Arthur Arbesser (Q2716)
Jump to navigation
Jump to search
Arthur Arbesser is a fashion house from FMD.
| Language | Label | Description | Also known as |
|---|---|---|---|
| English | Arthur Arbesser |
Arthur Arbesser is a fashion house from FMD. |
Statements
“It might not be much, but a window that opens onto the street is all I need,” said Arthur Arbesser. He’s always been obsessed with windows, watching life unfold through the glass when the lights turn on at night. The place where he presented his spring 2025 collection felt like a small white box, with synthetic grass replaced tiles on the floor. But an unnoticeable door on the other side of the shop window opened into an unexpected dimension that felt intimate yet communal. That space led to the back entrance of the studio of Turi Simeti, one of the most influential Italian artists of the 20th century, a master of abstractionism who transformed the simple oval into his own language.“Magic often comes from things that seem very small. This collection was born while looking around us: it’s always surprising to discover that what surrounds us can turn into an emotional fabric on which to build something,” said Arbesser. The hands of Francesco, one of his interns, became the starting point for an aesthetic exploration of everyday symbols. When giving flowers or writing postcards thoughts become gestures through hands, and Arbesser transformed those gestures into a collage print, a recurring motif in the collection. Along with Post-it notes, bar wall tiles, and checkered napkins, they reflected a reduction of the unnecessary to explore simplicity. “Fashion has become an industry where numbers and size seem to be the things that matter most, but to us small feels right, small feels wise,” said the designer.There were fabric remnants dyed orange in the studio shower, taffeta translated into easy-to-wear pieces, and old photos of animals turned into psychedelic prints. But also poker chips bought at flea markets used as jewelry and sculptural hats drawn with an irregular rhythm: Arthur Arbesser knows how to play with the system and its rules. And he knows how to have fun and how to make people have fun. While designing homewear or creating costumes for the Opera House, he takes care of a mental space that allows him to feel free, “even if thinking freely is a bitanti-Milanese,” he said. However, his greatest gift remains the naïvete of one that offers apricot juice or Coca-Cola to friends and clients, drawn in by the sense of warmth and eclectic storytelling. Because that’s precisely what he dresses people in.
20 September 2024
As he always approached his own designs in the past, Arthur Arbesser’s new collection spoke of personal encounters. The designer dedicated his fall outing to an 86-year-old woman he used to be fascinated with as a child. Arbesser enthusiastically recalled rigorously observing Ms. Kaesser outside the windows of her silverware, glasses and custom jewelry shop. “I learned through her what a window could do to a shopper. Everything oozed quality and exquisite taste,” he said during a studio appointment. Exhibiting his work for the last time within the walls of Piazza Sant’Ambrogio 16, his longtime workplace, while going back to his childhood memories felt like coming full circle. Scattered in a luminous room, his clothes bloomed among a few striped chairs he personally designed.It was last September when Arbesser stumbled upon this legendary lady at a gallery opening in Vienna, where he is originally from, and he took the chance to finally declare his admiration. “She wasn’t that severe, strict lady that I feared. She was fun and funky, and told me about her creativity and how she started the shop. That’s when I decided to shoot part of the lookbook on her and in her apartment,” he explained.The aim this season was to make clothes that tell a story and don’t necessarily need to look like 2024, but rather feel timeless, with lots of grace, personality and maybe a touch of nostalgia. A recurring print in the collection depicted glasses that Ms. Kaesser stored in her kitchen paired with a few flea market finds, reworked digitally to include a pinch of irony. Thick brushed mohair jacquard knits and shiny metallic quilted jackets found space next to an aquarelle painted take on a classic checkerboard, made alive by layering printed tulle over printed fabric.On the other hand—as Arbesser felt an urge for elegance and more dressy, formal shapes—big ruches along the hemlines appeared on voluminous taffeta skirts, dresses and on a trench in structured Japanese nylon. “Ms. Kaesser told me about her silk taffeta obsession and what an intelligent material it is. I must say I agree: it stays in shape and it crinkles in an elegant way,” said Arbesser.
