As our final-year BA Fashion students share their work with the world, we speak to Gabriel Blatterspiel (BA Fashion: Fashion Design with Marketing) about the "anti-inspiration" he found in his hometown.
Gabriel Blatterspiel comes from Erlangen, a small city in Germany. It is home to Siemens’s headquarters with many of Erlangen’s residents employed by the global technology company. Growing up, he found the place “grey and monotonous” but with his final collection he embraces it as, he describes, “an anti-inspiration".
“Siemens is tied to the identity of Erlangen like no other company,” says the designer, “the company does not have a specific dress-code or work uniform as such, but I found that the men who work there dress very similarly regardless. I’m interested in that choice of dressing the same when there is all the freedom not to do so.”
Inspired by “the mundane and the underwhelming”, Blatterspiel began documenting the fashion of Erlangen’s middle-aged company men. Over the period of a year, he spent time photographing regular spots around Siemens offices capturing people on the way to work and on their lunch breaks.
These covert processes reflect the his wider interests in films like The Conversation and The Truman Show. Peter Weir’s The Truman Show was a particular touchstone for the designer, combining both a seeming benign mundanity with more disturbing collective intention.
With over a thousand documented outfits, the designer then filtered those into a cluster of 50 in which he highlighted details that caught his imagination. These might be noticing things that are missing or off-kilter details such as oversized trousers kept in place with a big buckled belt or an ill-fitting jacket. For Blatterspiel these offer glimpses of individuality within the monotony. For his own collection he takes them and runs, magnifying and compounding these mundane moments into expressive and absurdist visions.
But on reflection, does he feel that his collection is a love letter or a satire on his subject?
“Even though there is something weirdly romantic about this voluntary uniformity, you can see a lot of criticism in my project. I find nothing more fascinating than individuality and independence and celebrate the latter... People wear their office attire and their business-casual looks in private and by doing so define the picture on the streets. I think, in Erlangen, this has led to a lack of acceptance towards alternative clothing and alternative culture.”
With his final collection, Blatterspiel has performed a neat trick. Curious, to the point of obsession, about this collective behaviour in his hometown he doesn’t simply transforms it, he turns it inside out.
