Due to a scheduling error, Bernhard Willhelm was absent from his review appointment today. No biggie; these things happen. For the sake of expediency, email questions were submitted on-site, which Willhelm answered promptly and, we suspect, with a bit more style than he’d have given up IRL. Here is how he described the inspiration for his ambisexual Fall 2016 collection, which he’s called “Magic Potato”: “It came from a visit to the Koyasan Temple in Japan. The monks opened a shrine with a Buddha, and the decoration was a potato. Also my parents survived on potatoes after WWII. Plants are important for everyone. Deal with it.”
Though his designs land about as far left-of-center as possible, the humbleness of his chosen sustenance brought the clothes down to earth a bit—there was a crunchy, stoner-y whiff to dip-dyed corduroy shorts, thread-work done in Kolkata (India), a jumpsuit dyed ochre and clay before being embroidered with tanagers and screened with Cupids, and an outsize scarf printed with a nude woman working on an old car by the artist Rade Petrasevic. Pretty much everything in “Magic Potato” is outré and odd—par for the course with Willhelm—but with, somehow, a somewhat accessible portability or, at least, familiarity. Unlike designers elsewhere who look to grandness and exoticism in amplifying their collections, Willhelm ended up needing the bland to amplify his, so wild is his whimsy.
Elsewhere, silhouettes bowed to traditional Japanese kimono or “wizard cloak” shapes (big sleeves, big forms). Those aforementioned tanagers were sewn on throughout; there was also a cockatoo motif, which appeared as an intarsia treatment on a neat piece of bubbled-sleeve knitwear. And Willhelm’s collaboration with Mykita, the Berlin-based eyewear firm, is still thriving. “Somehow, we manage to keep this Los Angeles–Paris–based company over water,” the designer concluded in his message. “A little bit like Jesus without the shoes.” That’s about as simple as he’s going to get.
