Julian Roberts Productions (Nothing Nothing etc)

[julianroberts_00]

I wish there wasn’t the hierarchy with fashion. It’s incredibly lopsided – all these passionate designers with a lot of fuel and ideas trying to get to that top spot to showcase their vision? It doesn’t make sense to me. I’d love to see a company as large as the Gap turn out

How did you manage to get to a point where you feel the freedom you do?

What is your favorite flower? I bet you love biology. Also, what were you interested in when you were little – like between the ages five to ten?

You are right, it would be good to see someone as large as GAP turn out A-POC/PleatsPlease like garments or mass produce Subtraction Cutting. Why do the really interesting ideas in fashion exist in such isolated pockets/ limited editions out of reach from most consumers? The subtraction cutting method cannot be mass produced in the same way as standard cut garments, because factories tend to favour machinery that cuts through multiple layers of cloth from the outside inwards using rotary & jigsaw type blades… cutting around the perimeter of a garment segment to release it from the waste cloth…. Whereas subtraction cutting utilizes the waste cloth and has shapes & holes punched out from the middle of the cloth… from the inside outwards. Some sort of large scale lazer cutter could be adapted to cut through stacked fabric. The subtraction cutting method I call the ‘tunnel technique’ could fairly easily be digitized in software and the garment simulated, so that you could visualize the possible end result with each manipulation of the pattern. Existing pattern making software could be subverted, and new programmes written. Also, random garments could be generated by altering all the variables.
Link the adapted lazer cutter to the subverted pattern making software and switch to random, and you have a machine for mass producing hardcore sculptural shapes, that no longer requires a designer.
I’ll be safely tucked away in my underground lair by this point stroking my cat, but you can see where I’m going
Technique & imagination leads to technological innovation. We have the ideas, but the machinery & hardware comes at a higher price.
Someone get on the phone & make some calls.. I’d love to talk with GAP’s Design Director/ CEO.
Quick before I offer the cutting machine to Pixar for ‘The Incredibles’ sequel: ‘Edna Mode’ the fashion designer character should be frightening the fashion industry with her superhuman methodology … and it would amuse me to see a cartoon character giving Rei Kawakubo/Galliano/McQueen a run for their money


You ask me how I managed to get to a point where I feel free…
I suppose I have always had a problem with authority. I like to imagine the alternative. I don’t care much about losing my job, losing an order, or losing press by saying or doing something that I think needs to be said or done. That’s not to say I don’t respect people or order… I am very respectful/polite/quiet &spend a long time listening/watching before I make a move. I dislike people who abuse or waste the power/authority they are given, or who become complacent and lack vision.
I am very much attracted to creative people who like me cannot differentiate between performer & audience, artist & producer, teacher & student, product & market, creative & technical… who see themselves on both sides of the equation, or who mix up the binary opposites… on/off, start/finish, left/right, up/down, inside/outside, back/front.
We might not be the right people to ask for directions and wouldn’t get far as bomb disposal experts, but we know exactly where things ought to be, or where instead they may look better

My favourite flower… probably an iris. When I was a kid I was into chemistry, mixing random concoctions, creating reactions, burning things, microscopes, magnifying glasses, insects, history, kings&queens, heredity & lineage, planets, drawing cross-sections of the ocean/houses/boats/submarines, drawing plan views of battle fields, wiring circuitry in completely illogical ways, drawing very detailed objects using pixels/half-tone, dot by dot, climbing trees, football, sprinting, swimming underwater, pretending to be underwater all the time, lying on my bed on my back with my head over the edge imagining the world upside-down, mid-80’s computers, translating musical manuscripts into numerical values & writing them into computer programmes, jumping off rooftops with an umbrella, writing stories, and riding my bike everywhere.
My childhood was very happy, but isn’t particularly relevant to the way I design… it’s a state from which I have evolved, and I don’t reference it in my work. I have a tendency to forget or blank out even the recent past and to concentrate on the future and what I might possibly become. It’s perhaps useful to a historian or biographer to help complete the picture of who I am, but there is too often a tendency to try to make an artist/designers childhood appear mythical. I don’t agree with the notion that creative people retain a child-like perspective. It’s a naïve ideal. Designers are adults, and adults have the ability to be far more wide-eyed, fantastical & idealistic than children… because they become increasingly fearless, self-motivated & reflective. Accepting responsibilities whilst simultaneously being subversive & creatively/intellectually challenging is beyond the capabilities of people who aspire to be childlike. We grow up & then we die. This is probably why I have a problem with authority & the title of ‘Professor’. There’s an assumption that I’ve achieved something and stopped growing/developing.

