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[size=+1]T[/size]he fashion designer Kai Kühne shows up more than an hour late, perhaps because it took him that long to put together his outfit. He’s wearing neon-pink-and-green nylon jogging shorts that barely make it past his buttocks, a silver iridescent tunic with an enormous embroidered butterfly, and zebra-striped high-top Nikes. His arms are covered in copper and pink plastic bracelets, his neck in a Mr. T amount of gold chains. A Jil Sander trench coat goes on top of everything else.
The customers at the outdoor Antique Café in midtown hold their mugs in midair as Kai approaches with his white pit bull, Powder, and platinum-blonde fiancée, Melissa Burns. “I’m sorry,” he says in a hoarse German voice. “But it’s not my fault. Nobody told me what time it was.”
Kai’s here to talk about his new solo career—which came about after his acrimonious split from As Four, the Lower East Side fashion collective known as much for sleeping together in one big modular bed—like the grandparents in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory—as for clothing Björk in mermaid dresses. And after dumping a handful of ice into his wineglass and downing it, he’s ready.
It’s been seven months since As Four locked him out of their atelier. The remaining three members, who kept the name As Four, have a new line launching in September. And while Kai says he’s over the group, that may not be entirely the case. His new line—to be presented September 15—is called Myself. For seven years he helped make As Four famous, or at least downtown-famous. In fact, in his eyes, he did everything.
“I controlled the b*tches,” Kai says. “I financed the whole thing, worked out the concepts, let them finish the pieces.”
The others maintain that Kai was a major, but not the sole, source of funding, and not the Svengali. “The main reason Kai left,” As Four’s Gabi (the collective uses first names only) says later, “is that he couldn’t cope with the idea that we had four different opinions and that is what As Four’s beauty was.”
The breakup “had all of the nasty things involved in a divorce,” says another member, Ange. “It became torture.”
“There were creative differences,” Kai says, “and physical assaults.”
[size=+1]W[/size]hether intentionally or not, all designers cultivate a certain mystique, from the semi-reclusive (Yves Saint Laurent) to the excessive (the old Donatella). Sometimes it works just right, bolstering their brand. Other times it goes perilously off course. As young designers, As Four worked harder than most on their “story,” yet controlling such stories can be quite difficult. Formed in 1998, the quartet—Kai, Gabi, Adi, and Ange—hailed from Germany, Lebanon, Israel, and Tajikistan, respectively. Theirs was a tale of globalist goodwill, an experiment in communal creativity—until the plot shifted.
Soon enough, As Four’s combativeness was being directed inward. “It started out as just arguing,” Quartana says. “And it became worse. Four people can’t live and work together and shre a bed.” So, Adi and Kai started sleeping in a tent on the floor. Then came the first all-group fistfight, one of many. They won’t really talk about it (it’s part of the old As Four story). “Sometimes you need to fight it out,” says Ange.
Kai thinks that the trouble began once external relationships started affecting the core of As Four. “Adi fell in love for the first time,” he says. “The balance was off because me and Adi were very close. The magic of As Four was in that balance.”
Adi moved out, followed by Kai, but the group kept preparing for last February’s fall 2005 show, albeit with difficulty. Kai says he wanted to make the garments less like sculpture. “They don’t have to scream avant-garde,” he says. “His vision of commercial is much different from ours,” counters Gabi.
Things finally came to a head at a 2004 Christmas party for the fashion label Heatherette at Darklight. “The mood of the place was really outrageous,” an attendee says. “Björk was dancing on the table. And [Ange] accidentally set her own hair on fire.” Then Kai—wearing “a big shawl thing”—allegedly started swinging a ceiling light like a tetherball. It broke, cutting someone’s leg. The bouncer kicked Kai out. As Four retired to the Chelsea bar Passerby, where what happened next is something they still refuse to discuss. Reportedly, Kai dumped a champagne bucket of ice water over his head, drenching Björk, and the others decided they’d had enough. Adi and Ange dragged him out and beat him up. “We are not proud of everything” is Ange’s only comment.
Kai left the country. “He was in Brazil and Israel,” Cutrone recalls, “and the others started to feel very Cinderella about it. ‘We’re doing all of the work. Where’s Kai?’ ” He urged them not to have their February show. They did anyway. Kai, who showed up for it, “was shocked,” says Gabi. “He realized that we actually operated without him.”
“The revolution started,” Kai says, “and the king had to leave. The kaiser.”
