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Christopher Nemeth
Christopher Nemeth is friendly, astute, fun to talk with and - thanks to his swept back dark hair, a self-made slim-cut suit, plus a tie adorned by manic yellow stitching that causes passers by to stare - looks every inch the skewed dandy. As he drinks coffee and chats, often cheerily exclaiming, “Oh, absolutely!" by way of agreement, he is able to discuss the unusual status of his own work and the unique fashion path he has carved out across the past few decades in such a way as to make it all seem totally normal. Yet it is anything but. After all, there are precious few designers around who have managed to stick to their guns, albeit on a relatively small scale, and quietly develop their aesthetic across the years without losing momentum or needing to compromise. Fewer still can gain new generations of fans, while holding on to those present from the start.
When Nemeth talks about his work it is with a mixture of practicality and passion that is appealing and authentic; there is not a hint of the bitterness that might be expected from one whose ouvre has - over the years - been so copied and culled-from. Quite the opposite - he finds it all rather amusing. Along with Mr Judy Blame, Nemeth was part of a small yet hugely influential gaggle of design mavericks - also including shoe designer John Moore (R.I.P) and Richard Torry - whom forged new fashion vocabularies and ways of working that still resonate today. Nemeth and Blame, in particular, interjected the idea of using found materials within their work and created unexpected silhouettes via one-off or limited edition designs which looked like nothing else that was around some twenty-five years ago.
Operating from a shop named the House of Beauty and Culture, just off Kingsland Road - an area that is now considered achingly cool, but at that time was painfully crap - they created an HQ in the mid-80s which drew in every stylist, clubber, designer, fashion victim and pop star who wanted to work a look with a difference. Nemeth's early designs were insanely distinctive: a fantastic collision of old suiting, un-picked and then re-worked - along with postal sacks, other pieces of fabric, torn-up magazines, rope, string, glue, sand and paint - into jackets, shirts, trousers and ties. Key to their success as actual designs, rather than examples of customisation, though, was Nemeth’s obsession with adventurous forms of cutting and sewing - which he has never lost sight of. Whether fresh off the sewing machine, or worn until they are falling apart (and Nemeth certainly likes the idea of them looking lived-in and appropriately fucked-up), his designs from past and present genuinely do bridge that much-trumpeted gap between art and fashion that quite a few designers would like to think they straddle - yet don't. Because, unlike Nemeth, their approach is ultimately too trend-led and preoccupied with modish artistic posturing, rather than being concerned with the exploratory joy of making things that you genuinely love - and wear - yourself, produced via the hard-earned sensibility of an a artist-turned-fashion designer.
You didn't have any formal fashion design training, so how and why did you first get into making clothes? I moved from Birmingham to London in 1979 to do painting at Cambewell College of Arts. I graduated in 1982, and for a couple of years after that I was painting at home. The paintings at the time would involve me getting old suits, taking them apart, laying them flat, like a canvas. Because there were all these shaped pieces of fabric, it kind of looked like an animal skin. I would put glue on them and chuck sand on them, and paint on them with house paint, and I would stick images on them from holiday brochures. I had no money, I couldn't afford to buy any clothes - and I couldn't actually find any clothes I liked, anyway - so I began to make them for myself. I had this pair of trousers that I'd picked up in a jumble sale, which I really liked the shape of, but after wearing them endlessly they had completely worn out. So, I took them to bits, laid them flat, and made my own new version of them. That was how I made my first pair of trousers - as a way of getting back those trousers that I loved but had worn out. People would say to me, ‘Where did you get those trousers?' and gradually I began making clothes and selling a few things to friends. I put some of them into a stall in Kensington Market, and to be honest I think the person who owned the stall didn't really expect to sell anything! Everything was hand-sewn and I was using found materials - like old postal sacks, made of linen that I'd find laying around on the streets. I'd initially thought they'd be good to use as a canvas, to paint on, but ended up making them into clothes. I wanted to be an artist, but I realised at that time - because there was so much going on within youth culture then - that really the way to do be an artist was through the clothes. You see, people began taking an interest in my clothes, and I realised that no one had any interest in my paintings whatsoever! So I cut those paintings up and put them into the back of these jackets that I was making. One day I was walking through Soho, and I saw John Maybury wearing one, and I was like, 'That's it!" Because I realised that if you want to be a painter, that's the way to do it - with the clothes! It meant that the work gets seen, and that people talk about it.