 

[julianroberts_00]

I have to give my two sense of your demo video here now..
I loved it. I love its content, editing and textures. ...

Thanks Rui… I have just finished editing a 20minute video documentary with Sophie about our work and future design ideas, and i will upload a web version into the videoworks section of our site (www.julianand.com) later this week for TFS folk to download & watch. I’ll give you all the URL when it’s done.

 

[julianroberts_00]

Can I ask 2 questions? Are clothes from Parc des Expositions available for buying by the general public, and if so, where? And what's Sophie's role in that label and what sort of thing does she do?

Hi!
No, Parc des Expositions isn’t available to buy at retail level (sorry!)… everything is made for individual people through some personal or random encounter, either as a gift or commission.
There will be a sub-range soon called SEX POSITIONS that will be available for retail, with emphasis on distributing hardcore silhouettes at really affordable prices.

Sophie Cheung collaborates with me on a lot of the projects I do. She’s a hugely talented textile designer/tutor specializing in embroidery & constructed textiles.
Sophie has an amazing eye for detail/colour/style & can tell me in 5 seconds whether whatever it is I’m working on at the time is actually any good or not. She is one of the few people I seek approval from. She is also my girl friend

 

[julianroberts_00]

Well, it's entirely a spatial thing....Julian's work is very very exciting. And absolutely anyone can do it. More so than any other method. Call it improvisational pattern cutting; it works.

Hey Kathleen..

(some thoughts that popped into my head when i read back over some of your & softgrey's quotes)

When I was a student I was inspired by the work of Comme des Garcons, Issey Miyake, Yohji Yamamoto, Yoshiki Hishinuma, Vionnet, Christobal Balenciaga, Christian Dior, Caroline Broadhead, Jean-Paul Gaultier and early Galliano. All these people pushed shape & silhouette to the forefront of their design/art. As a student they gave me hope.
I also now like the work of Preen, Bora Aksu and Nicholas Ghesquiere.
A lot of my appreciation for these designers isn’t for what they exactly do, but for what I imagine or misinterpret them doing. I see pictures & garments of their work, and often the picture suggests something to me… a new perspective, a top melting into a skirt, a garment in movement somewhere between two states, a small detail that could be exploded in scale to become an entire garment etc. So the act of looking, examining, inverting, hazarding a guess or rethinking how something might be cut leads to new experiments, mistakes, solutions, possibilities.
A lot of people look at garments that are asymmetrical, twisted and drapey-looking and think they are all the same, or that they all somehow share a similar method of cutting & making.
This of course isn’t true.
There are so many different ways of cutting & making, and so many differences between garment making methodologies.
People may look at what I do & think it’s a bit like Comme des Garcons, or might look at A-POC and draw some comparisons with Subtraction Cutting, but I think the apparent similarities are greatly outnumbered by the actual differences.
There is of course a tendency in contemporary culture to seek similarities, and in fashion particularly to group designers together into referential styles & trends.
Information on how & why a garment is constructed in a particular way from 2D to 3D is not usually a main selling point, so is neither sought nor readily available.
I think most people forget that garments are actually constructed/made. For the majority this isn’t what they see… they see a finished product or an image of a garment on a model/celebrity, and their attention is held by the garments status, not how or why the garment was made.
In order to understand one particular methodology or making system, you often first have to get your head around the basics: how garments & fabric function and are manufactured, what discoveries lead to this particular method, and what previous making systems it references & is built on.
For most people this isn’t why they like clothes in the first place, and if they are fascinated by what they see to the extent that they absolutely must find out how its constructed, then they need to be pretty committed & fanatical to go as far as taking a pair of shears to the garment, cutting it open back to its two dimensional pattern shape, and pondering how the transformation process might possibly have unfolded.

eg.
Within the border of your computer screen is a window.
A window is a programmed space, existing within an application, with all its guts hidden. We move closer towards streamlined, uncluttered, clearer views of the world, with more and more processes concealed from view.
In this equation we see things enhanced & clearer than they often actually are in reality, and know less & less about how we came to see them, or how in fact we saw them before such enhancement.
Behind this we probably know next to nothing about how these words are actually electronically transmitted &displayed, what calculations are being made right now as you ponder scrolling downwards, and who wrote the code that facilitates this process.