“It was the seven-year itch,” says Adi. “We made it and Kai didn’t.”
[size=+1]T[/size]he As Four three are in the silvery loft where they still make their clothes. To gain entrance, you must catch a key thrown out the top-floor window in a leather pouch. They have been busy preparing for the September 9 presentation of the Best of As Four—a reworking of their greatest hits (skirts, pants, even the circle bag) in . . . denim, and at a much lower price point (starting at $111 rather than $1,111.11). They’ll have a “pirate” storefront downtown during Fashion Week to sell the line, also known as As FourDenim. Why denim? “We always wanted to do it,” says Adi, “and we got a big order from Japan.”
A line of clothes they made for Kate Spade—including capelets—is doing well, and they’ve just finished a unisex perfume in collaboration with Parisian boutique Colette: ThreeasFour, which has a nice, gingery smell. The working environment is “not the same, because Kai’s energy is not here,” admits Adi. “But now the most important thing is the product. It’s more and more like a label, and that’s what we want. It’s not the conceptual As Four. We did that already.”
As it turns out, Kai has also created a fragrance. Its working title: Balloon. “The inspiration is making love with me in a field,” he explains, “and feeling safe. My favorite thing is when I meet certain women and smell their cheeks and there is a scent of a balloon.” He says it reminds him of his childhood. Balloon kicks like a mule, the scent both rubbery and synthetic. “It smells like a used condom,” observes Ange.
If As Four seem determined to mellow the drama, Kai is caught between courting it and squashing his more outré instincts. He showed up for the photo shoot for this story in a relatively restrained outfit (docksiders, even). Yet he can’t help becoming tabloid fodder. “Kai has joined that hallowed pantheon of self-destructive celebs,” says Chris Wilson of “Page Six,” “like Andy Dick and Tracy Morgan, where every time they go out, something crazy happens. When Kai goes clubbing, you know you’re gonna get a phone call or three the next day.” The most recent item was Kai’s alleged attempt to set Gabi on fire at a store opening. “Like all of these stories,” Kai says, “there is a piece of truth and a piece of misinformation.”
And then—in what may be another odd bid for attention—there is his engagement to Melissa Burns, an ex-model best known as the Beyoncé of the disbanded electroclash girl band W.I.T. (which stood for Whatever It Takes). It’s the Lower East Side version of The Surreal Life. “He asked me to marry him and I couldn’t think of a reason to say no,” says Burns. But isn’t he gay? “Umm, yeah.” And aren’t you already married? “Yeah, but I’m getting divorced.”
The nuptials are scheduled for next spring, but Kai already has children on his mind. A couple years ago, while in the mirrored tent As Four made for a Downtown for Democracy show, he had a vision that it was his mission to have them. He’s already donated sperm to a friend in Israel. “She liked my genes. I give sperm for babies and sperm for, like, whoever. Sperm for everybody.” And now “I’ve been chosen!” exclaims Burns. We’re all in a chauffeured Explorer heading downtown, and she’s showing some of her drawings, which are mostly of women performing oral sex. Kai considered incorporating them into his new line, Myself, but they were deemed a bit too “out-there.”
With Myself, Kai says he’s “aiming for everybody. To satisfy the spoiled couture b*tch, the crazy pop star.” But he also claims to be toning things down. “After doing something very conceptual in As Four,” he says, “I’m focusing on classical clothing that I believe are basics—and on the commercial.” Myself, Kai e-mails later, will be a women’s line but “with a unisex touch,” incorporating “equestrian influences, graceful time travel, colonial Africa, beachy Sahara, horses in the ocean . . . light silks, taffetas, cottons, and subtle curves in classic shapes.” There’s also a T-shirt line, priced under $100. Stylistically, the whole venture is about “returning to where I come from,” Kai says. “My family are cool but bourgeois.”
Kelly Cutrone no longer represents As Four, though she and the three members express genuine affection for each other. But she recently signed on to rep Kai, and she’s hoping for his success for all sorts of reasons. Not least of which is that he—like his ex-comrades, still sewing away in their lovely silver cage—is an awfully good urban character. Fistfights aside, he walks that fine line, one that still gets trod every so often in fashion, between maddening and entertaining, destructive and creative.