Were you actually interested in fashion, before you began designing? No, No, not at all. It was like a way to make some pocket money at first. Years later, though, I would say to old friends who I'd been to school with in Birmingham, 'Isn't it weird that I turned out to be a fashion designer?' And they'd say, 'Well, no, because I remember when we were at school and you would be taking in your trousers, and friends' trousers, to make them tighter, or altering your neck tie.' I had totally forgotten that I even did that - I didn't think of it as anything significant. I just wanted narrow trousers! But I do know that when I first started making clothes I had a feeling that I'd never had with painting. When I saw what I'd made it was like, 'Oh, that's me!'
How did you come to the attention of legendary photographer and long-time i-D contributor Mark Lebon? I was walking around town one day, in 1985, wearing some of my stuff, and was noticed by Mark who was doing a shoot for i-D. He asked me who I was, took some pictures of me, and asked me where I'd got the clothes. He went to the stall in Kensington Market where my stuff was stocked and grabbed the whole lot, took them all out of there, and used them in the i-D shoot. He called me up afterwards to say he wanted to be my representative.
A sort of new movement was being formed? Yeah, that's how it seemed.
Nowadays people are very self-conscious about the idea of customising, and about recycling too - but presumably that wasn't the case then? No, it wasn't. I was a bit wary of the term 'customising', I didn't like it. I always insisted that what I was doing involved cutting patterns - not simply tweaking things that already existed. I like the idea that when people see the finished result of something that I've made they are looking at the pattern cutting, as cutting is the most fundamental aspect of a designer making things.
How did you make the initial transition from rickety old Kensington Market to being stocked on swanky South Molton Street? Well, Mark took my stuff out of Kensington Market and had it in his office, on New Cavendish Street, a place that always had lot of people calling by or passing through - people doing shoots, and so on. From there, it went to a South Molton street shop called Bazaar, which primarily stocked Jean Paul Gaultier. Keith Spicer, who was the buyer and manager there, took quite a big leap of faith after seeing my work in i-D. He got the contact numbers from the magazine and got in touch and said he'd like to have it in the shop. Me and Judy did the window - with duct tape and buttons glued all over it. Gaultier's designs we're very pristine, and that was kind of what the shop was about at the time, yet Keith allowed me and Judy to make this huge mess - it looked great! To this day I am astounded that they allowed us to do that. And what it did was give a legitimacy to me - this penniless painter making clothing out of things I found on the street. It kind of made people take me seriously as a designer.
Were your designs really expensive at that time? Yeah, they were. I still think that now, about the price of clothes in general, though. But they were one-off handmade pieces, with so much sewing in them. And they had to be priced in a comparable way with Gaultier's stuff in Bazaar.
When did you first meet Judy? Mark put us together. It was an instant case of us recognising and appreciating what each other was doing, you know? He's a person who has done all his creativity without any formal training - he is even more extreme in that sense than me, as I did go to art college and he didn't. Yet his designs are so obviously original and recognisable as being by him.
The first time I became aware of your work was through the shop, the House of Beauty and Culture, which you, Judy and John had in East London in the mid 80s. It was actually John's Moore's shop originally, and he was handling the finances of it. Me and Judy weren't as good at the business side of things as he was! It was just off the Kingsland Road, a small building on a corner, very narrow, but with a big window at the front all the way down. John had his bedroom upstairs.
As a collective you instigated a colonisation of that area which is only now reaching its zenith. After all, it was desolate, full of derelict buildings, and totally unfashionable or 'uncool' around there then. So utterly different from today... Oh absolutely! People would have to make a pilgrimage especially to come to the shop. We would have to walk around the neighbourhood like this [feigns a fearful expression] in case we got our heads kicked in - it was very rough around there at the time. The locals thought we were a bunch of freaks! What people forget though is that - for me - the whole period all happened really fast. I'd met Mark in April of 85; by June of 85 he took my clothes out of Kensington Market. And I met Judy and John Moore after that. But by June of 86 I had left England and was living in Japan, though I would still come over to London regularly.
What was it that prompted you to move to Japan just at the point of everything taking off for you in London?! I met Keiko, who is now my wife, who had a shop in Tokyo and would come to London as a buyer. She was the first person to sell Galliano in Japan - she would buy clothes straight off his catwalks. She was in London, at a Galliano show which was taking place in the Chelsea Barracks, and I was there in the audience, with Mark and Judy - she knew Judy already, as she had stocked his stuff in Japan. We were dressed in my clothes, we'd just been in i-D, and so she bought some of my stuff for her shop. I instantly liked her, so my reasons for moving to Japan were to do with her. I decided I could make my clothes there just as easily as in London - all I needed was a studio! Mark and Judy had all been to Tokyo before, but I hadn't. I didn't realise it was actually quite a big deal at that time to just move there. I said, 'Hey, I'm off to Japan - see you!', and they were all like, "What?!"
