In February of 2000, As Four (Adi Gil, Angela Donhauser, Gabi Asfour, and Kai Kühne), had already defined their aesthetic as organic and curvilinear. They had put this into practice in “Human Plant,” a collection that they created and photographed to publish in Zink Magazine, but they hadn’t gone public with their work—aside from sometimes wearing the pieces they made. When Paper’s Kim Hastreiter offered them a chance to show at the Bryant Park tents as part of a sort of alt-fashion/art event she was curating, the team jumped at the chance. “We wanted to really show how we worked,” Gabi Asfour later told Vogue.
The result was “Puppen Couture” a magical installation of miniature As Four garments shown en masse on wind-up hula dancing dolls the quartet found on Canal Street. As they twirled in their haphazard way to Wagner, the dolls placed As Four firmly at the center of downtown New York’s fashion/art nexus.
