Ostwald Helgason (Q8845)
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Ostwald Helgason is a fashion house from FMD.
| Language | Label | Description | Also known as |
|---|---|---|---|
| English | Ostwald Helgason |
Ostwald Helgason is a fashion house from FMD. |
Statements
Ostwald Helgason has achieved much for such a young label. (Its first runway show was last year.) Designers Susanne Ostwald and Ingvar Helgason have developed a signature look (structured stripes and florals, with fit-and-flare silhouettes), collaborated with retail big guns Aldo and Shopbop, and collected more than 80 stockists worldwide. The success comes from the label's distinctive way with colors and prints and, for Pre-Fall, increasing fabric quality while maintaining a mid-range price point.For their tight Pre-Fall collection, Ostwald and Helgason's love of geometric stripes dovetailed nicely with their alpine theme: Fit-and-flare skirts had details mimicking mountain peaks and the wood grain found in cabins. Colors repped the Alps: snowy white, forest green, and sky blue, with sporty mesh used as triangular details. Ostwald hand-painted the floral prints for the silk chiffon pieces, which are bound to create a lot of interest on shop floors come June. New to the collection were knits in soft blends of merino and cashmere, all engineered in a stripy look that set off the floral pieces perfectly. Ostwald and Helgason are known for their sense of humor (last season featured appliquéd balloon dogs humping on the front of sweatshirts), but in terms of quality and setting a tone for the future, this collection was deadly serious.
20 January 2015
Susanne Ostwald was a 10-year-old girl living in East Berlin when the wall came down. November 9 of this year marks the 25th anniversary of that epochal event, but that wasn't the reason Ostwald and her partner, Ingvar Helgason, decided to draw on her memories of the now-defunct East Germany for their new collection. No, as Ostwald explained after today's show, she and Helgason simply felt the time had come to do a "serious" collection. "We like to be upbeat, a little jokey," Ostwald said. "But we were worried about painting ourselves into a corner, and we wanted to try another mood." You could sense the difference just by looking at the clothes: They weren't downbeat or somber, but the collection as a whole exuded a reflective tone.There was some really lovely storytelling going on here. And it was a child's story, or more specifically, an adult's impressionistic recollection of childhood—not only its elements, but also its slant perspective. Thus, there were riffs on school and scout uniforms, folkloric prints and patterns, and arts and crafts detailing such as crochet appliqués. Ostwald and Helgason also made interesting use of magnification, exaggerating pockets on jackets and pleats on skirts. The technique had a skewing effect, making you see the world through a child's eyes, huge and full of strange proportions. Elsewhere, the diaphanous sheer organzas felt like a kind of daydream of the past, fleeting and ghostly. Abstract as all this sounds, Ostwald and Helgason executed the clothes on the runway with their typical realism, and typical aplomb. Everything was wearable, and everything sat comfortably in the Ostwald Helgason vocabulary; this season's shift was in mood, not style. The designers dug deep for Spring, and though this wasn't a perfect collection, it turned out that depth suits them.
6 September 2014
Following Ostwald Helgason's much-noted runway debut in February, design duo Susanne Ostwald and Ingvar Helgason offered up an energetic Resort collection, both in terms of color and a penchant for sporty fabrics—here, as elsewhere, mesh was a major statement for the season.The German-born Ostwald has a background in fine art, something that comes through in deft color-blocking and bright tropical critters like an orange-and-blue toucan on a gray sweatshirt. In a more subdued vein, the designers made a compelling case for abstract geometric landscapes, whether on shifts or as knits. They're also busily exploring new fabric treatments and combinations. One example: a skirt made of heat-pressed, woven blue raffia that was worked into honeycombed and lacy patterns, bonded with technical fabric and layered over black linen cotton. Speaking of technical fabrics, sporty-smart outerwear was a welcome carryover from the label's Fall collection. But overall, Ostwald and Helgason seem to have found a sweet spot with playful, mix-and-match daywear in simple shapes that let the pattern and fabrications do the talking. Yes, the clothes are so loaded with detail it's hard to list them all here, but at least they're not fussy: One could just as easily give one of these feminine skirts the uptown treatment as take it downtown with the russet-and-turquoise monkey sweatshirt and sneakers.
6 July 2014
Ostwald Helgason made its runway debut this afternoon. In other words, today marked the day that Susanne Ostwald and Ingvar Helgason officially "got serious." No more jacquards based on man-eating plants or totes adorbs varsity jackets and baseball caps. No, this collection, this first-ever runway collection, would take as its subjectart. Anselm Kiefer. Joseph Beuys. Roy Lichtenstein. Andy Warhol. These were names referenced in the show notes. Or, to put it another way: Art! Serious!The thing is, Ostwald and Helgason are two designers who can't help but show off their sense of humor. The most memorable looks at this show—and surely the ones that will generate the most editorial—were the Warholian apples and bananas 3-D-printed to appear to be peeling off. The sheer sweatshirt versions of that were a close riff on Spring '14 Wang, but that's cool, the joke was still funny. And in the meantime, there were plenty of looks here that had a more sophisticated panache. The trim knit shirtdresses in Kiefer-esque drip patterns, for instance, or the pleated skirts in metallic abstract prints. The denim-esque looks in iridescent sculptural fabrics were very cool, as were the little wool jackets with slashed shoulders, and the outerwear in either super-reflective leather or just-fuzzy-enough faux fur. There was definitely a sense here of a brand elevating its game. The weak elements, though, which were an emphasis unfortunately, were the skirts and dresses with trailing, asymmetric hems; those just looked ungainly, for the most part. But overall, the impression was a positive one: You left this show confident that Ostwald Helgason was a brand to be taken, yes, seriously.
