhard Richter ‘Text’.

Ever since, I have applied this methodology to some of my other shows. When I did the show at Hotel Carlton Palace, we just called it ‘Hotel Carlton Palace – room 763’, the room in which it actually took place. When I did a show in the Zurich drainage museum [Museum der Stadtentwässerung], I called it ‘Cloaca Maxima’. I also liked the titles of Pontus Hultén shows. When he did his big blockbuster shows he called them ‘Paris-Moscow’ or ‘Paris-Paris’. Titles have always been an obsession for me.

200%: Besides Richter, are there any other artists who you think are ‘good’ in titles?

Hans Ulrich Obrist: Ed Ruscha, Martin Kippenberger and I was always very fascinated by the titles of Gilbert & George (G&G). I met them at the same time that I met Christian Boltanski, Fischli Weiss and Gerhard Richter – at the very beginning of my trajectory as a teenager when I was 18 years old. G&G would always come up with these amazing titles. I thought it would be nice to do a book on all G&G titles and I had many years of conversations with them. Finally, last year, they agreed to do a book, that they would also design, ‘Art Titles 1969-2010’, in collaboration with Inigo Philbrick and me. It’s a bit of a ‘user manual’ for people in search of titles.

G&G had this idea to print the titles in the book twice: in chronological and alphabetical order. [Obrist reads from the Foreword of the book] “G&G likened their evolution to a pilgrimage; invoking John Bunyan’s ‘Pilgrim's Progress’ as a model of their desire to continually and uncompromisingly discover life anew”. Thus, titling for G&G in their artistic practice is a question of ‘one thing after another’. [Obrist continues to read from the Foreword] “With each idea following intuitively from what has just been named. Their art is above all an attempt to take what is at hand and to make of it what they can; to search amid everyday life for ways to invent what Raymond Roussel might have called ‘wily stratagems’ performative gambits, to form pictures and exhibitions from reality.” When you read the book, it feels a bit like a rap and they want the reader to read it aloud.

200%: What do you think of the titles of Damien Hirst’s shows, for example, ‘The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living’, ‘Romance in the Age of Uncertainty’,  and ‘Towards a Better Understanding of Life without God aboard The Ship of Fools’.

Hans Ulrich Obrist: They are great titles. His titles are the other side of the spectrum as they are long, but interesting ominous loops. They are somehow between a music song and a poem. I’ve also been inspired by music songs. I did this other show ‘Take me (I’m yours)’, which was inspired by a music song of the band Squeeze. It actually was my first show with Julia Peyton-Jones at the Serpentine Gallery.

200%: You don’t consider Hirst’s titles pompous?

Hans Ulrich Obrist: No, I don’t think they are pompous. It’s a very different type of titles. I’ve been more of into iconic, short titles but I think Damien has invented his own sort of title. I think they are quite enigmatic and they make you think.

200%: How much is the relationship between an artist and a curator a bit like the relationship between a novelist and his editor? Is it a curator’s job to tell an artist ‘This is good... this needs more work... this should be thrown in the bin?’

Hans Ulrich Obrist: In the literary world often an author works with one editor. I think in the art world, though, there is more a promiscuity of collaboration, because artists are collaborating with different people; curators, galleries and have dialogues with critics, so I think it’s more polyphonic in the art world. When editors are telling me about their extreme proximity with their authors and how they speak all the time, it reminded me of certain relationships I have with certain artists that have sustained over a long time.

200%: What have been major developments in the art scene since you started as curator?

Hans Ulrich Obrist: We’re in a situation where you have a polyphony of voices in museums and people with all kinds of different approaches; it’s more trans-national. Now, a museum director works in other countries. I think that’s an opening up and that’s our task in the art world as the forces of homogenization are also at stake in the world of art. Maybe we can dedicate this interview to the memory of Édouard Glissant as he was such an amazing visionary in terms of “mondialité" and "créolisation” to actually show us ways how we can engage in a global dialogue to produce differences and avoid the homogenization of languages. I believe that there should be a pluralism and a variety of different museum approaches. It’s important that Shows are not only curated by professional curators but also by artists. Last year, Julia Peyton-Jones and I, asked the industrial designer, Konstantin Grcic, to curate a design show at the Serpentine Gallery – these unexpected curatorships can lead to very unexpected shows.

