By VICTORIA CAMBLIN

But theirs is an unassuming quest. Bless is Ines Kaag and Desiree Heiss, a Berlin-Paris based collaboration that in addition to producing prêt-à-porter collections, beauty products, shoes, accessories, and home furnishings, has exhibited at contemporary art venues like Paris’s Centre Pompidou, the Berlin Biennale, and the Kunsthalle in Basel, to name only a few. Their work is alternately tagged under fashion and product design, but the fact of the matter is that the now thirteen-year-old Bless is neither one of these, and that that is the point. Instinctive, graceful, and anonymous, they remain above all commendably resistant to the mire of theoretical analysis in which the label could so easily be implicated. In two small studios, Bless has created a universe of its own, free of predictable discourse but rich in internal dialogue. Still, the question remains as to why we, who live and create and consume outside the Bless cosmos, should care at all. The answer lies between the sheer covetability of their objects and the inherent attractiveness of an unanswered question: unbrandable and anachronistic, Bless may be the most intelligent luxury brand ever.

BLESS BUSINESS

A life-sized foam replica of an Alfa Romeo Brera, clad in beige leather, dominates the ground floor of the Bless studio in Berlin- Wedding. The object is a re-thinking of Bless’s denim contribution to Intersection magazine’s “Dress your car in couture” call for auto covers in spring 2008, and doubles as a couch (priced upon request). It’s a roadster for your living room– a subtle contradiction in function, and a perfect example of how Bless persistently tinkers with its public’s preconceptions, especially when it comes to how we use design. To situate Bless’s approach within the business of design is to begin with a paradox: more ethos than brand, Bless not only operates outside of any realm we associate with the term “business,” it also challenges the very limits of “design.” It is all the more counterintuitive, then, that Bless should have more in common with a major sportswear brand than it does with high fashion labels: staunchly independent and frustratingly elusive, they remain bastions of an intangible but incredibly contemporary cultural community, as exclusive as it is limitless. Still, the Bless client base is just as likely to be decked out in Nike or Adidas as it is in Martin Margiela or Comme des Garçons, and it was with this in mind that I passed the tan Alfa Romeo and crossed the threshold into Bless’s Berlin headquarters.

VICTORIA CAMBLIN: Brands like Nike [See the interview with CEO Mike Parker in this issue of 032c] are actually quite niche in their approach – in the way they develop their products, their artist collaborations, their limited-edition runs. It seems that Bless is approachingits public in a similar way.

DESIREE HEISS: The first big difference between a brand like Nike and a brand like Bless, though, is that our primary goal is not to generate money. The second thing is that in many of our subtitles you find things like “style free” and “themeless” – what we like about our products is that they are so vast and vary so much style-wise, that a very wide range of people can relate to one product or another. There is no customer, actually.

INES KAAG: Maybe it’s because of the sporty aspect of our work – we start with functional clothes. And since we are not designers who are trying to do eveningwear, we do feel very close to these big brands in some ways. It’s not really about clothes or shoes, it’s about a whole environment. This simply reflects the way we live and work, and what we believe in. We’re designing for ourselves.

BLESS BY ANY OTHER NAME

To design “for oneself” is certainly a strong marker of independence – and a welcome change, in its first-degree honesty, from the marketing jargon of other clothing labels big and small, all claiming to design for a certain kind of happening socialite or sophisticated gentleman. Bless’s latest mission statement, it should be noted, is also committedly androgynous, a quality the label commands transcendently. As dealer Carol Greene of New York’s Greene Naftali Gallery, which has played host to Bless interventions, recently remarked, “Bless transcends the specific notions of gender and definitions of what it means to be masculine or feminine, and their ability to propose new models that are so personally affecting reflects an intelligence that is profoundly beautiful.” Still, this adaptable approach begs a number of questions, which I expect would be met with Bless’s signature insouciance, by a “Why not?” – that having been precisely Ines’s response when I asked the pair why they chose the name “Bless” in the first place. Other answers have been put forth over the years: “Bless” translates well for the inter national market; it’s more or less unisex; it commands a certain timelessness. But perhaps most interesting is that, as a word, it is just one letter more than “less,” which couldn’t be more apt both in terms of its business model, and its products. Doing “less” is a radical gesture, and Bless’s version is all the more uncompromising, taking neither output nor publicity into consideration. From their rigorous production standards, which they oversee personally (“We’re very insistent,” says Kaag), to their dealings with journalists (who as a rule are denied photo ops), Kaag and Heiss have added an entry into the dictionary: in their hands, the term “Bless” has become synonymous with a kind of resistance, a non-name, a negative.