“If Kai left New York,” Cutrone said before becoming his PR agent, “I would really miss him. There are very few people in the city now like Kai. Even in industries that seem really liberal, people try to stay socially acceptable.”
very long article, but an interesting read... i chopped some parts off, but you can read the full article here at:
http://newyorkmetro.com/nymetro/shopping/fashion/12546/index.html
credit: new york metro magazine
so what do you think?
The customers at the outdoor Antique Café in midtown hold their mugs in midair as Kai approaches with his white pit bull, Powder, and platinum-blonde fiancée, Melissa Burns. “I’m sorry,” he says in a hoarse German voice. “But it’s not my fault. Nobody told me what time it was.”
Kai’s here to talk about his new solo career—which came about after his acrimonious split from As Four, the Lower East Side fashion collective known as much for sleeping together in one big modular bed—like the grandparents in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory—as for clothing Björk in mermaid dresses. And after dumping a handful of ice into his wineglass and downing it, he’s ready.
It’s been seven months since As Four locked him out of their atelier. The remaining three members, who kept the name As Four, have a new line launching in September. And while Kai says he’s over the group, that may not be entirely the case. His new line—to be presented September 15—is called Myself. For seven years he helped make As Four famous, or at least downtown-famous. In fact, in his eyes, he did everything.
“I controlled the b*tches,” Kai says. “I financed the whole thing, worked out the concepts, let them finish the pieces.”
The others maintain that Kai was a major, but not the sole, source of funding, and not the Svengali. “The main reason Kai left,” As Four’s Gabi (the collective uses first names only) says later, “is that he couldn’t cope with the idea that we had four different opinions and that is what As Four’s beauty was.”
The breakup “had all of the nasty things involved in a divorce,” says another member, Ange. “It became torture.”
“There were creative differences,” Kai says, “and physical assaults.”
[size=+1]W[/size]hether intentionally or not, all designers cultivate a certain mystique, from the semi-reclusive (Yves Saint Laurent) to the excessive (the old Donatella). Sometimes it works just right, bolstering their brand. Other times it goes perilously off course. As young designers, As Four worked harder than most on their “story,” yet controlling such stories can be quite difficult. Formed in 1998, the quartet—Kai, Gabi, Adi, and Ange—hailed from Germany, Lebanon, Israel, and Tajikistan, respectively. Theirs was a tale of globalist goodwill, an experiment in communal creativity—until the plot shifted.
Soon enough, As Four’s combativeness was being directed inward. “It started out as just arguing,” Quartana says. “And it became worse. Four people can’t live and work together and shre a bed.” So, Adi and Kai started sleeping in a tent on the floor. Then came the first all-group fistfight, one of many. They won’t really talk about it (it’s part of the old As Four story). “Sometimes you need to fight it out,” says Ange.
Kai thinks that the trouble began once external relationships started affecting the core of As Four. “Adi fell in love for the first time,” he says. “The balance was off because me and Adi were very close. The magic of As Four was in that balance.”
Adi moved out, followed by Kai, but the group kept preparing for last February’s fall 2005 show, albeit with difficulty. Kai says he wanted to make the garments less like sculpture. “They don’t have to scream avant-garde,” he says. “His vision of commercial is much different from ours,” counters Gabi.
Things finally came to a head at a 2004 Christmas party for the fashion label Heatherette at Darklight. “The mood of the place was really outrageous,” an attendee says. “Björk was dancing on the table. And [Ange] accidentally set her own hair on fire.” Then Kai—wearing “a big shawl thing”—allegedly started swinging a ceiling light like a tetherball. It broke, cutting someone’s leg. The bouncer kicked Kai out. As Four retired to the Chelsea bar Passerby, where what happened next is something they still refuse to discuss. Reportedly, Kai dumped a champagne bucket of ice water over his head, drenching Björk, and the others decided they’d had enough. Adi and Ange dragged him out and beat him up. “We are not proud of everything” is Ange’s only comment.
Kai left the country. “He was in Brazil and Israel,” Cutrone recalls, “and the others started to feel very Cinderella about it. ‘We’re doing all of the work. Where’s Kai?’ ” He urged them not to have their February show. They did anyway. Kai, who showed up for it, “was shocked,” says Gabi. “He realized that we actually operated without him.”
“The revolution started,” Kai says, “and the king had to leave. The kaiser.”
“It was the seven-year itch,” says Adi. “We made it and Kai didn’t.”