What is also interesting, is that, to take as a positive sign, is the move from the art world that used to be a very limited field. Previously, it was only the Western art that was considered; what has happened over the last 10, 20 years, is extraordinary; China, Middle East, Latin America and all these powerful strong art scenes, are finally gaining credit and entering museum collections and museum shows. There are also more curators and artists from these geographies who start to play a role. We have a greater variety now. The art world used to be much smaller. When I started in the 1980s, you had less curators and they often had a local monopoly and, now, no-one has a monopoly.

Within curating I notice there is a lot of re-visiting of positions from the past. Ten, twenty, years ago curating was all about the ‘new’ and there was an excitement of finding new artists; now, there is, again, an additional layer to that which is memory. I see more and more curators being interested in artists from previous decades, undigging sources that help us to invent the future.

200%: Do you have a solution as to what museums could do with all the hidden treasures they have in their vaults that can’t be shown to the public due to space constraints?

Hans Ulrich Obrist: Museums can only show a little bit of what they have, and even if they do an expansion, and double or triple their surface, it is still is a very small percentage of what their collection includes.

I think it’s interesting to return to an idea of the architect Rem Koolhaas for the expansion of the MoMA, which must have been 10 to 15 years ago, but it was turned down (MoMA decided to adopt Yoshio Taniguchi’s concept). Koolhaas’s project was actually that the museum would have different parts, not only the physical part, the display of art, but that the viewer would also have the possibility to see parts of the storage e.g. accessible digitally.

One of the things that is very fascinating in the world of curating is that when I became a curator my relatives thought it was a medical profession, as it was so obscure, they had no clue what a curator was: today, though, the word curating is used everywhere. It’s used on the Internet, used by blogs: websites are being curated, the TED conference is being curated. From this point of view one can obviously say if Joseph Beuys says “everyone is an artist” could we say, 40 years later, “everyone is a curator”? Now, that doesn’t mean that an expertise disappears, because obviously museum curators have a life-long expertise – as a scholar, as a researcher, as a profession of how to install a show – and that is something we need in the future, as we need experts in all fields. It is, however, very interesting that, in addition, you could say there could also be the idea that every viewer is a curator. Actually viewers, through the digital connection, can go to the collection, they could put together their own display, and there could be all kinds of alternative proposals of use; you could then digitally, view other things than you see in the space that I think is not yet used so much, which I think has huge potential for the future.

Interview conducted and written by Thierry Somers. 

Additional contribution by Marie Drysdale.

Picture: Hans Ulrich Obrist, Photographed by Juergen Teller

© Juergen Teller

Wil Malone

Wil Malone is a musician, producer and responsible for the string arrangements of Massive Attack’s ‘Unfinished Sympathy’ and The Verve’s ‘Bitter Sweet Symphony’ – two songs that featured on our playlist ‘Pop Meets the Classics’ (January 2011 post).

As a musician, Malone was a member of the psychedelic bands ‘Orange Bicycle’ and ‘Motherlight’ and classical instruments feature prominently on his solo album ‘Wil Malone’ and the soundtrack for the horror movie ‘Death Line’. Malone mentions Samuel Barber’s ‘Adagio for Strings’, Paul Buckmaster’s string arrangements for Elton John’s albums and David Bowie’s ‘Space Oddity’ as big inspirations for his own string arrangements.

Earlier this month, Anne Dudley explained on our blog how the string arrangements of ABC’s ‘Lexicon of Love’ orginated and here Wil Malone shares, the origins of the string arrangements of ‘Unfinished Sympathy’ and ‘Bitter Sweet Symphony’.

‘Unfinished Sympathy’

With ‘Unfinished Sympathy’ it was the band and the producer who asked me to do the string arrangements for the song. I remember, the track was originally eight minutes long and they let me hear many demos of the song; all sorts of constructions and different ways of doing it. I asked them what they had in mind for the string arrangements of the track and it was Massive’s producer Jonny Dollar – he was highly responsible for putting together the track – who said: “do what you feel like”.

