Saturday, January 12, 2013

Marios Schwab: behind the seams of the red carpet's new king



The zip won't quite do up (this is a sample, after all) but I am standing in front of a floor-length mirror in the east London studio of the designer Marios Schwab, in the dress that Naomie Harris wore for the premiere of Skyfall . I need to gain a few feet and lose a few pounds, but if I stand on tiptoe, and half-close my eyes, I am a movie star goddess. I appear to be wearing nothing but a bodice sprinkled with iridescent blue sequins, a fine layer of black tulle not doing much to preserve my modesty. What appears to be a slip of nothing is a feat of construction and couture engineering designed to pull you in, push you up, smooth you out and enhance your curves. It is actually two separate dresses. The sequinned bodice is a floor-length, flesh-coloured underdress, complete with its own bra and soft boning - a built-in corset that gives a trompe l'oeil effect - and the long-sleeved tulle dress is like a veil over the top.

IN PICTURES: See Marios Schwab's designs on the red carpet

This is one of those rare dresses that has taken on a life of its own. Its designer had been playing with the idea of a dress that gives the illusion of nudity for several seasons. But when look 38 stepped out on to the London catwalk for spring/summer 2012, the idea seemed to have found its perfect form. 'This dress encapsulates quite a lot of what Marios Schwab is,' he said. 'It's about body consciousness, but then it's veiled and very femme fatale.'

Schwab's clothes have an innate sensuality - they are designed to caress the body; in this dress, you really have nowhere to hide. And, Schwab insists, you don't need a perfect body to feel comfortable in it, but a strong sense of confidence. 'I would like a woman to feel confident wearing the dresses. People say you design clothes that are very body-conscious, but at the same time it doesn't necessarily have to be a size six or 10. It can be a size 16. It's about confidence whether you can carry the dress. That's what makes fashion an interpretation of your personality.'


Marios Schwab in the cutting room of his London studio. Chiffon and satin dress with scarf neckline, £1,539, from Marios Schwab resort collection, at Selfridges (0800-123400). Photo: Marius W Hansen.

To prove it, he tells me he recently made the dress to order for a customer in Italy who is 26 and a size 18. 'I think she looked gorgeous. She had the belt on, she looked quite curvaceous; she looked really beautiful. Believe it or not, there are not many stores that buy size 18, which is a bit of a shame. So we had to make it specially for her.' Special orders are an increasingly important part of his business. Jessica de Rothschild is a regular client.

Look 38 was part of Schwab's Marlene Dietrich-inspired collection for spring/summer 2012. It sold for £2,500 a throw, from Selfridges in London to Opening Ceremony in LA. And then last October Schwab designed a version of it (without the subtlety of the hand-sewn sequins, the finest tulle money can buy and the handcrafted magic bodice, which meant it could be mass-produced and sold for £150) for the high-street retailer Debenhams, with which he has a four-season contract. When Harris wore the dress (a season late) for the Bond premiere, the Debenhams dress sold out online overnight.

READ: Debenhams add Marios Schwab to Edition range

This dress is a look that he intends to continue working with. For his resort collection for spring/summer 2013, he has kept the sequinned underlayer and added lace into the mix. 'There is an interior that makes the shape. A dress like that you don't necessarily want to put a bra on - you want it to have its own skeleton,' he says. 'It's not shockingly sexy or a vulgar gown. It is enclosed. This veiling is really Marios Schwab. I like this element of optical illusion, of putting a darker shade on top of a lighter colour.'


Dress by Marios Schwab, £2,484, from the resort collection at Selfridges (0800-123400). Photo: Marius W Hansen.

Schwab has a bit of an obsession with the contours of the body. His cutting skills and the way he slices through fabric are almost surgical. His fascination with, and understanding of, the female body makes more sense when you discover that his Greek mother, Niki, was a topographer, and his Austrian father was an underwear engineer.

I meet Schwab in his studio in an old industrial building in Dalston, east London. Schwab lives in nearby Stoke Newington but spends long hours and weekends at his studio, which is set over two floors. Upstairs is the cutting and sewing room where his five full-time staff work. On the floor below there is a kitchen with a table at one end where the team can cook and eat lunch. At the other end is Schwab's desk, which is partitioned off, slightly hidden from the rest of the space. There are photocopied pictures for inspiration on the white walls, including one of the Greek actress turned politician Melina Mercouri, photographed in the 1960s wearing impeccable white with sunglasses surrounded by a crowd of Greek women in black.