24 February 2024
Arthur Arbesser’s presentation was a conversation between clothes and the space they occupy, both real and metaphysical. With a Dadaist approach, his collection became a complementary element within Spazio Meta—a vast warehouse in Milan, filled with used pieces of window displays, sets from past fashion shows and a startup operating in the field of temporary installations.Spring was shown on inanimate objects, transformed and rethought as hangers or mannequins. “Using just what’s available is more a matter of intuition than reflection,” said Arbesser. His work is a search for joy and lightness through the eyes of an adult who is fearful of losing touch with his inner child. “Nothing beats the joy of being able to express yourself freely,” he said. “Everyone should embrace that precious mindset of not caring about what others think.”Dresses, shirts and linear skirts looked easy to wear but were complex in thought, designed for those who want to feel like protagonists in the clothes they inhabit. Graphic and painterly elements were prominent, from prints created with spray cans and strips of tape (later removed to create aesthetic effects) to those developed from textures found in the team's photo albums with a fake patchwork effect. Another was created using a large piece of white cardboard treated with liters of colored watercolor paint. “The most beautiful thing about this work is the opportunity to tell new stories,” said Arbesser, “and just seeing a new print is enough to still feel touched.”
24 September 2023
Arthur Arbesser’s great-great grandfather, Hermann von Koenigsbrunn, was an adventurous painter who, in the 1850s, traveled the world, embarking on long expeditions to Egypt, Sri Lanka, Greece. He was fascinated by nature, as shown by his delicate landscapes of verdant coastlines, mountains and forests. “He was really into fauna and plants—humans, not so much,” Arbesser explained.Some of his great-great grandpa’s romantic paintings followed Arthur when he moved to Milan, and now they sit in his studio, a nicely furnished workshop where he held his fall presentation. “This season I decided to go with something that you grew up with, that has been around you all your life and is close to your heart,” he said. “These paintings reminded me of home, and I wanted to go back to this.”His small crew of young assistants worked on turning details of the landscape paintings into allover prints: “Since there’s a sort of heavy Viennese-ness about them, we wanted something delicate to go against it,” he said. They hand-made new abstract graphics mixing tissue paper, glue and water. Using a tiny sponge they came up with a “spongy punky print.” Contrasting with von Koenigsbrunn’s rather solemn paintings, it looked spontaneous and joyous.On the fashion front, Arbesser focused not only on patterns but on defining volumes and new shapes, while keeping the artsy, charming simplicity of his creations. Refined little drapes gave a twist to A-line slip-ons, or added cloud-like volume around the shoulders or at the front of aprons, juxtaposed on slender printed tunics. Arbesser’s love for everything plissé was visible in one of the collection’s standouts, a finely pleated long-sleeved top rendered in the handmade spongy-punk Harlequin motif; it looked delicate and theatrical.Receiving guests in the intimacy of his studio was a clear indication that Arbesser wanted to “keep things small, keep things healthy, keep it joyful,” as he put it. He has worked with the same small team for years; he intends to keep his practice at a small scale because it’s the only way to preserve the spontaneous, artistic feeling that nurtures his creativity. Fashion for him isn’t about greed, rather it’s about doing beautiful things surrounded by like-minded people. “I’m not into ugly, sporty, comfy dresses. I’ve never been the edgy super-cool kid. I went intimate because the outside world as it is today wants you to go closer to who you are,” he reflected.
“I think that the worst thing for a creative is hopping on someone else’s wagon."
26 February 2023
Arthur Arbesser likes to keep things small—not only because as an independent designer he has to deal with limited resources, but because he likes a “more domestic dimension for my practice, more protected from stressful pressures,” as he explained at his spring presentation.Shown on mannequins in a pristine contemporary art gallery, his whimsical pieces were interspersed with artworks handmade from found objects: pieces of a chair morphed into an abstract shape, driftwood bejeweled with silk threads and pearls, metallic leftovers mutated into a tenuous freestanding structure. Everything was made in his workshop. “We had such fun; it felt like living in a playground for crazy kids,” he said. “What’s wrong with that? Being a child is beautiful.”Turning the domestic into soulful inspiration, finding comfort in proximity, being creative using the resources at hand—that’s what appeals to Arbesser, “creating something beautiful, even precious, out of almost nothing, like children do,” he said. This approach has endeared him to an artistic community of kindred spirits who appreciate what he dismissively calls “my bric-a-brac practice.”Arbesser is a bit of a Renaissance man, and he has successfully branched out into diverse endeavors that require not only imagination but actual designing chops. He has worked with textile companies making beautiful fabrics and carpets, and with interior design factories to produce quirky, inventive furniture. He’s also a compelling costume designer for opera and ballet, and he is currently curating an art collector’s exhibition in Vienna. Children can sometimes be hyperactive.As for the collection, it was as charming as the designer himself. Pieces exuded poetic simplicity and grace—masculine square-cut shirts, A-line pleated skirts, a raincoat in recycled nylon. There were easy shapes that could be juxtaposed and mismatched, made in honest fabrics printed with delicate graphics inspired by Viennese Secession or offered in the solid colors Arbesser favors, which reference the work of German Expressionist painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner.“It isn’t wrong today to be a little more delicate and sensitive, even if this isn’t often considered ‘cool,’” he concluded. “But who cares? We live in a world full of diktats—the only thing that can make you truly happy is to follow your own beat.”