The reason for inclusion of the string arrangements was to be supportive. In my view, in pop music, strings have to be supportive to the vocal, although they also have to give a boot and a sense of tension. If you have a rough track, it’s good to have the strings as a classical contrast sound so that you create a tension, a suspense going on all the time between the roughness of the track and the purity and classical feel. In pop music you’re usually working on a track with bass, drums, guitar, synthesizer, vocals and the strings have to blend with all that. My approach for ‘Unfinished Sympathy’ was that it’s a really open track: basically it’s just a groove – keyboards, and a great vocal by Sara Nelson – so you just let it drift, just let it chill.

With most string arrangements that I do, the strings are ‘put back’ in the mix. In other words they are so quiet you don’t really hear them, or they’re mixed up, so that you can just hear the top lines; but on ‘Unfinished Sympathy’, the strings are exposed. You can really hear them and I think that makes something different.

The string arrangements were played by 42 session players in EMI Abbey Road studio 1. I wanted to make the sound rich so that it vibrates in your chest and stomach, but to also keep it cool, so not so much vibrato – hit the bar lines very accurately. When you are writing, descriptively, in classical music there are emotions that you want the orchestra to have or play, but in pop music that isn’t true. There is no point in writing instructions like ‘dolce’ unless it really means something; basically it is a different way of writing for strings in pop music as you’re writing to a mix, you’re trying to blend your sound into the sound that is on the track.

‘Bitter Sweet Symphony’

Richard Ashcroft, the singer-songwriter of The Verve, asked me to write the arrangements for their track ‘History’ from their second album ‘A Northern Soul’. He liked what I had done and he asked me to write the strings for ‘The Drugs Don’t Work’ for their album ‘Urban Hymns’. And this track came up and they played me a riff [Malone hums the tune of ‘Bitter Sweet Symphony’] and they said that’s what we want. So I wrote it and but I wanted to have it a bit more bounce, jump if you like, and I added some bits and pieces. And it’s always on the same chord, quite Arabic – it doesn’t change.

Also in this song the strings are very pronounced and that’s why people talk about it, because you can hear them. Apart from Richard’s voice, they became the most important element of the song. The strings were basically performed by the same team of session musicians who did ‘Unfinished Sympathy’ but done by a smaller group of 24 people at Olympic Studio. My instructions to the musicians were to make the strings tough, determined, not pretty, not to make them poetic.

Emotional response

When people hear a string ensemble playing together, sometimes, they are emotionally moved by it. I have seen them cry on sessions when they hear it; but as the person who has written the string arrangement, I know what they’re going to sound like, so I’m not going to cry about them, I will just be happy when they sound great. In a certain sense all show business, film, music, etc is a form of manipulation. The benefit, thus, is for the person ‘receiving it’. That’s what you try to do: to put a bit of humour in it, or some wit, maybe a bit of elegance or create an unnerving effect. That’s what great string arrangements can do.

Written by Thierry Somers

Anne Dudley

Throughout her career Anne Dudley has experimented with many musical genres. She has been a member of the avant-garde synthpop group, Art of Noise, who used innovative ways of ‘sampling’; has created many film scores, including ‘Black Book’, ‘The Crying Game’ and ‘The Full Monty’ (for which she won an Academy Award); has been the musical director of Bill Bailey's ‘Remarkable Guide to the Orchestra’; and, most recently, she created her first opera ‘The Doctor’s Tale’ in collaboration with Terry Jones (one of the members of Monty Python).

Dudley is also renowned as a string arranger: she arranged and conducted a Russian-school classical music opening theme for Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s ‘Two Tribes’ and the epic string arrangements for ABC’s album ‘The Lexicon of Love’.

Two of the fifteen songs on our play list ‘Pop Meets the Classics’ (January 2011) featured Dudley’s string arrangements. Here, in her own words, Dudley shares how the string arrangements of ABC’s ‘Lexicon of Love’ originated; explains the difference between ‘real’ strings and strings created on a synthesizer; and how it feels to be standing on the conductor’s rostrum.

