About
Authentic. Appreciative. Timeless.
Katja Musenberg ABOUT VAN TRICHT
"I want to do something that I can live in."
On a summer morning in Hamburg, I want to meet Hanne Ludwig-van Tricht to talk to her about her slow fashion label VAN TRICHT. She comes to our appointment with a large rolling suitcase and opens it right at the beginning of the conversation right in front of our coffee bench on the sidewalk:
It is filled to the brim with carefully folded skirts, trousers, shirts, sweaters and jackets. One by one, she carefully takes out the pieces, unfolds them, strokes the surfaces, shows the inside and outside and presents each of the pieces to me individually and with devotion: For van Tricht, talking about her work is showing, feeling, folding, turning. She is a fashion designer who thinks and designs from the dialogue between body and clothing - and does so on two levels:
In the design phase, it is the appeal of material resistance that challenges the designer to recognize and reveal the essence of an idea. Here you can see the trained sculptor. And it is the dialogic "body-forming power" (as Gertrud Lehnert puts it in "Fashion. Theory, history and aesthetics of a cultural practice") of the items of clothing she designs that, together with the wearer's body, create a posture.
The very first piece from the suitcase shows the design principle very clearly: a long skirt made of black, solid pilot fabric demands an architectural, geometric cut simply because of its materiality. And the solid architecture of this black skirt will give the wearer a sculptural body feeling, a strong extension of her own physique in space. Hanne van Tricht calls this skirt "armor".
Strength is an essential element of the collections. She combines this with softer fabrics such as the finest wool or linen. But even the soft materials show geometric elements in the cut and refer to a body image based on basic shapes: round yokes or triangular inserts visibly trace abstractions of the corresponding body shapes on the inside. The human figure is always contained, despite clearly different materialities. It is precisely the relationship to the schematic that gives the silhouettes and thus the wearers freedom: the clothing subtly picks up on the wearer's physicality without surrendering it. The designer's wish is to create "human-friendly clothing".
Textiles are “slow objects”, objects whose manufacturing process is in the best
case remains legible," says Sabine Maria Schmitt in "Pick up the thread again" (Kunstforum International 297). Van Tricht shows great respect for craftsmanship in all phases of production. She carefully selects everyone involved and looks for something special and down-to-earth. The knitting mills in Holland and Belgium, the weaving mill and button factory in Baden-Württemberg, the sewing mill in Bavaria, the dyeing mill in Switzerland - they all work to the highest quality, ecologically and socially justly. I see buttons made of corozo or white mother-of-pearl, fabrics dyed with oak bark, a shirt made of rare, naturally colored cotton ... and so I also see what we so often (want to) forget: the work of the weavers, the dyers, the button makers and the knitters.
I also see van Tricht's mother, who hand-knits many of the complicated knitting patterns as prototypes, and I see their meanings from the Dutch fisherman's sweater tradition: the tree of life, the lightning, the ropes. Van Tricht tells us about an exhibition on these old patterns that inspired her to create her own knitting designs. The knitting follows a much less sculptural approach in its production, but here too van Tricht subtly marks the body architecture of the wearer in some pieces using the stitch pattern. The sculptor is always at work, and she can and wants to deal sensitively with the challenges of very different materials. For example, translating the hand-knitted prototype designs for the knitting machine was a challenging process for her. But here too it was the uniqueness of the materials and the technology, as well as tinkering together with the knitting experts, that particularly appealed to her.
Many pieces refer to physical activity on a further level: in addition to the fisherman sweaters mentioned above, other pieces, especially trousers and skirts, are inspired in their cut and materiality by workwear or vintage sportswear: the simple, the practical and the self-evident are interpreted casually and with high quality to become fashion beyond the ever shorter collection cycles.
"Elegance that lasts." This is how van Tricht sees the ecological demands of her work. An elegance that gives the wearers an idea of what fashion can also be: an art that takes a step back from what it deals with and designs it respectfully and in complex simplicity. Van Tricht is a designer who creates something "that you can live in."