There is so much we don’t know about windows & garments, and so much we don’t need to know to appreciate & use them.
Knowledge is built on knowledge, technique on technique, window within window.
But the magic of the process is often deceptively simple, involving short cuts & slight of hand: Whilst you are looking here, something else is happening in the background unseen.

I think this particular phenomenon has greatly motivated subtraction cuttings development and dissemination, because if you are a designer pushing forward construction as an aesthetic, it becomes increasingly necessary to reveal the tricks & demonstrate exactly how & why the garment is made differently in order to drive an interest in unconventionally made things.
But in order to explain this without losing everyone’s attention the method has to be simplified & streamlined. It needs to be demonstrated in a way that anyone can have a go at, and have the scope to be taken in many different directions, with plenty of room for error & experimentation.

 

[softgrey]

Happy 2006 everyone!
Excuse me whilst i offload a load of my responses

How to make Profit?
Profit isn’t so hard to make – but if you want to make a creatively challenging product, you need to remove the costs of your own labour. A creative person often cannot stop themselves putting all their time & energy & skills into making a product, but I cannot afford an employee with such obsessiveness(!) & who isn’t constrained by the projects budget: so I earn my living from outside my brand (teaching, creative direction, show production, etc).
That way my wage/living isn’t linked to the success/failure of my products.
That way I am free to do whatever I have to do without incurring my brand any costs.
Profit rises or falls therefore on how good an idea is, at a particular moment in time.
Being profitable in fashion is as much about finding the right moment in time to launch a product or make a statement, as it is about finding the right product to launch. The two cannot be separated.
The best way to make a consistent profit is to keep your costs low, to spend only what is absolutely necessary, to be resourceful, to not be distracted by praise or criticism, to show only when you want to show, to only make the products that really mean something to you, to limit or refuse orders that destabilize your production capabilities, to think 3 seasons ahead (not 2), and to invest your knowledge & skills in other peoples projects too – preferably those with bigger budgets than your own brand
You have to believe in other peoples success as much as your own.
You cannot limit your thinking/design to only within your own product.
Lastly, to put my cards on the table, I haven’t been made rich being a designer, but I have sustained myself for 13 seasons and had a fantastic time doing so. I don’t plan to ever stop, I do plan to expand & grow, to work with some big companies on projects that interest me, and if I can sustain this all while providing myself with food, shelter & travel then I’m HAPPY
I’m more interested in sustaining Turnover.
There is a lot of money to be made in the fashion entertainment industry, but it doesn’t all have to be channelled into one place... money is fluid, it changes hands, it’s a system, sometimes you lose, sometimes you gain. It’s how you spend it that’s important, not how much you keep of it.
Opening a big shop with lots of advertising budget might be a profitable move for a big retailer, but not if the retail sector happens to be in decline & people are saving/ shopping online for bargains. Nothing is profitable forever, and rarely is something profitable in isolation.

What’s my greatest fear?
Being cured.
Being made normal against my better judgement.
Finding an antidote to my restlessness.

so far this is the thing you have said that makes the most sense to me...


hurrah!......

 

[julianroberts_00]

thoughts on the fly...