The big epic sound

In 1980 Trevor Horn was producing ABC. At that time the band didn’t have a keyboard player or a bass player, but they had some really good songs and lyrics that Martin Fry had written. As the songs were in a basic form, Trevor wanted to re-arrange them; to have them become more interestingly structurally and to build a much bigger epic sound around the ‘bare bones’ of the band.

I had worked with Trevor before on a few things and he asked me to do the string arrangements of the songs. The first track on which we worked with ABC was ‘Poison Arrow’, which was released as a single and was quite successful [It reached #6 on the UK singles chart]. The next main single was ‘The Look of Love’ for which Trevor wanted a big string arrangement on the song. This seemed a great opportunity to do something big and bold.

We recorded the strings in Abbey Road in Studio 1 and had, what I considered, a quite large string section in those days – probably about thirty musicians. We had the full string arrangements, violins, cello’s, contrabasses, and a brass and winds section – so we used the whole spectrum sound.

When I first heard the mix of ‘The Look of Love’ I was quite surprised how Trevor really featured the strings, which became a major part of the whole sound. They had more importance that I had first envisioned. They weren’t just the icing on the cake: they were the substance of the cake and a lot of commentators spoke about “the big epic sound” after the album came out.

‘All of My Heart’

It was one of the last songs we did. To be honest, I thought it was a very dull song. By this stage, after recording most of songs, we were very confident that the strings would give it something really different and elevate it above the ordinary. Thus, there are some really bold counter melodies in the strings’ part; and at the end of the song I took the opportunity of doing something quite intricate, quite complex. I was very pleased with the sound of the ending. It went somewhere else, it seemed slightly English pastoral, Ralph Vaughan Williams-esque.

I’m also very happy with ‘Valentine’s Day’, which starts with these manic arpeggio’s. Again, there was nothing really in the song until we put the strings on it and we made a feature out of the arrangement of the song.

It’s quite interesting to look back at the things one does. The album, as a whole, has a distinctive character about which I’m quite pleased.

Fun and joyful

In the lyrics on the album there are some funny lines, for example in ‘The Look of Love’: “If you judge a book by the cover / Then you judge the look by the lover”. It’s meaningless but it sounds important. I have always liked humour in music, which is a very rare and difficult thing to do; if there is a little tongue in cheek in it then I’m very happy about that. I suppose the string arrangements on ‘The Lexicon of Love’ are quite fun and joyful. It’s very grandiose as it swoops up to the high octaves – perhaps just a little bit over the top. A little bit too good to be true –quite lush and extravagant.

Strings vs. synthesizers

I believe records where the string arrangements have been recorded with ‘real’ strings will sound less dated, than those when the strings were played on a synthesizer. For example, Ultravox’s ‘Vienna’, a record of the 1980s, sounds very dated to me. I think it is a great song but the strings really don’t sound like strings. It would have been a different record if the strings were done by an orchestra, although now, it has this wonderful synthetic 1980s gloss to it.

On the rostrum

When you’re conducting an orchestra the sound of strings playing together can evoke an emotional response. It lifts your spirit when the strings start playing together. It’s almost like a sort of manipulative thing. I don’t really know why. I sometimes put it down to energy. When you got 30 or 40 musicians in a studio in front of you they are giving you a lot of energy. If you are recording strings, even if they play quite quietly, you can sort of feel that energy. It’s quite difficult to get anything like that if you’re just using synthesizers because you haven’t got the energy of all these musicians.

I’m not the world’s best conductor but I want to be there on the rostrum conducting the musicians because I think they like to have direct communication with whomever has written the notes. And to be on the rostrum is a nice feeling. I wouldn’t swap it for the world.

Written by Thierry Somers

Anne Dudley and Terry Jones’ opera ‘The Doctor’s Tale’ – a tale about a devoted doctor, whose patients love him and who has a wonderful cure rate, but the General Medical Council say he has to stop practising because he is a dog – is commisioned and prodcued by ROH2, and performed from 8-16 April at the Lindbury Studio Theatre in London.