'My dad studied engineering,' Schwab tells me. 'He worked in Sweden and he heard of a position in Greece for Triumph and he took it. He was really successful and became the manager of Triumph International in Greece, which was a big part of their production at that time. We always had women around coming to try underwear and he would take me to the factory and I would see the incredible machines that would do all the grading. It was all very technical but quite inspiring. You would never imagine that a lace bra would come out of this huge scary metal machine.'

So it is perhaps not so surprising that Schwab should have recently launched his own lingerie range, called Kallisti, in collaboration with Asos Inc. 'Without being really conscious of it, there is always a reason for what you are doing,' Schwab says. He had originally hoped to have his collection of deep-V bras, bodies and knickers manufactured in Greece but that didn't work out, so it is being made in Britain. Schwab invited his father, Klaus, to the launch last September at the Crazy Horse's temporary London outpost, where the range was worn by the dancers - far racier than anything he could have dreamt of during his days at Triumph.


Bardot body, £50, Spider bra, £65, and pants, £25, all Kallisti (asos.com). Photo: ASOS.

'I asked my dad quite a lot of questions but he probably had had enough of underwear,' Schwab says. 'It is nice to have somebody in the family who understands it.' The underwear is made of fine mesh in a variety of jewel colours, and embellished with sequins and delicate spider's webs. 'It's very technical - it looks so minimal, but it's a big learning curve. It is a completely different design execution and perspective [to making fashion]. I like to keep the underwear soft and not too much boning or anything, which can only be for certain sizes [up to C cup for non-underwired bras and 36D in underwired styles]. Everything is constructed with softness in mind.' Rather than upholstery, padding and industrial-weight elastic, the underwear is soft and fine.

Schwab was born in Athens in 1977. He has two brothers who both live in Germany. 'One is a banker, one is a psychologist, and I am a bloody fashion designer,' he says with a laugh. In the 1980s Athens was, he says, a cool place to grow up, with lots of bands visiting from London. Both his mother and her sister married Austrians (they were there studying) and they both liked their clothes. 'My aunt was a doctor and she used to buy fabrics from San Marino and Italian cities because she would go with her husband for operas. She would bring all these incredible devoré fabrics and stitch them with her seamstress in Salzburg. She was very tall and quite an opulent figure. It was always incredible to see these fabrics as a kid.'

As a boy, Schwab dreamt of becoming a ballet dancer. 'I was a little bit frustrated in Athens. I didn't have the chance to do my own things, even though I had open-minded friends and family. It was harder to do the things you liked. I wanted to do a ballet class when I was 12 and I didn't have the chance because they didn't let boys under a certain age.' He had been introduced to the world of dressmaking by his Austrian grandmother, who would teach him how to sew and let him play with her boxes of buttons and trimmings, and to the world of fashion by his French teacher whom he saw for private lessons once a week. She had collections of Photo magazine and French Vogue which captivated the young Schwab. 'I didn't learn much French, but I was very well guided in terms of photography.' At the age of 12 he started to buy his own copies of French Vogue , which were very expensive in Athens. 'Richard Avedon and Irving Penn were my favourite photographers at that time.'

From the age of 13, he told his father he wanted an education that would allow him to do fashion. 'I started brainwashing my parents from an early age,' he says. His father researched the options and he was taken to Vienna one summer to take a test for a Berufschule, which would prepare children to work in a particular trade. He spoke German to his father at home, as well as Greek, so he was allowed to move to Salzburg to be the first boy ever to enrol at the Annahof School, which taught the regular academic curriculum during the day and allowed its students to specialise in dressmaking and tailoring after lessons.

He lived on his own, in a house that had belonged to his uncle's grandmother. 'There was somebody living on the top floor - they were renting to a musician - and I was living in the basement and the ground.' He would eat at school or go to his aunt's for dinner at the weekend, but it was a lot of freedom and independence for a 15-year-old. His friends would visit him and stay over, but he didn't have parties. 'I knew what I wanted to do in Austria when I left Athens,' he says.