The only thing i can ever do to change the world is to demonstrate new ideas.
For as long as there are new ways of thinking, doing & making things there is the possibility of change.
It is not the performance of new ideas that is important, but their preservation. You have to find a way of producing things in a new way that might inspire future generations to believe & hope that things might be different. This might involve engineering their misinterpretation, it might involve a refusal to present things at-all, or it might involve concealing ideas in some way so that they become preserved. Our audience is not solely contemporary, and we are not at the zenith of civilization: We are permitted as designers & artists to address the future, and to anticipate unknown audiences, to factor in the probability that we are before our time, that we might become easily lost amongst our contempories, forgotten and later rediscovered. Loss shouldn't disuade us from pursuing new ideas & ways of making. It is not the traditions of creativity we need to uphold, but the future of new ideas. It is a very real certainty that a great deal of creative products & ideas will be destroyed & eroded by our tendency towards ephemeral media formats, and virtual presentation. Future archaeology might not be able to unravel the ideas so deeply encoded in our choice of media & format.... a great deal has already been lost to the magnetic tape, cinefilm and vinyl record, more is lost to the CD & video cassette, and an entire culture of ideas & images could be lost in the passing of the internet & digital age. The deeper we encode ideas within the medium of presentation, the less future generations will know about our ideas & our motivation to innovate new thoughts.
Change is not continuous, it requires effort & motivation & an awareness of time passing, to keep the dream of it alive.

 

[softgrey]

The only thing i can ever do to change the world is to demonstrate new ideas.
For as long as there are new ways of thinking, doing & making things there is the possibility of change.
It is not the performance of new ideas that is important, but their preservation. You have to find a way of producing things in a new way that might inspire future generations to believe & hope that things might be different. This might involve engineering their misinterpretation, it might involve a refusal to present things at-all, or it might involve concealing ideas in some way so that they become preserved. Our audience is not solely contemporary, and we are not at the zenith of civilization: We are permitted as designers & artists to address the future, and to anticipate unknown audiences, to factor in the probability that we are before our time, that we might become easily lost amongst our contempories, forgotten and later rediscovered. Loss shouldn't disuade us from pursuing new ideas & ways of making. It is not the traditions of creativity we need to uphold, but the future of new ideas. It is a very real certainty that a great deal of creative products & ideas will be destroyed & eroded by our tendency towards ephemeral media formats, and virtual presentation. Future archaeology might not be able to unravel the ideas so deeply encoded in our choice of media & format.... a great deal has already been lost to the magnetic tape, cinefilm and vinyl record, more is lost to the CD & video cassette, and an entire culture of ideas & images could be lost in the passing of the internet & digital age. The deeper we encode ideas within the medium of presentation, the less future generations will know about our ideas & our motivation to innovate new thoughts.
Change is not continuous, it requires effort & motivation & an awareness of time passing, to keep the dream of it alive.

how very star trek...

i always imagine future generations...
possibly from another world...
trying to figure out who we were as a society once we have destroyed ourselves... (because every 'advanced' culture seems to self-destruct)...
and finding nothing but a giant computer...


...

 

[julianroberts_00]

so far this is the thing you have said that makes the most sense to me...


hurrah!......

Hey softgrey.. glad something i'm rattling out makes sense to someone other than myself...lol

i gotta get some sleep now.. its 5.27am in London and i'm totally strung out... my sleeping clock has been totally flipped upside down.

Had a really stressful Christmas cos my mum's really seriously ill... if there's such a thing as Karma nows the time to collectively use it everyone OK
Need a holiday!

I'll dissapear back into the shadows now..
Much love,
jX

 

[softgrey]

i hear ya julian....
thanks for stopping by...

best wishes to you and your family in trying times......

now get some sleep!!!...
you're no good to anyone if you can't funtion!!...
......

 

[rui]

rui, the Trompe le Mode collection is very nice.
http://www.thisoldthing.net/tlm.html

thank you Zazie for taking the time to check it out! and thanks for the kind words, any favorites?

 

[finalfashion]

Professor or Designer?
Designer… I hate the title of Professor

Oops, I called you Professer earlier! I apologise.

I like your answers a lot


Though the statement “All ways are going forwards. Going backwards is going Forwards.” is fatalistic, only true by virtue of good fortune, and doesn’t sound like a plan.
I know you mean it in a positive way, because you believe in the future and are being positive & trusting.
Personally, I feel the future has to be designed, made better & changed, because history teaches us that great civilizations both rise & fall. I wouldn’t ever take progress for granted therefore.

Wow, Julian, I like your answers a lot too. I'm honoured. You're right I'm a little fatalistic... The future I believe is spinning out of my personal control. My primary goals are to survive and do things I do well that I enjoy. I'm open... but very skeptical. I guess you've figured that out by now.

