Heliot Emil (Q4261)
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Heliot Emil is a fashion house from FMD.
| Language | Label | Description | Also known as |
|---|---|---|---|
| English | Heliot Emil |
Heliot Emil is a fashion house from FMD. |
Statements
Spirals and ouroboros are a recurring theme this spring, in set design and product. At Heliot Emil, the models walked a labyrinthine path that brought them in close proximity to the audience and the show’s centerpiece, a hanging “chandelier,” created in collaboration with the Swiss design studio Encor, and made of square sheets of electrochromic glass. Simply put, the transparency of the glass reacted to the soundtrack. From the get-go Copenhagen-based Heliot Emil has aligned itself with technology and espoused an industrial, protective, hypebeast-meets-motorsport aesthetic. There have been 3D printed accessories and a made-for-meming model walk of flame. This season the Juul brothers, Victor (business director) and Julius (creative director) dialed down the pyrotechnics in order to put more attention on the clothes. Said Julius: “I wanted to create something that was a bit more intimate this time and a bit more personal, where people could really see the work we did with the textures and the fabrics.”On the heels of aspring collectionco-designed with AI and presented on virtual models, it was a wise decision to bring things back down to earth, and show how the clothes can exist in a real-life context. Ten years ago in Louisiana, the designer saw Olafur Eliasson’s Riverbed, a site-specific installation of stones and a stream in the museum. This inspired the patterned knits with meandering lines, and the somber palette of the collection. Rocks strung onto necklaces and left on guests’ seats suggested a return to nature as well, but it wasn’t as straightforward as that: the stones were sourced on the internet. “It’s kind of ironic to sell stones or to buy stones online; it seems like something so futuristic and so old at the same time,” Julius said. “It’s a really weird construct, but I thought that that was an interesting concept and obviously a reflection of what Eliasson did [in bringing] the stones from outside into the museum and giving them a different context or perspective.” Another example of reversal in the collection was bulbous sneaker shoes, made with Italy’s Staccato, inspired by the 3D printed shoes of past collections.
Julis noted that as he’s able to indulge his penchant for defensive, motorsport designs through Heliot Emil’s ongoing collaborations with Alpine Stars, this collection was more about layering and texture mixes and the puffy, protective elements were toned down in favor of a more bodycon silhouette, with the notable exception of a padded jacket with a sort of anatomical vibe made, the designer said, with about 70 pattern pieces, with slits between some of them for an airier effect.
27 September 2024
Copenhagen-based brothers Julius and Victor Juul of Heliot Emil remain committed to Paris while rethinking their brand’s relationship to the catwalk. For fall, they hosted a pop-up/exhibition in the capital in order to draw attention to their second collaboration with Alpinestars, an Italian company focused on motor sports and material innovation. This time around, the partnership took two forms, Jules (re)made co-signed pieces using Alpinestars materials as well as crafting wearable sculptures (two of which are seen in the lookbook) from deployed airbags that safeguarded actual riders. What the designer wanted to underline with the latter wasn’t only Alpinestars’s technical aptitude but, as he said on a call, “that clothes also can make a difference in a very literal way for people; that you can actually save lives by innovating within the garment industry.” In other words, fashion isn’t as frivolous as it sometimes appears to be.Heliot Emil’s aesthetic is anything but decorative; utilitarian is more Julius’s vibe. And while there are sometimes Langian elements at play here, the designer’s take on futurism, to his credit, is not at all retro. He’s previously used 3D technology to print footwear, experimented with AI design, and for fall incorporated a Shieldex fabric that blocks radiation, including from a cell phone, into some pieces. This idea of shielding synced nicely with the collection’s two takes on protection. There was the hard-edged defensive approach, and a softer more embracing sort. Alpinestars materials and a metal-infused fabric that holds any shape you make with it spoke to the former; garments in cashmere, mohair (used for the outer shell of a puffer), silk, and alpaca, the latter. Straps wrapped comfortingly around the body and then fluttered free. A pair of suede trousers for women had riveted panels of pony hair; they were a nice alternative to denims. The outerwear was the standout. Julius’s focus this season was less on forward movement in terms of silhouettes and more on upgrading and softening fabrications. The Dune adjacent styling (the lookbook was photographed in a Danish limestone quarry) was apt and timely.