25 September 2022
Every good designer pours personal passion into their work. With Arthur Arbesser there is a particular narrative intimacy that sees the encounters he experiences in life inflect the garments he fashions for work. The chief example in this collection, he revealed through chat in a preview before today’s showroom presentation, came after the 90-something Salzburg priest who had baptized Arbesser saw his name in the credits of an opera Arbesser costume designed and, after 30-plus years, got in touch.“This fellow, a prelate named Neuhardt, was a friend of my late grandmother and also an art historian and he contacted me out of the blue. It was so interesting to talk with him—you can always learn from those who are older than you,” said Arbesser. “Just because he thought it might interest me, he sent me this digital archive he had of renaissance and baroque swatches, really beautiful and opulent materials.” So started the development of this small but lovely collection, via the development of a print of those ancient decorative pieces arranged within a vivid scrawled context created by Arbesser. The swatches provoked thoughts of Old Masters Bronzino and Pontormo and the ephemera of their backgrounds. This in turn led to a brushstroke print—“as if it is of the painter getting ready to paint and testing their colors”—on sleek wool dresses.Complementary gridded fabrics from unused past collections were pressed and serviced into large armed tops, and grid patterned mohair recruited for jumpers. Riffing on Prada’s sheer skirts, Arbesser declared a satisfied adjacency in his wide-gauge knit skirts that appear deconstructed and reveal—if cerebrally—a little more of the wearer than his collections usually do. Arbesser is that rare thing in Milan, an artist in his garret, so let’s hope the skirts take off as they deserve to.
26 February 2022
As an independent designer possessed with a yen for ballet, opera, and the visual arts, Arthur Arbesser relishes residing in a space outside the spectrum of Milan fashion’s mainstream. And yet you could see that cherished intellectual position being profoundly pulled at during his presentation for this collection. The reason was the location, a pop-up space on Via Della Spiga, one of the most significant shopping arteries in the bourgeois heart of this old city. With evident satisfaction, Arbesser reported: “Last night, when we were setting up, there were a lot of ladies passing and showing interest. One of them popped her head around the door and said, ‘Finally! Something on the street with a bit of color; something a little bit different from all the usual brands!’”The space, though small, was for sure a head turner. Tables loaded with antique Viennese glassware from Arbesser’s own hoard were laid with vividly patterned and vibrantly colored Como-made tablecloths, whose prints were drawn from past collections.There was a television installation—with old-world cathode ray TVs—involving Philip Glass and a flautist named Francesca. Photographic prints from this look book papered the floor and wall, alongside a six-canvas painting that Arbesser’s colleague painted while the collection was being developed.That collection, however, was the chief eye candy. There was a sweet new print based on the little, long-forgotten personal keepsakes Arbesser rediscovered when in lockdown limbo going through old boxes of stuff. He also dug out his fabulous pixel print for shirting, skirts, and dresses; reset his stripes story; and offered a trench in a metallic fabric whose supply Arbesser is close to exhausting. This was a designer staying in his lane and loving it. “I’m not a provocative guy, and I don’t have anger inside me. I’m not the coolest designer. But you know, it’s a great thing to come to the realization that you are happy with your language, your work, and your place in things—it’s peaceful,” he said. Arbesser’s anti-crisis resulted in another lovely collection. If only he could have kept that store for a few more days.
27 September 2021
The current lack of art openings is challenging if you are a fashion designer beloved of a clientele that frequents art openings. Happily for Arthur Arbesser, his pressures in that regard have been slightly offset by his other work designing costumes for theater and ballet productions—these are going ahead, albeit audience free.So fashion-wise, as Arbesser reported gamely this afternoon via Zoom, he is keeping on keeping on: “I made this deal with myself; I thought it’s really important, even if it’s small, to do a collection every six months and to keep writing my chapters.” Reflecting the narrowed horizons to which all of us have been subjected, this collection replaced his usual expansive span of reference for more personal points of departure. The start was an old and well-used painter’s palette and an old and well-used harlequin toy, both of which he picked up for a euro in one of Milan’s many flea markets last year.These were developed into prints and patchwork fabrics, and then inserted within a collection that was rich in revived deadstock and updated Arbesser ideas, and informed by the Italian-accented art of Royal Academician Joe Tilson. A brush-stroke-printed fabric from two years ago was dusted down, inverted, and turned into pleated skirting. Old season brushed wool was over-dyed and turned into miniskirts that complemented harlequin-patched mohair knits, some of which were sized for Arbesser’s male fans. A 200-meter bolt of upcycled silk jersey was fashioned into flowing pajamas, which contrasted with the rigid silhouette of buttonless liner vests and waistcoats.The resulting collection was photographed in a friend’s art studio to create a series of hopeful postcards to a future in which canapé trays once more circulate, warm white wine is once more quaffed, and canvasses are once more passingly scrutinized in salons crowded with intellectual dressers. Bring. It. On.