Why design as Bless? Why choose to remain anonymous?

DH: It’s not even a choice; it’s just a matter of mentality. We simply exclude that part from our definition of what we have to do. We find it sufficient to design a nice object, and we don’t feel that we have to put out our personalities with it. We are not interested in putting ourselves, as persons, into the game. This doesn’t makes us very valuable for a brand that wants to say, “This is our new designer,” because we are kind of invisible. In that sense I think we‘re not very tempting partners for some companies. Well, one thing that distinguishes you as a brand is that, after over a decade, you’ve remained independent.

IK: We’ve become even more independent! This is how we grow: we have created this whole network around the world, but without any “networking.” It’s just naturally growing.

DH: For us it’s about that freedom to take whatever decision, however unconventional or unrealistic. But also, it’s not so easy to work with us – we live in different cities, for instance, we are not just one person. Also, we never draw.

Does not drawing complicate your own collaborative process?

IK: We do a lot of writing, describing what we are going to do. In the beginning, we were sort of pen friends – this was before the Internet, and we did it by writing post cards. Afterwards we bought a fax machine. It’s complicated if you don’t draw – to communicate things, you need to actually do them. It would be easier for us to just do a sketch – but we don’t believe in it so much.

Why not?

IK: Maybe because of our own experiences while we were studying – you’d do a nice drawing, and then bring the fabric and put it on it, and it would look totally different. Somehow the next step, in order to be more efficient, was to start immediately on the piece, whatever that may be.

DH: Plus sometimes while we’re doing it, all these accidents happen, which lead to a more interesting result than the original idea. And what’s also nice, being two of us and not at the same place, is that the interpretation is quite loose in that sense – you can interpret written words in a different way. So when she’s telling me an idea over the phone or writes it down, I might think of something totally different, which can be quite fruitful.

Are you happy with the way you’ve grown, just sort of organically?

IK: Yes. But we don’t know it any other way – and we prefer to be happy!

DH: We don’t want to be Calvin Klein. I think what would be much more interesting for us would be, instead of growing bigger and bigger, and for another even bigger company to come and buy us, would be to establish Bless as a brand that just stands as a synonym for a certain kind of quality, or a certain kind of value. So if we were to decide, in 20 years, to open a Bless restaurant, then people would come because they would know the food would be really good.

IK: That’s also why it’s not so important for us to be pinned down to a particular field. Design, conceptual art … it absolutely doesn’t matter to us. We are just happy that we still get along well after all these years, and all we wish for is to grow older together, and also for our structure to grow with us and in a way that makes sense for us.

If the Bless moniker functions to negate the naming system we’ve come up with to divide and categorize the creative industries, then to situate the brand somewhere within the realms of art, fashion, or design is as pointless as it is impossible. Bless thrives on its very themelessness, its unplaceability, its inaccessibility to that part of the brain where the human impulse to categorize resides. “One aspect of Bless’s work that distinguishes it from that of other conceptual designers is that it is rooted in fashion,” replied International Herald Tribune design critic Alice Rawsthorn when I asked her about Bless’s unique position. “If they had trained and started working in another design discipline, such as product, graphics, or multimedia, their approach would seem less unusual. Working conceptually in fashion is really tough, which is why so many of the other designers who’ve done so have given up. Both Martin Margiela and Helmut Lang tried for years to define their own way of working, and to challenge the conventions of the commercial fashion system. They had some success, but both gave up eventually. I really admire Bless for plugging away at it.”