You’re right, some of my clothes are walking patterns, in fact I might as well answer all my critics in one fowl swoop: I have had an obsession with cutting, and have in the past made some of my discoveries very central to the style of the garment. In many ways, some of the garments I have made are simply the pattern & nothing else… at least not to me. When you work at a technical level in a highly obsessive way, it is the inside of the garment - the patterns, seams & stitches - that hold your attention. If you are a male designer creating womenswear & have no direct connection with how the garment functions on a practical level, then it’s easy to become self-obsessive & forget to stand backwards. You get to know the garments you make intimately as they slowly construct, and at the last moment just before the lining is closed you kiss goodbye to them & they suddenly becomes finished… but this finished state is not how you recognize them… they becomes products, they are photographed, presented & displayed, they then become an image & people are never really interested in asking how they were actually made. In fashion, most people are more interested in who’s wearing it, what party it is being worn too & how they can get hold of it at sample sale price. Of course I now spend a lot more time with fittings & prototypes, & now spend a lot less time obsessing about the inner workings of the garment, and a lot more time getting to know it as a garment on a girl… but in the past when I was first starting out and for many seasons until quite recently, I was living on the bread line and working on shoe-string budgets, and I didn’t give a damn whether the pattern was over-dominating the garment: of course it was, because THE PATTERN WAS ME… it revealed my thinking, my actions, my hands, my movements, my personality as a designer… frozen within the garment for all to see. Of course I have often made mistakes. If you stick your neck out, experiment & try out new techniques then mistakes are absolutely necessary. I look back at a lot of my old work with embarrassment. You never stop learning. Another thing you must know is that I do not consider myself a ‘good cutter’. I am a fluent cutter, I cut and make things quite instinctively, and I like to try out new things… some of which lead me nowhere. I have to be quite wasteful, make mistakes & take risks, because I am trying to find something. I don’t know exactly what it is, but slowly step-by-step I get closer. My understanding & knowledge grows. I don’t only use my own techniques to make garments, I mix them with traditional skills. The Subtraction Method is only good for making certain garments. But having developed it as a way of working it has changed the way I approach both tailoring and traditional cutting. In some ways it has ruined my concentration, because some forms of cutting do require exactness & respect, and when I work with other cutters I know I frustrate them because they think I don’t care for the rules. I do care & I need to show that I care. Future collections will be more mindful, there will of course be extremity & experimentation, but it will be balanced carefully against what looks good on a girl (I now seek a lot of female advice when I cut womenswear because I need to know how the garment feels, both physically and emotionally), and how the garment shape works with the fabric & textiles. When you are a new designer seeking attention it’s easy to get swept along with the whole carnival of the fashion spectacle, and when your budget is next to nothing & you’re living like a bum you’re more inclined to chuck in everything but the kitchen sink, and not care much for refinement. I now feel a much better designer than I have so far demonstrated, though of course my future work will rise or fall depending on who buys it, who writes about it & how it is received by the fashion world.

Wow... Gosh. ... I love this paragraph. Reading this paragraph made me realize how much I respect what you've done, you've done fully and at cross-angle to the mainstream... and how you did create wonderful entertainment... and how you pushed the possibilities of the cut in a way I haven't seen anywhere else. You've totally won me over Julian I am officially a die-hard fan.

I wish you had a blog... I am fantasizing about a loose online network aka "the world's greatest pattern cutting school"... Kathleen is making a cutting blog... imagine an online cutting spot...

I think the subtraction methods could be used subtly to create fascinating, beautiful clothing. You've developed some great effects. Your random dress generator sounds extremely intriguing.

Great stuff I'm all inspired to get to work now.

 

[Lena]

rules are there to be broken julian..
glad to hear your opinions, mainly those on 'freedom' and 'new ways of thinking/acting/creating'

 

[julianroberts_00]

documentary film

Hi... i've just uploaded a new documentary film of our design label & future ideas into the 'videoworks' section of my site: http://www.julianand.com

its free for all... the direct link is:

http://www.blowpr.co.uk/JULIANandSOPHIEsite/movieFUTURE.htm

btw... It's 20minutes in duration, so the MPEG file is about 200MegaBytes in size... so unless u have superfast connection like me it may take an hour or so to download...
Stick with it... let it download in the background & get on with something else.