25 February 2021
An increasingly fruitful side gig for Arthur Arbesser has been designing costumes for ballet and opera, and this season he imported the elements of storytelling that are inherent in such work to help him spin his lockdown narrative. Using either deadstock fabrics from collections past—“the plan is that after this, it will all be gone”—he created the costumes for what he called “a little fairy tale” whose cast was the friends you see here, shot in a Milan factory space. Polyester-mix dresses were printed with Bridget Riley-ish harlequin diamonds. A highlight print on a series of slouchy poplin menswear shirts was taken from a photocopy of a cut-in-half cabbage, and a long, sleeveless dress in oxblood jersey was inset with a lozenge-edged yellow panel.Contemplating some red-heavy, crazily pixelated kaleidoscope prints, Arbesser became a little misty-eyed and ventured, “You know, I have always used these pixel prints, and I still remember a review from Nicole years ago mentioning ‘an unmanageable dose of graphics.’” Arbesser and his small team clearly derived great joy from the certainties of endeavor in the middle of uncertain times, and the designer seemed both a little sad not to be showing but also liberated by it. He said, “I’m in such a lucky position. Because I’m a tiny, tiny venture here. No, I’m like a small, small team; I can do whatever I want.”
27 September 2020
After designing the costumes for a performance ofDer Rosenkavalierat the Wiener Staatsoper recently, Arthur Arbesser confessed this afternoon that after six years of collections reflecting different elements of his home city, he might just be all Vienna’d out, which allowed Milan, Arthur’s hometown of 15 years, to enjoy its moment in the glare of Arbesser’s deeply considered contemplation.Scattered among the female models and the regular male cameo Leon Dame was the gallerist Paola Clerico, the designer Maddalena Casadei, and the expat British jewelry designer Joanne Burke, as well as other women whose spirit and intellect Arbesser admires. They wore a pleasingly quirky mix of pieces whose irregular checks in mohair and sequin drew inspiration from the patinated tiles of Milanese 19th-century architecture, or whose prints in bronze and black, of arches both inverted and upright, echoed the beautiful entranceways of so many of the grand old apartment buildings here. The crushed brass silk shirting and dresses were reminiscent of the many-buttoned doorbells through which you must gain permission to enter these buildings. Arbesser collaborated with his friend Marco Guazzini, who has invented a ceramic-like material named Marwoolus that mixes pressed marble powder and wool. In white, but flecked with attractive abstract plumes of color, there were Marwoolus single-button jackets, belts, pendants, and earrings. That pattern was also transplanted into skirts, shirts, and pants. For me, the look that most channeled the specific twist of externally intellectual femininity you find in some Milan milieus was a blue work jacket over a slick and shiny quilted liner, an olive miniskirt, maroon tights, and a brown version of the half-height flat-sole mary janes that trod this show. As Arbesser pointed out, Milan is the most unobvious of Italian cities, but with steady scrutiny comes understanding: The playfully brooding autumnal languor of this collection reflected as deliciously as a slow-cooked osso buco settled into a parmesan-unctuous pool of risotto alla Milanese.
