Hand painted for Hong Kong

Photo: André de Loisted

When I was in Paris I met the buyers from the huge store D-Mop in Hong Kong and they fell in love with all the hand painted styles I had in the collection. They asked me to make them a special in-season production for them on these limited edition styles and oh am I glad the edition was...limited? Last week we sent them off and right now feels like a vacuum after all the hard work.

The idea of painting the outlines and all the seams originally came from a text that I wrote when sketching the Screaming Collection.

If you ever find me,
make me paper thin,
pin me up and leave me,
or sit on me with all your weight
with no restraint so I can't breath.

If you ever find me,
draw my outlines thick,
define me with a marker,
in any shape and every shade,
plastic lines of reds and greens.

But if you ever find me
I'll throw my weight on you,
with borrowed force I kick and scream,
tearing, I will wear you out,
biting, breathless still.

I hope you'll never find me.
I'll do my best to hide from you,
I have become what I most fear,
drop this cup that spills.







The garments I made were white and I thought that if one stands close to the white wall no one will see you. I bought a huge black marker pen and by drawing black outlines and even adding green and red, the world would turn into 3d and you would be seen. The new outlines would be a way to define a new start when one friend helps another. 

 

Last month we put six different jeans styles in production for Hong Kong and except for all the black machine dyed ones, we hand painted over 70 pairs for them plus some tops. First we washed all those white jeans with black seams in the laundry room in our basement, dried them and drove over to the Leonard garage where we did the fashion show this Summer. Mitt Möllan let us lend a huge dirty old room in the mall that used to be a super market and we started by putting up wires where the painted jeans could hang dry and we spread out big plastic sheets over the floor. Truls came to help me after work in the evenings and we did the light grey wrinkled wash that made me think of how one would look if shaped as a thin paper that someone had wrinkeld and thrown in the corner. The black outlines on white turned out really well and I especially liked the the gorgeous dappled industrial grey jeans with sloppy black outlines. After a week we were finished and fixated the colour in the enormous oven at Konstnärernas Kollektivverkstad and then awaited the worst work so far of sewing on all the tags.

I really want my customers to not be afraid of changing my fashion into their own fashion, I think it's a pitty that so many people think of designer clothes as holy, so I put a little note on them encouraging the future owner to not washing unless necessary and to do whatever they want with their new garment.I'm hoping it will lead to someone putting paint on them or cutting them off or whatever.

It was quite silly how I made this tag, it pretty low tech in every way possible. I wanted to make a graffiti stencil out of the Ravishing Mad logo and the easiest way, yeah I know, would have been to print it and cut it out with a scalpel. The last part I got right but since the printer was out of ink I pencil traced it from the computer screen. I went outside with the stencil and a piece of paper and sprayed the black limited edition logo and wrote some well chosen words with the great big marker pen and then I asked the print shop to reproduce the tag for me so we could attach it to the back pocket of the jeans.

We did over produce and right now our living room has boxes of seven fantastic styles that will enter our webshop next year in all the coolest colours...