Shaun Samson

One of the highlights of the Central Saint Martins MA collection presented at London Fashion Week (February, 2011) was the work of the young designer Shaun Samson. The work of the graphic artist M.C. Escher was one of the inspirations of Samson’s menswear collection for which he fused plaid wool, Aran knitwear and denim into a single fabric, using the ‘felting’ treatment. Samson presented a visually arresting collection that looked sophisticated, artistic and minimalistic.

In our interview with Samson talked about the process of the ‘felting’ treatment, Louise Wilson’s contribution to his MA collection, and what he considers to be the difference in struggles between ‘young’ and established designers.

200%: How long did you work on your MA collection?

Shaun Samson: I started research during the Summer holiday before my final year, and worked on it up to the Press Show in February 2011. Thus, I’d say it was around six months, similar to working on a normal Fall collection. During that time, though, there was a lot of “shit work" that lead to absolutely nothing. Toward the end of that six months, however, everything was scratched and I started over again. I used the same reference points, but revamped all the shapes. I think after working on a project for too long it becomes harder to have a new opinion on it, and becomes harder to see what you need to do to make it fresh.

200%: What made you come up with the idea to fuse Aran knit wool, denim and tartan into a single fabric for your MA collection?

Shaun Samson: In my research I looked at traditional men’s workwear, transfiguration, and the work of M.C. Escher, from which I wondered if I could recreate the idea of something morphing into another thing in real life. I’d seen ‘felting’ as a treatment to decoratively apply one fabric onto another, which was a starting point for my technical research – then, I wanted to see how far I could push it. When I was felting those small samples of wool to denim and to linen I started to imagine how it would look in large scale if I joined a whole garment onto another. That's from where the idea of fusing Aran knits to all these other fabrics came into the picture. 

200%: Could you share something about the process of the ‘felting’ treatment that you discovered during this time?

Shaun Samson: I actually have to do everything on the reverse side of the fabric, so I never see exactly how I’m felting. It’s only when I take the fabric out of the machine and turn it right side up where I see what I've felted. I had to learn to be really intuitive to the process to get it to finally work the way I wanted it to.

200%: Can you say what is was that Louise Wilson (Central Saint Martins Master of Fashion Course Director) contributed to your education throughout the MA course?

Shaun Samson: Louise has an extensive knowledge of fashion and shares it with each of her students. She keeps it from being just another collection, and knows how to make things more special. At the end of the day, though, it is up to each student to take her advice or not. I thought I was “hot shit” coming onto the MA with amazing marks from my BA collection. Louise made sure that everyone, including me, was “knocked off their high horse” from the day we started the course. 

200%: Was there any advice she provided to students that remains with you?

Shaun Samson: Her first piece of advice was eloquently clear: “It's right to be wrong”. I still have the sheet of paper she gave us taped to my wall in my room.

200%: What did she mean with “It’s right to be wrong”? Did she gave that sheet of paper with this advice to all students on the first day of the course?

Shaun Samson: Louise walked into the classroom on that first day, and, instead of giving a long welcoming speech and overview of the course, she passed out this piece of paper that she had photocopied and read it aloud. It was akin to one of those calendars with ‘daily affirmations’, but this one, I believe, she especially thought would resonate with us students. It read:

It's Right to Be Wrong

Start being wrong and suddenly anything is possible.

You’re no longer trying to be infallible

You're in the unknown. There’s no way of knowing what can happen, but there’s more chances of it being amazing than if you try to be right.

Of course, being wrong is a risk.

People worry about suggesting stupid ideas because of what others will think.

You will have been in meetings where ‘new thinking’ has been called for, and at your original suggestion.

Instead of saying, “That's the kind of suggestion that leads us to a novel situation”, the room goes quiet, they look up to the ceiling, roll their eyes and return to the discussion.

Risks are a measure of people. People who won't take them are trying to preserve what they have.

People who do take them often end up by having more.

Some risks have a future, and some people call them wrong. But being right may be like walking backwards proving where you've been.

Being wrong isn't in the future, or in the past.

Being wrong isn't anywhere but being here.

Best place to be, eh?

I don't think she does this every year. She probably read this the day before the course began and decided to share it with the class.  But it's definitely advice that I consider when I'm questioning my work and want to push it further.