19 February 2020
Arthur Arbesser recently found a large box in which his grandmother, Mathilde, had kept scraps of fabric cut from her own clothing. She started the habit as she grew out of herkinderwear outfits in the 1920s, all the way until she stopped buying clothes in the 1980s. He said: “I only found out about it after she passed away. It was an archive of prints and patterns and textures. The past was sacred to her.”As a tribute to Mathilde, this collection combined both her lifetime and that of her grandson in clothes. The sailor collar looks near the end were reminiscent of Mathilde’s school uniform and the blue floral emblematic of the folk pottery tradition of her Transylvanian birthplace. The grayish patched pieces—skirt, waistcoat, and first men’s look—were made of swatches of fabrics taken from past Arbesser collections. He said he stitched them together before running them through his washing machine (hence the gray), and added: “This is my story in fabric.”The collection reflected the layers of meaning behind it in a marvelously gathered black-on-white polka dot dress with an irregularly beaded hem, within whose pattern softer, larger, yellow dots were hidden. From his own box of fashion memories, Arbesser took past motifs—the punchy paint splash florals, the diamond check, those layered polka dots, the big scrunchy sun hat—and presented them afresh. To signify the personal nature of his material, the designer presented his initials as shadowed solids on prints reminiscent ofSesame Streetalphabet education animations.Maybe it was because he was so familiar with so many of the ingredients at his fingertips that Arbesser was able to shape such an especially interesting and attractive collection today. He only rarely presented variations on the same look more than once, yet there was still a coherence in the whole that gave it a distinct sense of identity and authorship. Arbesser said afterwards: “There is so much of everything. So the only way to do this is to be personal and to tell a story that is a real story. Otherwise there is no point.”He also added that Mathilde, who could be quite “harsh,” used to tell him: “What you think is beautiful doesn’t mean itisbeautiful: other people have different taste.” That’s quite true, of course. However, had she been there to hear the applause for the show dedicated to her today, she might have conceded that her grandson knows a thing or two about beauty and how it is beheld.
18 September 2019
“It’s my life!” said Arthur Arbesser before this show. True enough, the collection was packed with observational references to his workplace, his neighborhood, his back catalog, and even his own wardrobe. “My studio is in Piazza Sant’Ambrogio—a very bourgeois, conservative neighborhood where ladies tend to wear their Casentino coats or loden.” Here, a nubbly piled Casentino came in almost-black brown and was worn with black-piped, rib-knit blue pants, belted loosely, and a high-collared harlequin-check sweater. There was also a milky, almost-white Casentino paired with wonderfully vibrant egg-yolk yellow pants. The lovely loden—made by a father-and-son operation in the Tyrol—was worn over a double-collared shirtdress in the same arresting yellow.Arbesser looked at an abacus he keeps in his studio for a print used on shirting, and he was inspired by the tiles in his restroom to make pleated check skirts and shirts, plus mohair tank tops and scarves. The pomegranate and lychee prints arranged artfully throughout this collection were designs reprised from his very first. There also seemed to be a gentle whisper of his side hustle with Fay in the quilted, drawstring jackets. A dark lychee-print suit was an adaptation of his own tuxedo, and, he said, one cut of pants—I guess the ones worn below double-collared workwear jackets—were adaptations of the pair he wore as a 15-year-old Boy Scout. (Sadly, no images of Arbesser in his scout kit were on the mood board.) As well as including places, things, and designs drawn from his own personal experience, Arbesser cast three of his friends and clients as models for the collection. This collection was authentically Arthur Arbesser down to the very last stitch.
20 February 2019
This affable Viennese-born Milan expat has in the past invariably looked to his hometown for artistic inspiration. Today, however, Arthur Arbesser turned to the work of Fausto Melotti, an absolutely not-Austrian, Italian-born sculptor and ceramicist.If it was mildly shocking not to be listening to Ultravox and contemplating Wiener Werkstätte, Egon Schiele, Sigmund Freud, or Oskar Kokoschka, Arbesser provided—perhaps subconsciously (ask Freud)—what looked like a heavy nod to one Viennese titan via his first-ever pieces deploying sequins (a development, he said, that had taken him “guts” to consider). The apparently random spattering of them on a long dress in an irregular velvet green-and-white check, as well as a crop top worn over a jute skirt, had a decidedly Klimt-ish glint that was attractive to behold.Arbesser adapted the abstract whorls in the finish of Melotti’s ceramics into a jacquard and print used in rope-fastened full skirts, full kaftan-like overdresses, full-look shirts and pants, and a strong-shouldered power coat. Melotti’s angularly whimsical sculptures were the inspiration for the giraffe silhouette patterned on plissé skirts and dresses.The designer said he’d imagined this season as “a woman who works in a studio with clay and gets her hands dirty, but she is equally up for fun and going out at night. She is very at peace with herself, self-confident, and not afraid of patterns.” He also inserted one menswear look modeled by Leon Dame—who featured in Arbesser’s first season of his excellent sideline gig with Fay—a jacquard-panted, argyle-slipover-wearing masculine foil to the dirty-handed, pattern-saturated sculptresses around him.Certainly, there was a lot of that pattern, often attractively layered to give his looks a depth and richness—not unlike Melotti’s ceramics—the eye kept returning to. A silk organza overdress in Arbesser’s recurring irregular argyle was semitransparent, revealing the fitted green-and-white check pattern of the knit beneath it, and work jackets, skirts, and pajamas were made up of spliced panels of Melotti-like swirl and stripe. Rough and rough-hemmed jute pieces were used to provide a textural clash with his finer crepe and silk pieces. And near the end, two dramatically distorted garments—squished short and wide on the left arm, and long and narrow on the right, like a pot gone wrong on the wheel—were fringed with feathers for emphasis.