[size=+1]T[/size]he As Four three are in the silvery loft where they still make their clothes. To gain entrance, you must catch a key thrown out the top-floor window in a leather pouch. They have been busy preparing for the September 9 presentation of the Best of As Four—a reworking of their greatest hits (skirts, pants, even the circle bag) in . . . denim, and at a much lower price point (starting at $111 rather than $1,111.11). They’ll have a “pirate” storefront downtown during Fashion Week to sell the line, also known as As FourDenim. Why denim? “We always wanted to do it,” says Adi, “and we got a big order from Japan.”
A line of clothes they made for Kate Spade—including capelets—is doing well, and they’ve just finished a unisex perfume in collaboration with Parisian boutique Colette: ThreeasFour, which has a nice, gingery smell. The working environment is “not the same, because Kai’s energy is not here,” admits Adi. “But now the most important thing is the product. It’s more and more like a label, and that’s what we want. It’s not the conceptual As Four. We did that already.”
As it turns out, Kai has also created a fragrance. Its working title: Balloon. “The inspiration is making love with me in a field,” he explains, “and feeling safe. My favorite thing is when I meet certain women and smell their cheeks and there is a scent of a balloon.” He says it reminds him of his childhood. Balloon kicks like a mule, the scent both rubbery and synthetic. “It smells like a used condom,” observes Ange.
If As Four seem determined to mellow the drama, Kai is caught between courting it and squashing his more outré instincts. He showed up for the photo shoot for this story in a relatively restrained outfit (docksiders, even). Yet he can’t help becoming tabloid fodder. “Kai has joined that hallowed pantheon of self-destructive celebs,” says Chris Wilson of “Page Six,” “like Andy Dick and Tracy Morgan, where every time they go out, something crazy happens. When Kai goes clubbing, you know you’re gonna get a phone call or three the next day.” The most recent item was Kai’s alleged attempt to set Gabi on fire at a store opening. “Like all of these stories,” Kai says, “there is a piece of truth and a piece of misinformation.”
And then—in what may be another odd bid for attention—there is his engagement to Melissa Burns, an ex-model best known as the Beyoncé of the disbanded electroclash girl band W.I.T. (which stood for Whatever It Takes). It’s the Lower East Side version of The Surreal Life. “He asked me to marry him and I couldn’t think of a reason to say no,” says Burns. But isn’t he gay? “Umm, yeah.” And aren’t you already married? “Yeah, but I’m getting divorced.”
The nuptials are scheduled for next spring, but Kai already has children on his mind. A couple years ago, while in the mirrored tent As Four made for a Downtown for Democracy show, he had a vision that it was his mission to have them. He’s already donated sperm to a friend in Israel. “She liked my genes. I give sperm for babies and sperm for, like, whoever. Sperm for everybody.” And now “I’ve been chosen!” exclaims Burns. We’re all in a chauffeured Explorer heading downtown, and she’s showing some of her drawings, which are mostly of women performing oral sex. Kai considered incorporating them into his new line, Myself, but they were deemed a bit too “out-there.”
With Myself, Kai says he’s “aiming for everybody. To satisfy the spoiled couture b*tch, the crazy pop star.” But he also claims to be toning things down. “After doing something very conceptual in As Four,” he says, “I’m focusing on classical clothing that I believe are basics—and on the commercial.” Myself, Kai e-mails later, will be a women’s line but “with a unisex touch,” incorporating “equestrian influences, graceful time travel, colonial Africa, beachy Sahara, horses in the ocean . . . light silks, taffetas, cottons, and subtle curves in classic shapes.” There’s also a T-shirt line, priced under $100. Stylistically, the whole venture is about “returning to where I come from,” Kai says. “My family are cool but bourgeois.”
Kelly Cutrone no longer represents As Four, though she and the three members express genuine affection for each other. But she recently signed on to rep Kai, and she’s hoping for his success for all sorts of reasons. Not least of which is that he—like his ex-comrades, still sewing away in their lovely silver cage—is an awfully good urban character. Fistfights aside, he walks that fine line, one that still gets trod every so often in fashion, between maddening and entertaining, destructive and creative.
“If Kai left New York,” Cutrone said before becoming his PR agent, “I would really miss him. There are very few people in the city now like Kai. Even in industries that seem really liberal, people try to stay socially acceptable.”
very long article, but an interesting read... i chopped some parts off, but you can read the full article here at:
http://newyorkmetro.com/nymetro/shopping/fashion/12546/index.html
credit: new york metro magazine
so what do you think?
