Bernhard Willhelm and Björk go way back. She bought stuff from his graduate collection in 1998. He designed the extraordinary thing she's wearing on the sleeve of Volta. And their reputations have both just been sanctioned by major museum exhibitions, Björk's at MoMA in New York, Willhelm's at MOCA in L.A. If there's an irony there, the designer would be perfectly happy. "Iconic and ironic" was his own summation of his work during a walk round his latest collection.
But what the MOCA show confirms is that "collection" may be too fashion-y a word for Willhelm, especially now that he's a museum star. He's turned his back on the conventions of the industry (an industry he feels turned its back on him anyway), relocated to L.A., repositioned himself. "Freedom to experiment, to explore fashion, sexuality, art, film, video, tableaux vivants…" That's what he's after now. Maybe "vehicle" is a better word than "collection." Still, Willhelm continues to design and produce clothes (everything is made in Japan), and there was enough here to please the fan club that looks to him for a little raw-edged provocation.
Willhelm is a Dionysian designer. There is no gender in his clothes, just the pleasure principle that underpinned outfits that looked rave-ready, like the cotton overalls with big zippers. The zip pulls were baby pacifiers recast in aluminum (Willhelm's comment on instant oral gratification). The graphics were, in this case, well and truly just that: faces of climaxing porn stars, one dévoré-ed print of women, the other of men. Willhelm called them his "gay Madonnas in ecstasy." Other visuals looked like messy, spontaneous explosions of paint. They reflected Willhelm's affection for the late '70s German art movement called Junge Wilde ("wild youth"), and they had a nu-tribal feel when they were reproduced on huge wraps. The notion of shameless performance appeals to him. That's what porn shares with Junge Wilde. And it's why Willhelm shot his lookbook two ways: arty, on the dolls from his MOCA show; horny, on Cutler X, an icon of the adult film industry.
Art world leanings aside, it's Willhelm's skewed humor that has always been his most memorable calling card. He said this collection began with shampoo—Australian entrepreneur Kevin Murphy's Kakadu Moisture Delivery System, to be precise—which rescued the designer's hair from the 30 percent peroxide solution he'd been dousing it in. The brand's labeling was faithfully duplicated on T-shirts and sweats. From Kakadu to cockatoo: Willhelm is impressed that in L.A. you can rent any living creature your heart desires, and the cockatoo, with its natural mohawk, seduced the punk in him. So he borrowed the cover art of Supertramp's album Brother Where You Bound, with its five evolutionary stages of man, and added a cockatoo on the end, after Homo sapiens, as an "attitude adjuster," the equivalent of the half-smile with which he punctuates everything he says, betraying an ultimate seriousness of purpose. "Humanity needs a spank from designers," said Willhelm. He embroidered endangered frogs and bats on his cotton overalls. Evolution or extinction: the way forward, the way back.