BLESS PRIVATE LIFE

Bless No. 9, a collection from 1999 called “Merchandizing,” featured colorful, abstracted portraits of the Bless designers on a series of sweatshirts; Artforum’s online diary once featured a picture of Kaag taken in Rotterdam in 2006, her eyes blocked out by a black censor bar. Both are gestures of control, not anonymity, negations without effacement, vocal silences. There is humor beneath the apparent Teutonic sangfroid, how ever – for instance, Kaag and Heiss both joke about being “unfashionable” themselves (although “fashionable” or not, their style is intuitively and comfortably great). They recently realized their own censor bar, too: for 2009’s No.36, they created chain-fringed eyewear (€235) that obscures the face of the wearer, but not the wearer’s vision. The “Metalfringeglasses,” as they are called, were followed by dark black visor-style “Sunshields” (€192) – two interesting metaphors for the label’s public relations strategy, two instantly canonical Bless items, and two of a handful of pieces that have made their way into mainstream productions, on the heads of hip hop giants like Beyoncé and Ciara, respectively. Before turning up in music videos, though, the Metalfringe glasses were modeled, like all Bless collections, by a group of the designers’ friends, acquaintances, and colleagues. And they don’t just stand there wearing them – the objects are deployed in full wearable glory, premiered in social action, used. “One of the things

I admire about Desiree and Ines’s work,” says Rawsthorn, “is that so much of it is functional, while also fulfilling other arguably more important and complex objectives. They design clothes that can be worn, and hammocks that can be snoozed in, whatever else those objects may explore, articulate, or signify. Conceptual design that doesn’t work often seems like cheating, and risks being more like dodgy art than design.” Bless’s mobilization, both human and material, is certainly one of the brand’s most distinctive and inimitable qualities, the material usability of their products making its more elusive community aspects somehow tangible.

The larger brands we discussed before are very concerned with performance and usability, and it’s interesting to connect that to your identities as product designers. It’s what you teach at Karlsruhe – product design, not fashion. Is this a question of being interested in function over form, an additional aesthetic level there?

IK: It’s much more down to earth, actually. Of course we like to think about a pair of trousers and a T-shirt, but we lose interest for the sake of coming up with something new. It’s much more interesting to design a car cover that is a couch.

DH: We have stepped out of the definition of fashion in terms of how we relate to clothing. For us it includes our way of living in general, and our relation to the time we live in. What concerns us these days may be a pair of trousers, but may also be the new lamp we need at home, or maybe we move flats and we need to think about architecture.

IK: We react to what’s going on around us – we are not egomaniacs who only think, “What do I need?” But it is still a very personal structure. It concerns the opinion or the wishes of very close friends, and of other people who somehow react to our kind of work. And when other brands want to be a part of that, to buy a part of our “style” – we say it’s “style-free,” but others fi nd there is a certain style there – this generates money, which we can use to invest in these “crazy” projects that you know nobody besides maybe Desirée and myself believe in.

One thing that many of your works share – be they clothes or furniture or other objects – is a certain materiality, a tactility. The materials themselves and these kinds of considerations must be a very big part of what you do. I always think of what a miracle it is that those knitted boots don’t stretch out, for instance.

DH: It’s funny that you mention that exact product– just this morning we had a conversation about maybe re-releasing the original knitted shoe from Bless No. 16 [revised in Bless No. 36 as the Eramhigh, €358, 2009]. We hand-knitted them ourselves and they were made of real leather; and they would really stretch out! But we were discussing this quality of feeling the leather on the skin in relation to the commercial-ness of having a product where nobody will complain because they won’t stretch – whereas these would be three times more expensive, but the leather stretches and breaks so easily. The leather doesn’t exist as an endless material so you will find knots all through the knit, and when it rains the rain comes through because of all the holes.

