By
Steven Yatsko
Photography by
Johnny Dufort

FAUSTINE STEINMETZ


In Paris, a fourteen-year-old girl stumbles upon Joseph Kosuth’s One and Three Chairs at the Centre Georges Pompidou. The piece—a life-sized photograph of a chair, said chair, and the definition of a chair—served as a revelatory lesson in semantics and art for the teenager who was, at the time, cutting up all of her jeans. Now, fourteen years later, with a master’s from Central Saint Martins and a label of her own, Faustine Steinmetz’s handwoven designs embody that interpretive nature between user and object.

The process for a single piece requires days, sometimes weeks, of toil on a wooden handloom in an East London studio. Of her silk-and-rayon, denim-inspired articles for Fall 2014, Steinmetz explains, “I have inserted very thin copper into the weaves so that you can mold and pleat each piece of clothing to your liking. I really liked the shine it gave to the clothing as well as the malleability. My starting point was pleats I wanted the wearers to make them- selves to be able to adjust the clothes to their body shape.”

The meticulous process, which she admits she has unsuccessfully tried to make less so, makes one wonder whether the intensive commitment acts as personal leaven for inventiveness.

“Now that we are growing, I am weaving, dying, knotting, and embroidering less and less. This has made me realize that all those crafts really help me see more clearly, get new ideas, and stay calm,” Steinmetz says of the process. “When I start a weave, I start a book from the French classics on tape. It is a very special time for me to focus on one thing for a week.”

Her discipline is perhaps a reaction to her perspective on the consumer climate and the dwindling lifespan of a wardrobe. “There is something uncomfortable to me in the way we tend to buy clothes,” she states. “A lot of girls around me have thirty pairs of shoes! I have one pair of shoes. They are beautiful ones from Robert Clergerie, and I intend to keep them for as long as I can.”

Not straying far from semiotics and Kosuth, Steinmetz meditates over the influence of Issey Miyake’s Pleats Please on her role as designer. “There is the idea that Pleats Please is an essay on those few shapes he reworks every time,” she says, her own idée fixe being the simple pair of jeans. “I think this concept touches base with Kosuth’s work in the way that it is a visual reflection on an object.”

The designer, who, growing up, had a displaced sense of belonging, found in London a supportive community through Saint Martins. It’s no coincidence, then, that Steinmetz attributes her attraction to denim to its ubiquitous appeal amongst disparate groups. “It touches a lot of different types of people which have nothing to do with each other,” she says, “and I find that very interesting.”

Faustine Steinmetz is available at Opening Ceremony. For more information, please visit FaustineSteinmetz.com. Styling by John Colver. Makeup by Niamh Quinn at LGA Management using MAC Cosmetics. Hair by Cyndia Harvey at Streeters. Model: Ella Richards at Storm. Photographer’s assistants: Anna Olszewska and Tom Jarman. Stylist’s assistant: Samia Giobellina.

Steven Yatsko is a New York based filmmaker, writer, and photographer currently serving as the features editor for S Magazine.

Also from this issue: Marc by Marc Jacobs’ revolutionary new design team, sculptural innovation at Melitta Baumeister, timeless Spanish elegance from Pedro del Hierro, and New York label 1.61’s gender neutrality.

By
Steven Yatsko
Photography by
Johnny Dufort
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