Bless, the label founded by Desiree Heiss and Ines Kaag, marked 25 years of doing business its own way last year. That’s a momentous achievement for any label, not to mention an independent one that operates between Paris and Berlin. To mark the occasion, the duo invited the 400+ interns (they change every three months) who have worked with them to celebrate. The number “collects over the years,” deadpanned Heiss, wearing cat-tapestry pants in the label’s unmarked Paris shop. “Our oldest ex-intern is, I guess, 69, and the youngest are our childrens’ ages, 14, who do school internships.” There was a new book, launched in various creative ways, and various creative launches, including totes that represent different pages of the most recent Bless tome.
Heiss and Kaag don’t appear in its pages. That the designers decline to be photographed hasn’t slowed them down, as a Bless x Supreme collaboration for fall 2023 and a Bless x Fendi collar for Design Miami show. The latter included an installation as well as Bless’s iteration on the peekaboo bag that looked like an airmail package. The brand’s “jeansified object” collection (such as denim wrapped brooms) is a good example of the designers’ focus on the everyday. Before the designers had launched Bless, Martin Margiela used the “fits every style” wigs they made from vintage fur coats on his fall 1997 runway. Reuse and reframing are pillars of Bless’s trans-disciplinary practice. A chair is equally at home in the Bless universe as customizable shoes, trousers with double waists—circa 2010—or a scarf sliced out of a toggle coat.
As can be imagined, the Bless approach to presenting work is unconventional. On the first day of October the designers will, said Heiss, “transform the shop into a little movie theater and people can buy slots—there are only 10 to 15—and quietly watch the movies. They will also be projected on the outside of the store so that people who just pass by can see them.” The impetus behind this was last year’s show at MACRO where the videos were shown. “We haven’t done presentations for quite a while, and people kept contacting us asking if we would play all of our videos because there’s this interest in Bless from a new generation, so that’s what we’ll do now,” she explained. The brand has given Vogue Runway a sneak peak at one of the films that will be played in Paris. Heiss also reflected on where the brand started and its latest project.
Once upon a time…
“When we started, we were two fashion students… and the only thing that we really already knew in the beginning is that we didn’t want to do catwalk shows, but that was really the only configuration. And then we went off and tried to define what, in our eyes, the life of a fashion designer could mean with having children and this and that, and we grew into this specific brand that now kind of adapts to our needs. It’s not a business model, it’s really very personal. That’s why the art market is so interested in us, because our way of functioning is more like that of artists—but we don’t consider ourselves artists. We also don’t really consider ourselves designers because we are not the ones who create new volumes and shapes and this and that; it’s more like we work with what we have, what surrounds us. And we clearly define every moment again and again and again; we shape our contemporary being in a way, and this feels really good, especially in growing older. Because we shape [things so] actively we are not in the camp of complainers; the only people we could complain at would be ourselves. But of course we have never managed to reach that state where we are completely satisfied. After 25 years we are proud to still work together. We’re like a couple, and we are not divorced.”
Sand clock and a library
“I think what’s the most interesting thing is our website; our entire archive is online, so people can really look up whatever. You can click on any collection, and you can see the first time we did a piece, the exhibitions and publications we had in that time period. [The collections are numbered and the archive] starts from the very beginning. The newest collection is 79, and it ends at 99 because then we will stop. We have actively planned the end. We don’t want to sell the brand or for it to be continued [without us], but it is totally in our hands how we construct our rhythms. We can do three numbers a year and then it goes quite fast, or as we get older we can decide to do only one number a year. With this in mind, we are really focused; it’s like ‘Okay, we only have 20 numbers left, what do we still want to say.’ It’s not random, like ‘Let’s do another collection.’”
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