IK: In the summer, these shoes are the best. It feels like wearing nothing …

BLESS SPACETIME

When I asked Sarah of Colette about what she imagined the future of Bless to be, she replied, “I don’t try to – because I know everything is possible, without limits.” Still, trying to situate Bless in a linear chronology of art and design is incredibly tempting. The work sits like a set of aesthetic nesting dolls in which minimalism inhabits an avant-garde inhabiting pop culture inhabiting classicism, and from which limitless influences and disciplines can be unpacked. Rawsthorn situates Bless in a trajectory of conceptual or “critical” design paved by the likes of Moholy-Nagy at the Bauhaus in Weimar Germany, and Mari and Munari in postwar Italy. Additional parallels in modernism spring to mind, their “Hairbrush” (€190, 1999), a literal ponytail of hair sprouting from a brush where the usual bristles would be, conjuring a kind of de-sexualized Meret Oppenheim Object (Breakfast in fur) (1937), distilled through a conceptual filter. The problem here is again one of art versus design, of reconciling Bless’s rhetoric of usability with such objects as “Hairbrush.”

The clothes are a simpler story. Products like Bless’s loose wool pullover, imprinted with a mountain landscape (€925 at Colette), are not only comfortable and functional, but putting them on is like stepping through a looking glass – it’s a per formative act, an occupation. “With Bless,” says Greene, “what is quite special is the fact that one directly engages, you could even say participates, in this experience by being able to actually wear the clothes. […] Bless products teach you how to see and wear things. And once you become attuned to their world it is very hard to find another vision that is as consistently sophisticated, daring, and graceful.”

“Hairbrush,” then, is not a tool with which to brush your hair but a filter through which to view the day-to-day. Tagged with the brand’s name in gold, the object is a prime example of the Bless amenity – luxury elevated to the point of being productive. Leaving no drawings, blueprints, or paper trail, these entities materialize into being from an idea: it’s the design equivalent of an immaculate conception. If Bless is so hard to place in time, they are at least locatable in space. Their stores, both pop-up and permanent, are veritable institutions – the Bless shop in Berlin to such a degree that, for example, when I recently referenced the “Mitte” district to a friend visiting from California, he replied, “That’s near the Bless shop, right?” Yet the store’s local presence is discreet; nestled into its side street it has become supralocal, a Mecca for the internationally Bless-aware.

I’m interested in how your design practice relates to Bless’s commercial and exhibition spaces, in Berlin and Paris but also the more temporary spaces, globally.

DH: Well in the beginning, people often invited us to show the objects we were making in small, very low-budget exhibition contexts. But we found it very boring to show the same work over and over again; we just wanted to make something new. Also, whatever we did, and do, was never meant to be exhibited – it was always meant to be worn or applied in everyday life. The solution we found was to create temporary shops. Then it’s displayed to buy; it’s clear that it has another end destination. We never sold an enormous amount, but it was a nice way to react in different spaces and different situations. I think we’ve done over 20 of these now.

IK: If you were to just sit in front of your desk thinking about next season’s collection, and following restrictions about what sold best, you would not get the direct feedback you get from standing up in front of these people while they try things on. And this really makes you think.

DH: Even our more permanent shops in Paris and in Berlin are always moving a little bit as well– sometimes we would be across the street, sometimes next door, sometimes elsewhere in the building. So there’s also this ideathat nothing is fixed, it’s not this stationary thing.

That Bless maintains a “guerilla” sensibility no matter how permanent the space again testifies to their rhetoric of resistance. Pop-up stores, fleeting editions, and products that constantly challenge their own use-value serve almost as a consumer selection committee – you don’t choose Bless objects, the claim goes, the objects choose you. Theirs is a lateral mobility, one that grows like a creeping vine across disciplines more than it does up any kind of fashion ladder, moving in all directions at the very hard-to-reach speed of now. And this is evinced as much in any of their products as it is on the speedometer of their leather indoor roadster.

It takes a year to design a car, we learn elsewhere in this issue. After months of drawing upon drawing, eventually a clay prototype is made – very similarly colored to the ever-deepening beige of Bless’s office Alpha Romeo. And like a dream car, Bless, situated at the most intimate quadrant of the intersection of fashion, art, and design, is a lifestyle proposal for a world of “naughts”—the answer to their big “Bless Question” a double-negative. Whether or not they are aware of the issue is irrelevant – they’re already bored with the question.