Whether in pattern, texture, or proportion, Arbesser appeared to be experimenting with the idea of wrangling apparently disharmonious elements into a counterintuitively harmonic whole. As a formula for furthering Arbesser’s catalog of unconventional intellectual glamour, it worked.
19 September 2018
Even for those to whom Vienna means nothing, Arthur Arbesser’s fashion-wrought love letters to the rich creative heritage of his home city continue to cast a certain spell. Today, Arbesser’s chief focus was the work of Koloman Moser, a Wiener Werkstätte cofounder and graphic artist who died 100 years ago this year and who was a key contributor to his city’s modernist flowering.Moser’s reincarnation via Arbesser manifested as a stripe pattern indented with notches and a plain stripe in dusty shades against black on long, softly contoured dresses and tank dresses. Moser’s designs for interiors, vases, and furniture inspired metallic pastel coats and skirts patterned with diamond stitching, full poplin dresses with gentle printed gridding, and pants and coats decorated in more stripes overlaid with triangles. The intensity of the pattern was further illuminated by the occasional starburst of reflective two-tone metallic jacquard, most powerfully in a violet and russet pleated-skirt shirtdress. Layered over that was a series of prints and knits of flowers, fruit, and animals that came in punchy colors and a hand-applied patina. As the color and pattern rather rioted above gold and red patent boots, the silhouettes retained a severe yet statuesque Adele Bloch-Bauer look: both rigorous and nonchalant. Cordula Reyer returned for the second season to Arbesser’s runway and finely inhabited his creations.
21 February 2018
Ah, Vienna: home of great coffee and awesome cakes—plus the birthplace of psychoanalysis. Arthur Arbesser is Viennese: This collection was replete with influences which, upon reflection, revealed quite a bit about its author. The return after many years of Helmut Lang favorite Cordula Reyer to the runway was the first breakthrough—for it revealed Arbesser’s lifelong fascination with fashion.“He was a strange fan!” said Reyer of their very first meeting, in the ’90s. “I was living in L.A. then, but I was visiting Vienna. These two boys were looking at me on the street, then one of them came up to me and asked me for an autograph. It was Arthur. Nobody in Austria ever recognized me! And he was 12!” Over a decade later, Arbesser added, the two met again at the Milan furniture fair—where she recognized him—and they have been friends ever since.Exhibit two was the main decorative influence of the show, the paintings of Heinz Stangl. This new-to-me painter, a now-deceased friend of Arbesser’s parents, created disturbing canvasses in cheery colors showing knotted kaleidoscopes of figures locked in what is either ecstasy or agony. Given his Viennese provenance, it’s probably a bit of both.Arbesser translated this starting point—and the doomed poise of the Romanov daughters—into a collection that was, the Arbesser expert alongside me noted, a notably user-friendly outing from the designer. Swarovski pearls were used with restraint as contours on structured but ergonomic dark looks, including Reyer’s opening coat. Graphic polos, an Arbesser regular, were repeated but in less challenging graphics than previously. Printed viscose Stangl-inspired separates—plus complementary rain hats—needed no great analysis to be found desirable. Stangl-knit jacquard tabards, pocket-printed PVC outerwear, a mac with two black straps under each arm to create shape, and some fine chisel toe two-tone boots were amongst the other highlights of this very personal Viennese whirl.
21 September 2017
Tonight Arthur Arbesser brought us to an abandoned former bakery that once made bread for northern Italy’s troops. He felt it was raw in the way Berlin was circa the 1980s of Wim Wenders’sWings of Desire, which inspired his latest collection. It’s been a long time since we cued up that flick, but we can vouch for the chill inside the bakery.Brrr.Wings of Desirewas shot in black and white; Arbesser’s show was in living color—strange colors like caution orange, acid yellow, and chalky pink. In addition to his big color message, he emphasized graphic patterns, including the black-and-white checkerboard motif that has become one of Milan’s surprise trends. He also did narrow stripes on cotton separates whose volumes were adjustable with rip cords, and a sort of pixilated, multicolored Prince of Wales check. Among all the graphic treatments, the most compelling and most likely to be worn was the clingy ribbed knit dress. It was graphic in a manageable dosage.Arbesser has an off-kilter sensibility; he is unique in Milan, but some of the pieces here came off as awkward and unlikely: the quilted striped wraps worn around the shoulders or as a skirt over contrast stripe shorts, the clear plastic overskirt topping shorts in pepto pink vinyl, the Vibram FiveFingers sock sandals he made in collaboration with the shoe manufacturer. We’re always going on about the importance of vision, but it would be to Arbesser’s advantage to get out of his own head for a while and study how women are dressing in contemporary real life.