7 February 2014
"We wanted to celebrate all the happy and beautiful things in life." So asserted Susanne Ostwald, when asked about the inspiration for this season's Ostwald Helgason collection. Now, Ostwald Helgason is a cheerful brand, to be sure, but celebrating the happy and the beautiful? Surely that's a bit much. In these designers' capable hands, though, it wasn't. The theme wasn't treated sardonically, but the execution was sly.According to Ostwald, she and partner Ingvar Helgason riffed on the work of Sean O'Malley, an artist so obscure Google has no record of him. Maybe the designers made him up, in which case their creation is a seventies-era Dadaist who used toys in his art and was a major hidden influence on Jeff Koons. (Or—who knows?—maybe it's all true.) At any rate, a motif that looked quite a bit like a Koons balloon sculpture showed up as a pattern on jacquard, as well as on a semi-risqué T-shirt appliqué. Elsewhere, Ostwald and Helgason elaborated on that motif by developing fabrics for their pleated skirts that were woven to resemble the skin of a balloon blown up taut; the effect was kind of like a textural dégradé, and the pieces were very cool.The remainder of the collection, meanwhile, advanced Ostwald Helgason's trademarks—the bold florals, the trim tailoring, the sporty elements, the stripes. There was enough development in all those areas, and enough pop in the pieces themselves, that the consistency didn't read as boring. And you'd really have to be a Grinch to be bored of fun, wouldn't you? One wonders what Sean O'Malley would say to that.
6 September 2013
Splashy stripe blocking put Ostwald Helgason on the map this spring, then Susanne Ostwald and Ingvar Helgason kept the momentum going with a boldly bookish Fall collection, which included a standout novelty sweatshirt screened with the visage of Charles Baudelaire. The new Resort lineup continues to deliver look-at-me (or alternately, take-my-picture) looks, including bright double-face jacquard dresses and overlay skirts featuring kicky tulip hemlines, as well as two-toned running shorts that could make the AM to PM transition with a pair of heels. This season's graphic tribal prints (monkeys, snakes, and jungle foliage displayed on athletic pullovers and crisp button-ups) were reportedly inspired by French artist Fernand Léger's cubist paintings from the early twentieth century.At a presentation, Helgason was keen to point out the design duo's strides in tailoring, as evidenced in a boxy raffia safari coat (outerwear was a previously unexplored category), which nicely complemented the fit-and-flare silhouettes here. He continued to explain that the OH message is ultimately about creative personal styling, and pointed to look No. 15—a sporty shift playfully paired with a matching knee-length trumpet skirt—remarking, "That is how Mira Duma [the Russian editor and street-style standby] would wear it."
11 August 2013
"Ostwald Helgason" is a bit of a mouthful. But you might as well get used to saying it, because this London-based line is going places, fast. Susanne Ostwald and Ingvar Helgason's clothes are confirmed street-style favorites, and since their brand made its New York fashion week debut last season, it has been picked up by several pacesetting stores, including Louis Boston and Ikram. That momentum should only increase with this collection. The theme here was a hilarious one: a punning juxtaposition of French Symbolist poets, notably Charles Baudelaire, author ofLes Fleurs du Mal, and the campyLittle Shop of Horrors, a musical about a bad flower. The latter reference served as fodder for the designers' spirited riff on Americana; the poetry, meanwhile, they parlayed into an homage to the textile designer William Morris, a contemporary of the Symbolists.It also inspired the duo's first forays into tailoring, for which they have a knack. A neat suit of Morris-esque gold brocade, with neoprene lapels on the jacket, was a collection highlight. So too the board shorts in Morris-inspired silk floral prints—a minor quibble, here, was that these looks didn't seem particularly appropriate to Fall. But then, it seems mean-spirited, and perhaps even unwise, to quibble with any item of clothing featuring a cannibal flower. The board short print had one, and the joke was sophisticated and funny. Which is a pretty good way of summing up the Ostwald Helgason modus operandi; they seem to work from the position that having a good time needn't come at the expense of intelligence and refinement.
8 February 2013
Ostwald Helgason designers Susanne Ostwald and Ingvar Helgason may be relatively new to the New York fashion scene, but they can already check some respectable accomplishments off their list. Their first order at the new Upper East Side boutique Fivestory sold out within 24 hours. Plus, street-style mainstays Miroslava Duma and Anya Ziourova were snapped by Tommy Ton during last season's couture shows in two of the brand's matching outfits. And if the looks at today's presentation are any indicator of what's to come from the London-based label, things are only going to get better.Words of praise and congratulations were overheard as people stopped to take in the scene at Milk Studios. Fifteen models were clad in sixties-style getups inspired by Frances Brody, a wealthy philanthropist who commissioned Matisse to make a mural for her mansion's courtyard. "She [Brody] told Matisse to redo it," Helgason said in a preview the night before the presentation. "That is the kind of strong, adventurous woman that we were thinking about." A graphic color-blocked dress—whose fabric comes from the same house as Dior's—was layered over a preppy collared shirt. Not exactly what you would expect, but it worked. The same pink and burgundy combo came in a cropped trouser that was paired with a printed chiffon tank. On an even lighter note, there were fun, Picasso-like animal drawings on cute sweatshirt dresses. One Russian editor pointed out a pair of bubblegum pink and navy short shorts with a button-up top as one of her favorite looks. Tommy Ton, get your camera ready.
7 September 2012