Full screen high quality DVD versions of all the films in the videoworks section of my site are of course available for press loan... &i'm sure one day they'll be available to buy too..
Maybe when im dead.

Enjoy.

jx

 

[julianroberts_00]

thank you Zazie for taking the time to check it out! and thanks for the kind words, any favorites?

i like http://www.thisoldthing.net/tlm/lgTOT7356.jpg

nice pics
good stuff

 

[Hye Park Lover]

Ooo Julien, are you showing for FW06?

 

[Hye Park Lover]

And you used Goodnight Moon in your documentary film! I love that song!

 

[iperlchen]

Hey Julian!
The person behind perlefine is Marit an innocent girl D) who lives in the middle of 'de polder' in the Netherlands. Here's what I wanted to say.
The disclosure of your 'avant garde secret' was the last key I needed. Thanks so much for opening up, Julian! In a world of overwhelming amounts of numbers and plasma screens it's great to 'find' people like you who work instinctively. I had quite a few questions, but for now the videos have given the answers. I especially was really intrigued by the Lageos Project!

What one aspect of the Fashion Industry would you most like advise on or help with understanding?
- What happened to artistic motivation?

What one question might you ask me about who I am/ my life… if you had the courage, were drunk, or if all these other people weren’t listening in?
- Your definition of true art?

Which designer outside London/ New York/ Paris/ Milan/ Tokyo, and who isn’t stocked by Selfridges/ Harrods/ Browns/ Collette/ Saks/ Barneys etc etc etc would you most like to bring to my attention? Feel free to try to influence me.
- Jacqueline Korpershoek. She graduated from the Fashion Institute Arnhem last year (http://www.modearnhem.nl/mode-en.html) with a collection that seems to be based on watercolors. Just take a look for yourself, I don't want to say too much Here's also something I scanned: http://i15.photobucket.com/albums/a372/valleyofthetigers/JacquelineKorpershoek_1.jpg

Seed EACH of the following three lists into the right orders from BEST to WORST:
i) Tokyo, Paris, London, New York, Milan
ii) style, cut, fabric, stitching, label

P.S. What is Sophie up to now?

 

[Zazie]

"It is not the traditions of creativity we need to uphold, but the future of new ideas."

Julian, thank you for your answers. They make me ponder and think a lot, I need time to digest some of it, but I think that the particular quote above sums up a lot of what you are and what you've achieved.

What gets me excited about fashion now isn't the next Louis Vuitton collection but a new wave of younger designers who are more about ideas and concepts, much more like artists than fashion designers. Examples would include you and a lot of new young Euro designers from England, Germany, Austria and even Poland. Art doesn't mean it doesn't have much to do with fashion. These days, when I put on a nicely "designed" and "cut" garment, say, from Miu Miu, I feel a bit empty, it's NICE, but well....same old slightly retro cut, cute prints, etc., etc....deja vu at the vintage stores. I hate the way it is all about the rotation of "styling", the "Lady", the "Siren", the "Goddess", the "Babydoll", the "Beatnik", the "Boho", and ack...the "AvantGard"!

The curious thing is that for most of us here, I think, we're perfectly capable of "styling" ourselves, depending on the mood and occasion, and we just need interesting, fascinating, witty pieces of clothing or accesories that would allow us to "plug-n-play", so we don't get bored.

In that sense, perhaps I'm in the monority here, but I think you don't have to worry too much about making it look good on the girls. When it looks startlingly fresh, I think it makes the wearer instantly attractive.

I'm going to check out your new videos too, before I comment further.

Happy New Year!

 

[finalfashion]

btw Julian I really enjoyed your musical selections in the videos... I'm especially curious about the song that starts when you describe the collection you made "for your press agent"... gosh I love that driving beat these days.

 

[Zazie]

thank you Zazie for taking the time to check it out! and thanks for the kind words, any favorites?

You're welcome rui, and best wishes for your success tto. Ha, my favourite was picked out by Julian. The other I dig is the red and black hood. There are ideas behind those...