200%: As a student of Louise Wilson how would you describe her teaching style?

Shaun Samson: Necessary. I don’t think I would have grown the way that I did on her course had it not been for the way she treated me. I think she has a special knack for being able to understand a person’s personality to know how to get to their core; and she treats everyone accordingly to that. She’ll be really excited with some, whilst antipathetic with others at different points during their collection. It’s hard not to take things personally when the criticism is purely about the work. For me, what made me feel most like an asshole was when she was fairly calm and guilted me into thinking that I failed her expectations. Then there were other times where her precise attention to detail brought out the best of me – during which times, I’d shake during tutorials, which is just as bad. I will never ‘falter on a hemline’ ever again. It's actually quite amazing how she does it.

200%: Whilst the MA fashion show is the end exam, were there other objectives and / or goals for you in participating in this show?

Shaun Samson: I've always wanted to start my own label, so being in the press show was a great way to launch myself out into the real world. But I didn't just do the MA in hopes that I would get into the show. I really wanted to work with Professor Louise Wilson as a teacher/mentor. I'm always up for a good challenge, but didn't really know how to prepare myself for how intense the course really was.

200%: What makes you interested in menswear?

Shaun Samson: I studied Menswear because it's the only thing I want to do. I doubt that I will ever have a women’s line.

200%: Why do you feel so strongly about menswear? Is there something specific that appeals to you in menswear which you don't find in womenswear?

Shaun Samson: With womenswear the possibilities are endless, but there is a certain line with menswear that men will not cross. I like seeing how far I can push that line without compromising a man’s masculinity: it’s just different designing for guys – they want to be cool. 

200%: There are many designers who design for men. Do you perceive that there is a gap in the market that you can fill and if yes, what do you think you can do differently or revolutionize?

Shaun Samson: I think I design for a man that isn’t represented in fashion, otherwise I wouldn't feel the need to start my own label. I make men’s’ modern street wear, or at least that’s the best way that I can describe it if you have to put me in a box. I actually like being in this grey area. I don’t have to abide by any rules that make me specifically a ‘tailor’ or ‘luxury designer’. I use other devices to present fashion on the modern man, like felting...ha!

200%: According to Toby Bateman (buying director at Mr Porter, the online luxury retailer for men) “Men want a guide to buying the white shirt or jeans that works best for them, rather than seeing what’s the cutting edge of fashion”. Do you agree with him? Do men tend to be a little conservative in what they wear and not go too far, or is that a cliché?

Shaun Samson: It’s not just men that are conservative; some women are the same. Personally, I think the men that follow these ‘guides’ are the crazy fashion victims that tend to go for the cutting edge of fashion. No normal straight fashionable man would want anyone telling them what to wear. It would be too gay.

200%: Could you explain how important is wearability for you as a designer?

Shaun Samson: Of course it’s important. I'd like guys to wear my clothes everyday, although I know they won’t. Most of the people I know are precious about designer clothing, because when you spend so much money on it, people give it a sense of preciousness which isn’t for everyday. I like people that treat their luxury garments as another piece of clothing, because in the end clothes are meant to be worn.

200%: Has the work of the Raf Simons influenced you?

Shaun Samson: He represents the modern man very well. I like his silhouette and admire his contribution to menswear every season. It’s hard not to applaud his work when he’s been so successful at being Raf Simons for so many years. His designs are quite timeless. You can wear anything from his past collections at any time and still be cool. I’d love to have that much might.

200%: Invariably designers face struggles and make sacrifices. As a ‘young’ designer do you consider your struggles different compared to ‘established’ designers?

Shaun Samson: Obviously, as a new designer getting my label started is definitely harder than those that already have their label up and running. Establishing the business side is a lot of unglamorous work, but it needs to be done, on top the work that I need to do to design my next collection. But I’d say that as a young designer there’s so much more creative potential. Established brands have a customer to whom they have to cater. I don't have to worry about selling...yet.

Interview written and conducted by Thierry Somers.

Images: Photographer: Pelle Crepin, Art Direction: Rob Meyers for RBPMstudio, Design: RBPMstudio, Grooming: Christopher Sweeney, Model: Tom Lander @ Select