4 March 2024
As difficult as it might be to believe, there is a realm in which the freeform craftiness of Collina Strada coexists with the sparse utilitarianism of Heliot Emil. It’s called AI. Both Hillary Taymour and Julius Juul took the decision to feed their past work into a computer (Juul added this season’s designs as well) and then started editing and puzzling out the machine’s translations of their distinct DNAs into garments that people can wear. In both cases it required human labor. “We’re not at the stage yet,” said Juul, that AI can replace people in the design process.It makes sense that the Juul brothers (Julius and Victor are creative and business directors, respectively), would be among the first in line to experiment with this new technology. Fashion tends to be shy about such things, often employing a silver-and-white retro-futurism as shorthand for things tech and seems happy to leave it at that. The opposite is the case at Heliot Emil, where the focus is solidly on what’s next. “For us, it’s always been about trying new innovations. We always try to incorporate new things, whether it’s 3D printing or doing a digital show. We want to see how that interacts with what we’re doing so that we don’t just become repetitive,” said Jul.The brand’s aesthetic is hard, sleek, streamlined, features a lot of hardware, and is not especially emotional. Funnily enough spring’s man-meets-machine lineup had unexpected poetry that was linked to the increase of draping, which took both classical and deconstructed forms. “I think [this AI experiment] has taught me quite a lot about looking inwards,” noted Juul. It also stretched the team creatively on a material level. “It was so interesting to see all of the signatures that the algorithm spits back at you, like the metal details, the trims, those kind of things, but given that it has less boundaries than what we have in reality, it also came back with some very interesting things that if you looked into closely, can’t be created in reality: seams that there’d be no way to finish, or a part coming out of nowhere. That was a very interesting complexity to grasp; the machine doesn’t understand physics in the real world.”One of the workarounds Juul and team found was to make use of suspension techniques, many of which don’t visibly involve hardware.
There was less (puffy) volume and more layers and draping, much of which was overcomplicated but did create a welcome sense of flou, which moved the general vibe from Rick and more in the direction of Ann 2.0. Simply put, this collection was surprisingly pretty. It was also overlong. An edit would have made the message clearer.The dichotomy between human and machine was echoed in the play of organic against engineered, the material and the abstract. AI, noted Juul struggles with the latter, but designers have to deal with intangibles as well. “Fashion is a reflection of how we all feel and act in one way or another,” he noted. “There are things that we’re consciously doing, and then there are subconscious influences” in collections as well. Heliot Emil is a resolutely intentional brand to which it seems technology brought, or uncovered, an unexpected softness.
26 September 2023
There was a smoke and mirrors aspect to Heliot Emil’s Instagrammable “burning man” runway moment; the appearance of the professional stuntman in flames gave the models time to change into second looks. And, hey, form and function are always at the top of Julius Juul’s agenda—though most often used to enhance design rather than theatrics.A bit of background for those whose first introduction to the Danish brand was scrolling through Paris Fashion Week content today. Brothers Victor and Julius Juul launched the line, which is named after their great-grandfather, in 2017. Victor handles the business end of things and Julius, who worked in advertising in Manhattan with such clients as Calvin Klein, Hood by Air, and Donda, and was mentored by dressmaker Kevin Johnn, designs. In 2022 Heliot Emil was a finalist for the ANDAM Grand Prize.This was the label’s third time showing in Paris, and this collection was consistent with those that came before; dark, dystopian, and focused on proportion play and material development (the fabric in look 14 was melted, for example). Recently designers have been talking about customizable or convertible clothing; Juul is fully committed. The zippers that snaked beautifully around legs are all fully functional, some open and close fabric, others allow whole sections of the garment to be removed or reattached. Snaps serve the same purpose and Juul noted that the brand will be posting a video demonstrating 55 different ways that one of the jackets in the fall line-up can be refigured.The collection took its name from a work by the artist who inspired the collection, the British sculptor Henry Moore. Juul explained the appeal: “He does these quite large, semi-abstract sculptures where he really sort of messes with the dynamics of the human body so you can see that there are some shapes—some legs or some forms—but it’s stretched in an interesting or weird way. And then depending on what angle you see it from, you really feel like it’s alive in different ways.” It was difficult to see this at work in the collection, which, with its down-filled knotted ties, seemed to owe more to the bondage erotica of Nobuyoshi Araki; the show opened with a model with a strap across her breast. A few looks later a model’s arms were bound to create a kind of Empire shape. This kind of styling was mostly applied to women’s looks.
The divide between the exposure of the female looks and the concealment—to the point of almost menacing anonymity—of the men’s was even greater than last season. When asked about this, Juul explained that he was seeking to balance the values expressed in the brand ethos of “industrial elegance.” “What I think is considered elegant is also something that’s maybe a bit more exposed or vulnerable in a way, and then what’s considered more industrial is something that is a bit more rough and hard.” This sounds like another way of saying girls are soft and men are the opposite.It was disappointing to find such an old-fashioned dichotomy at Heliot Emil, which in many other ways is a futuristic and refreshingly nostalgia-free brand. Juul is “look into the future kind of person,” who has been fascinated with technology since he was a boy. He sees the future as dystopian, “but in an interesting way more than a scary way.”The full-face balaclavas worn by the male models were frightening. Juul said he was after the idea of anonymity and drawing attention to the silhouettes. Many of those, like the second look, featuring an “obscure monster of down” were inflated, but in many cases could be streamlined by using the customized fastenings. As always there was a protective element in the clothes; this season some of that was created using spongy compression knits and molds to create dimensions and shapes, which complimented the softness of the down pieces, including boot covers.It was the sharp tailored pieces, especially those with zippers, that really lit the imagination with their combination of precision and adaptability. You might even say they were “fire.”
28 February 2023