'Salzburg is the most conservative city in the world. It's like a little sweetshop - the birthplace of kitsch. I cried a lot in Austria among so many girls at such a conservative school. It was a traditional setting and the techniques they were doing were old-fashioned. If you did a wrong stitch, they would make you unravel it and start again. So it started an obsession about being very specific about details.'

Schwab studied there for four years before moving to Berlin to attend the prestigious Esmod fashion school to continue his studies. It was equally strict, but it must have been quite a culture shock moving from the unworldly Salzburg to Berlin. 'Once I came out of college and I went to Berlin it was almost rebellion. I looked at the fashion that was happening and started appreciating the technology that can be combined with the traditions I had learnt.'

After he graduated, winning the best student award, he moved to London in 2003 and got a job as the sampling-room assistant with the fashion designers Clements Ribeiro. Their pattern cutter, Mark Tarbard, recommended him to apply for Louise Wilson's MA course at Central Saint Martins. 'I had had enough of colleges, and studying in Berlin was quite hardcore. The head of the course there was notorious, and when I landed in London I thought, not another crazy woman [Louise Wilson]! But she was great. She found it interesting that I was such an intense researcher. You can work very well with her if you are dedicated. She took me under her wing.'

When he graduated, he set up his own label. There are three awards perched on a shelf in Schwab's studio, the first for Best Student when he left Esmod, the second for Best New Designer, which he won at the British Fashion Awards in 2006, and the third a Swiss Textiles Award in 2007, accompanied by €120,000 prize money which he used to build up the studio and develop his collection for autumn/winter 2008. In 2009 he was made the head of design at the American fashion house Halston. He stayed for three seasons but gave it up because he didn't want to move to New York.

Schwab has a conceptual approach to design, which was more apparent in his earlier collections, such as the Yellow Wallpaper for autumn/winter 2008 (which had benefited from the Swiss Textile prize) in collaboration with the artist Tom Gallant. It was inspired by a Charlotte Perkins Gilman short story written in 1892, about a woman who is suffering from nervous depression and is confined to an upstairs bedroom of her house by her doctor husband. She becomes fixated with the yellow wallpaper peeling off the walls. The collection itself was dark and featured dresses - the beginnings of Schwab's nude look - so tight that the models could barely walk, the fabric apparently peeling off around them, revealing fragments of William Morris prints mixed with pornographic prints underneath. It echoed the claustrophobic hysteria of the book.

The audience was left feeling a little unsettled, and unsure whether this was quite the way modern women wanted to dress, but the Crafts Council was so impressed by the craftsmanship that it bought one of the dresses in 2011 - made with the most complex laser-cut lace - and displayed it last year as part of an exhibition called The Yellow Wallpaper.

For Schwab, the inspiration behind a collection can be a series of apparently disparate references. 'I'm obsessed with educating myself every time I do a collection. It makes it ultimately personal and isn't that what people should express? Personality?' The influences for his collection for spring/summer 2013 came from a copy of National Geographic that he read on the beach during a short holiday in Greece. He drew connections between a story about dying languages and the plight of the endangered honey bee, which resulted in a collection that features tribal fringing, honeycomb patterns and Navajo face paint alongside some of those dying techniques of craft and dressmaking he learnt at Annahof - skirts made from fabric slit to make it stretch like a concertina, intricate Grecian goddess pleating, and delicate lace. And, of course, there is one of his 'nude' dresses too, this one without the black tulle ve iling and for only the most confident of women.


Looks from Schwab's spring/summer 2013 collection. Photos: REX and Getty.

'Even though the collections evolve quite a lot they are kept consistent in that they are about craft and certain elements that are very detailed and very specialised,' Schwab says. 'There is a certain woman who likes seductive dresses. For me, seduction plays a very important role. I come from a generation where we like to look beautiful or attractive, not weird.' He wants women to feel an emotional attraction to his clothes and to value them in the way his aunt valued the clothes she had made from the silk devoré she picked up on her travels.

While he may be inspired by bees and lost tribes, in the end, the clothes have to speak for themselves. 'I don't think fashion should be more than what it is about,' Schwab says. 'Dressing up, looking good.' And with that, look 38 is wrapped up in its hanging bag again and put back into the archive, ready for its next moment on the red carpet.

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