26 February 2017
Arthur Arbesserhas collaborated with the architect Luca Cipelletti since he landed on theMilan Fashion Weekschedule two years ago. It’s been a fruitful relationship that has yielded some memorable shows; Arbesser’s first presentation was held in a disused warehouse once belonging to Milan’s ’70s feminists that counts among the coolest venues this reporter has encountered. But today was more impressive. Having overseen the renovation of the Museo della Scienza e della Tecnologia Leonardo da Vinci, a former stables dating to the Habsburgs’ time in Milan, Cipelletti was able to secure it for Arbesser’s Spring show. To hear the architect tell it, the museum was a much in-demand venue this season, but Arbesser’s Austrian roots made it an especially good fit.The collection had a lot to live up to, and it didn’t quite manage to do so. Technical knitwear based on the Palio di Siena horse race was awkwardly proportioned, and acid green is a tricky color to wear, even in a season of neons. Arbesser looked at old pictures of his grandfather in his school uniform and holiday clothes; they gave the collection its boyish, shrunken shapes. There was a literal but still delightful little sailor jacket. Traditional Vichy check, another callback, was made modern with an iridescent sheen on a nice trench. A bold red-and-blue striped dress had grown-up appeal.Speaking of productive partnerships, Silhouette produced the shades, Swarovski provided crystals, and Fabio Rusconi made the smart-looking snub-toed patent boots based on Arbesser’s design. We’re looking forward to seeing that aspect of his brand grow in the future.
25 September 2016
Last stop ofMilan Fashion Week: a car repair shop with a leaky ceiling backstage.Arthur Arbesserlanded a creative director gig at Iceberg recently, but his funky location and tough time slot post-Armani, when most high-profile types are quickly hightailing it to Paris, was a reminder of how hard-going it can still be as a newcomer in this town. That, and what a pleasure it is to encounter a promising one with a unique point of view.Arbesser worked for Giorgio Armani for many years. It showed in this collection, which was built on tailoring and exuded an intellectual point of view. Drawn to simple, clean lines, Arbesser is a technician, not a decorator or a stylist like many of his young Milan peers. Where he’s expressive is with his fabric choices. From least compelling to most, there was the dusty pink plaid of a three-piece suit (jacket, kilt, and leggings), a sky blue wide-wale corduroy trench, and a classic wool loden used for sturdy coats that nodded to his Austrian roots. He reunited with illustrator Agathe Singer for a very pretty autumnal leaf print that appeared on smocklike dresses and a tunic-and-pants set, and the gold velvet on a floor-length A-line dress was Klimtian—it radiated in the small space. Arbesser caught Fall’s feeling for shine, but he’s not a trend-minded designer. His loden jacket, lamé shirt, and openwork knit black pants will be the brainy girl’s answer to all the excess of next season.
1 March 2016
It’s been a big week forArthur Arbesser, one of Milan’s new generation of designers. Last Friday, he presented his first collection for the Italian sportswear company Iceberg, and today, an hour before his longtime former employer Giorgio Armani put on his own show, Arbesser took his young eponymous brand to the runway for the first time. There was already a sense of occasion. It was a fact Arbesser opted to accentuate by recruiting his friend, the composer and musician Jordan Hunt, to play live music, and by installing in the middle of the room a giant Balthus cat and a young woman who played the artist’s model on a low velvet chair.Balthus’s favorite subjects were adolescent girls, and Arbesser used the famous painter’s oeuvre as a framework. The models’ hair was scraped carelessly to the side with bobby pins, and they wore white anklets with both their patent slingbacks and their Nikes. The pubescent edge-of-innocence thing can go dreadfully wrong. It’s a tribute to Arbesser’s sensitive spirit, and that of his collaborators, that it didn’t. At 33, he’s fairly youthful himself; he gets how young women want to dress. A paper-thin technical nylon coat and matching pants brought a sleek, athletic edge to the collection that felt genuine. But the stars were illustrator Agathe Singer’s lovely prints. If the naive cat motif on a pair of overalls and a raincoat won’t be for everyone, the lively floral that appeared on a flirty little dress, a pantsuit, and a long-sleeved T-shirt gown will find admirers well past their teenage years. This writer can attest to that.
