Bless Origins: Interview by Husk Magazine
Shop Bless at Suspension Point.
Bless is an almost indefinable institution. An elastic, interdisciplinary luxury brand. Stretching and investigating the constructs of design and floating somewhere around boundaries of high fashion, art and lifestyle. Bless exists on the fringe. And that’s exactly how they like it.
Desiree Heiss and Ines Kaag are the delphic design duo responsible for the enigma that is Bless.
HUSK: Bless took an unorthodox approach to entering the fashion world. You placed adverts for your ‘N° 00 Fur Wig‘ along with your telephone number in magazines like i-D and Purple Fashion.
BLESS: When we did the first project together, we would photograph them posing on the kitchen table with a passport-photo camera, where you could slide-in a little card with typed information that was photographed at the same time and included in the picture. Instead of using this typewriter mode we slid in some cut-out female faces that were photographed together with our bodies. We blew them up in a copy shop and generated 3D formatted posters that contained our phone numbers. Quite naively, we thought people would eventually call us to order some of the tops, but aside from investigative calls asking if it was an upcoming exhibition or a sex hotline— we didn’t succeed. Therefore we thought, if we manage to advertise in our most favourite magazines, we would reach better, likeminded people.
(Photo from Bless' first collection)
One of the callers was Patrick Scallon from Margiela, who ordered 50 fur wigs for every model in Margiela’s Fall/Winter 97/98 runway collection. Since Bless was never planned, there was never a moment when we sat down and said ‘let’s make a company’, the Margiela commission decided it for us.
(Photo of Martin Margiela's FW97-98 runway)
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