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Sruli Recht
for the full feature with photos: http://scoute.org/creators/srulirecht
For his new menswear collection, Iceland-based designer Sruli Recht created his own atypical design process, producing one of a kind patterns combined with particular materials. The result is a collection that has an extremely organic feel and strikes a balance between freedom and form.
Sruli Recht is eyeing the racks of clothing at his corner of a multilabel showroom in Paris. The garments, most of them made out of a single draped piece of exotic skins and Icelandic wool, form a muted but bold colour palette of earth tones with a splash of blood red and bright green. Its noon and Recht is just back from running errands – picking up a boot sample delivered to Paris late and unfinished, along with supplies from a hardware store. He spent the morning at his apartment shaping the heels of the boots and treating the leather to his liking. In midst our conversation, the showroom’s owner has come over to examine the new addition, now placed on a shelf next to belts, jewelry and wallets made of dyed fish skin. “Don’t touch my shit”, Recht mumbles, followed by a burst of laughter – one of many examples of his witty and satirical character.
Its Recht’s second day in showing what is, despite making clothing for nearly 15 years, actually his first complete menswear collection to date. Recht’s journey into creating garments began in Melbourne, where he studied in the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, graduating with a Bachelor Degree in Fashion Design in 2002. He began his career by hand sewing one or two made to measure garments in a week. “Designing actually always seemed very difficult, complicated and confusing… I think in the beginning I, being the new-kid-foreigner, did it as more of a way to try and fit in”, he says.
Recently, however, he has been rather recognized for a wide array of work unrelated to clothing, “non-products”, as he calls them. For the past 5 years or so, he had relatively little studio time to himself, spending a majority of time working with or running other labels. “It is a commitment to work with or for other people – you have to get into their heads, think like them, create like them”, he says. Due to the time constraints, he found himself working with smaller projects that weren’t as time consuming to produce.
This, combined with the actual need for whatever things he would have use for at a given time, brought about the concept of non-products. Constant travelling and utilizing various spaces for a studio created the need for a portable table, so he designed one out of cardboard that could be packed into the size of a small suitcase and pieced together for a large cutting table. He wanted a belt that he didn’t need to take off at the airport, so he made one without a buckle. Whether or not his umbrella with a brassknuckle handle served other purposes than fighting the rain is uncertain, but Recth did end up battling in court over its legality, and won.
Another reason for designing non-clothing products was that Recht’s working knowledge had become somewhat of a burden for him. “It meant I couldn’t just improvise and make something; I would pre-design and map the entire garment out in my head, the order of every stitch and snip, and this was claustrophobic and unenjoyable”, he explains. Without realizing it, he had distanced himself from his own clothing, working on that of others and various products. However, as enough time had passed, he’d come a full circle and had, in a way, forgotten about clothing in order to approach it in a different way. That, and he also needed new clothes for himself.
Aesthetically, Recht’s garments certainly stick out from the mass given the raw materials and dramatic silhouettes. Take for example a leather coat in which the back is cut fairly straight, but the large lapels of the jacket stick strongly forward, especially if the wearer’s hands are in the pockets. Perhaps the most extravagant piece is “Icarus, post crash” – a jacket made out of 21 taxidermed blackbird skins, feathers still intact, on a reindeer skin base, and a piece of headwear matching to it.
Recht says the new collection is different from anything he has ever done before, but he still recognizes himself in it. This time around, his design approach and working methods were entirely new. “I wanted to let the collection happen in my hands instead of on paper… To listen to my hands, and let the fabric tell me what to do”. He chose not to involve any sketching in the design process, and came up with a special technique to develop the collection; making a half-scale mannequin and draping fabrics directly onto the form. “Making it in half scale really reduced the amount of detail that you would otherwise put in because you have only so much space.”
Additionally, he came up with what he calls a macroscope – a camera shooting the mannequin and garment, projecting a full scale image of it onto a wall. Once he had come up with a pattern for a garment, it was transferred onto paper, scanned, scaled to full size, and then cut directly onto the material with a laser cutter. The garment was then re-draped in full size, edited and re-scanned. This unique process proved to be very efficient and precise. “What you have as an end result is very little use and wastage of paper, much less time tracing and cutting, and much more time to work and think with your hands on the actual material”, Recht adds.
Another unique element in the collection is brought on by the materials, of which nearly all are of Icelandic origin, and in some way developed by Recht. The only material imported, due to not being available locally, is wool-angora jersey, used for only a couple of pieces. Recht spends a great amount of time working with local producers, developing unique ingredients for his work. “I work very closely with a tannery in the north of Iceland, creating new materials out of raw skins.” All the leathers – horse, reindeer, shark, bird and even fish – make up a large part of the garments and accessories in the collection.
On some occasions, he has even found ideas in failed experiments, picking up scraps from the tannery and saying “I want this effect!” Similarly, he works with a knit producer who handles Icelandic wool utilized for the knitwear. “In the beginning, 10 years ago, I would have an idea, and force some fabric into achieving it. But I learned over time that the fabric would never do what it wasn’t supposed to do, so there was little use in trying to beat it into submission. So I started to develop the ideas incorporating the garment and material together.”
The result is a collection that is completely intuitive and free, but at the same time very dimensional and constructed. While drapery is a key part of his design process, Recht is careful to differentiate his garments from certain trends. “In my view there is a current ubiquitous and lazy approach to men’s wear masquerading as drapery, which seems to be a vague formula of hanging a length of raw fabric around the neck, adding sleeves that are too long and too tight, and sticking a hook on it – bam, avant garde men’s wear. Where is the thought, wit or humour in that?”
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