28 September 2015
Given that he was raised in Vienna and trained in London, the fact that Arthur Arbesser is based in Milan is easy to mistake for a matter of happenstance. Perhaps it was, at first. He spent seven years in the atelier at Giorgio Armani, and by the time he’d decided to strike out on his own, he’d made a life in Italy and was determined to stay put. But those years soaking up Italian culture and Italian craft have marked Arbesser, as his show today at Pitti proved.His collection was, in various ways, an homage to Italy’s tradition of small-scale industrial producers, most obviously in its layered references to Bitossi ceramics and Memphis design. There were iconic Memphis pieces by Ettore Sottsass on Arbesser’s runway, and very Sottsass-ian prints and intarsia knits on the models. The patterns pulled no punches—they were wildly colored and boldly geometric—and so Arbesser hewed to strong, simple, accessible shapes, such as denim jacket silhouettes, lean little dresses, and stovepipe-slender, boot-cut pants. There were also some clinical touches, like the doctor's-scrubs tops in soft nylon or the languid trenches that had a bit of a lab coat effect. Many of the designer's silhouettes were adapted for both men and women; there were six men's looks here, a tip of the hat to Arbesser's hosts at Pitti. The styling was so androgynous, though, that the appearance of male models on the catwalk could very nearly have gone unnoticed. His androgynous tone extended down to the shoes—another nice collaboration with Sergio Rossi, one of those Italian heritage brands to which Arbesser's collection paid implicit tribute—and up to the show's standout intarsia knits, which he has made by a small manufacturer based not far from Florence. People tend to associate Italian craft with handicraft—the cobbler in his workshop, hammering the sole onto a shoe—but Arbesser's neat trick was to remind you, with the cool surface-ness of his clothes and their technical textures, of all the beautiful Italian things that have been lovingly mass produced.
17 June 2015
Antique chairs shipped in from Austria, a family friend at the grand piano playing Schubert, contemporary art on the walls—Arthur Arbesser's salon-style presentation was quite a production. "My ideal is to tell a bit more of a story," he said. "All of this is dear to me; I just hope someone else is interested in it." As a matter of fact, Arbesser's unique presentation format (last season he was in an old warehouse used by Milan's '70s feminists) and his uncomplicated but clever clothes have caught the attention of some key industry players. He got the call saying he'd made the semifinalist round of the second annual LVMH Prize not too long ago.This season, like last, what made Arbesser's straightforward pieces interesting were the materials. The designer reported that he'd reached out to an Austrian textile company by mail to make the loden fabric he wanted because they don't have an e-mail address. A jacket in the stuff was as sturdy as a wool and chenille blend sweater, and the matching skirt was very soft. Arbesser's vegan suede, while noble, wasn't quite as compelling as a leather-like coat in rubberized cotton that he affectionately referred to as "nasty." Elsewhere, a preoccupation with uniforms materialized in both dirndl-shaped skirts and sailor-collar stripes. The most vivid pieces were the ones in a graphic, multicolor print inspired by Vienna's Wiener Werkstätte; but if that proved too lively for the LVMH jurors, there was also a smart metallic pinstripe.
28 February 2015
It must be awfully cold in hell right now. And you might want to be on the lookout for pigs in the sky. Because if Milan can hatch a buzzy young designer, then anything is possible. Arthur Arbesser hails from Vienna originally, and he studied at Central Saint Martins, but he spent seven years working at Armani, and the label he launched not quite two years ago is based in Milan. Part of the reason for that, he has explained, is that the city provides him terrific access to all manner of textile factories, which is key, as Arbesser's fabrications are the defining aspect of his brand. As this collection appealingly reiterated, his strategy is to retrofit familiar, mainly tomboyish silhouettes in unusual materials—to wit, a little polo or knife-pleated skirt knit out of nylon fishing line, or a jean jacket made out of toweling fabric. The collection also featured a cool beige dress made from that naff polyester used in suctioning granny panties, and workwear-inspired button-downs and trousers in stiff waxed cotton. In all these pieces, there was a sense—subtle but undeniable—of the uncanny. The punchiest items, though, were Arbesser's color-blocked looks and the ones in circle-patterned knit jacquard, inspired by the work of Blinky Palermo and Isa Genzken, respectively. In Arbesser's hands, the references came off upbeat and playful, a tone common to all these clothes. Perhaps the most impressive thing about Arbesser, as a Milan-based designer, isn't the fact that he's young—it's the fact that his clothes feel so youthful. The buzz is well deserved.
6 October 2014