Bernhard Willhelm inhabits in his own time zone. This will not come as a surprise to any of the fans who appreciate his alternate-universe views. Let’s be frank: Compared with the rest of Paris Fashion Week, Willhelm’s showroom might as well be on another planet.
This collection, in the designer’s own words, is a “symbolic view on consumerism and the relationship between consumers, authors of consumer innovations, and the present and future states of humanity and the world.”
That’s a big mission. Let’s just say that Steve Jobs plays a role in it (“a collection has to look very good on an iPhone”). Willhelm is reaching out to the highly educated consumer, top of that list being the Japanese. America comes in on the opposite end of the spectrum, because, like so many these days, Willhelm is feeling both fascinated and conflicted. A lot of his clients come from the Silicon Valley new economy, where the idea of an office hasn’t existed since Sex and the City, as the designer observes. You get where he’s going. His base dresses for comfort. Some of them have given up on the city entirely and have headed back to nature, which is where unisex dressing might come in particularly handy.
So, the designer just sticks to some of his favorite things, like basketball. Willhelm has just returned to Paris from a couple of months in Venice Beach, California. The Veniceball basketball team stars in the lookbook, where the handsome French player Nick Ansom gets a special callout. So does the Brazilian-Austrian artist Christian Rosa, another Los Angeles transplant, who lent his studio for this shoot. That the wall is IKEA blue is hardly incidental.
This is when Timothy Leary’s The Psychedelic Experience comes in. A scan through the collection notes delivers this: “Design nowadays merely functions as a composition element, it’s minimal and reduced to the MAX. Sportwear is in a big moment of transition, it’s . . . worn by both sexes. Worn out, bleached, overdyed and dip-dyed in blood red. Like stonewashed Chanel. Trippy in Pink.” Never mind the pink; the khakis are better.
Willhelm situates his particular time zone somewhere between Chicago and Antwerp. There, in addition to Steve Jobs on a sweatshirt, one finds camouflage, kimono-style knitwear, a bizarre decapitated head on a marble plate, fil coupe appliqué spelling out Consumer, a Don’t Mess With Texas T-shirt, pretty cool leaping panther embroideries, and a quartet of really cute kittens. The sock shoes from Camper will probably go cult, too.
“In the best case, we wear what we design without being too precious about it,” the designer opines, citing another German designer who spent a lifetime working in Paris. Let’s not go overboard here. Oh, but wait: The Willhelm customer already is.