You seem to have pioneered a way of working which was an early fashion version of Deconstruction... Yeah. A designer might say, 'Oh my collection is about such and such', but this was about the actual thing you were sewing and cutting. It was and is about... itself! It's like a sort of self portrait, really. It was great. I was working with found materials - I would firstly take them back to their flattened form: for example, I'd take a suit apart, and you'd have all that labour inside of it, the lining, the sewing, and so on, then I would re-work it.
And do you still approach your work like that now? Oh absolutely. I still search for the business of the actual thing itself.
And of course, a then-unknown Martin Margiela - who would go on to become known as fashion's 'Godfather of Deconstruction' - is rumoured to have been a big fan of the House of Beauty and Culture. Is that true? Judy would always say years later, 'Oh, I know Martin Margiela was influenced by the House of Beauty and Culture - but he'll never admit it!' But the last time I saw Judy, about three months ago, he said, 'I saw Martin Margiela... and he confessed!'
So you nick back for yourself the bit that they've nicked off you? Yeah! I did that with the stitching thing. [He means the exaggerated zigzag stitching on the outside of garments]. When I first did that people were like, 'Oh you wont be able to sell that!'
And they were clearly wrong! So who are the core customers at your shop nowadays? It's a mixture, of old and young. In this shoot that we've just done with i-D, we featured actual customers of mine - people whose ages range from, say, 18 to their late 40s. You know, it's quite funny - I was walking down the street a while ago and I saw this girl who was at my daughter's kindergarten years ago, and there she was now wearing a pair of trousers I'd designed. I didn't even know she had my clothes. I had this sudden realisation that I'd probably designed and made those things before she was even born!
Do you produce two seasonal collections per year? I've always considered my work to be one ongoing collection - and I wouldn't actually drop anything from it - in much the same way that I would look at a painter's work as one body of work. So I don't do collections each six months - I put new pieces straight into the shop.
Is everything still handmade? When I first went to Japan in 86 I had only previously ever made clothes by myself, in my studio, with a couple of out-worker people to help me with the sewing. I'd never actually developed anything with factories, whereas in Japan that was something that I could begin to do properly, and that was very exciting. It was essential to my identity as a designer to develop my own cut. To design and make them so completely in a studio that it can then go to a factory to be reproduced, to look like that original thing: that is the thing to me that characterises them as designs, rather than 'creations' that I've made in my studio. In Japan there was a language difficulty. Not only could I not speak the language but I couldn't even write notes or instructions down either. So I would have to make a pattern and make the piece up completely as a finished thing, so that it could then go to the factory to be made. As a consequence I have never, ever had a meeting with the factory! But it always comes back spot-on. By contrast, when I had been in Japan for a while I remember I came back to the UK and I went to see a factory, I showed them an item as an example of my work. They were like, 'Well, you don't have to have a panel there, you could just have two darts...
Instantly they were trying to simplify the design, just to make their own lives easier! Exactly, and instantly I was straight out that door!
I think of your designs as essentially being menswear, yet women wear it, too. How do you define it? The base is menswear but I would say I'm a unisex designer. With the cutting, there is such a lot of shape going on that when they are worn by a woman they look feminine. When a man wears them they are often worn very low on the hips, and worn very casually, and they look masculine. So I've exploited that to make them work both ways. They also look quite flamboyant on a man.
So there's a lot of freedom there, not only in terms of who can wear it, but it defies categorisation in other ways too: there's no sense of it being specifically daywear or evening wear or casual or smart. It's somehow anything you want it to be... When I was younger and I was an art student, the idea of changing clothes to go out to a nightclub, or changing clothes to go to work, was just a horrible idea to me. I wanted to make clothes that you would be happy painting in, working in, but then you would quite happily go to a nightclub in them as well, and be quite flamboyantly dressed without even getting changed.
And the daily and nightly wear and tear inflicted on the clothes by work, travel, or by being out at a club - cigarette burns, drink stains and that mystery gunge you always find on dancefloors - would all attach itself to the clothes and become a part of their texture and history? Oh absolutely!
Do you still paint? I don't do paintings that are separate from making clothes. If I do make pictures now they relate to my work as a fashion designer. When I make pictures the theme [of them] is fabric or sewing, and they are used in the shop window as window display - so then the pictures refer to the clothes and the clothes refer to the pictures.
Are found objects and materials still an important part of your design process as much as they used to be? Using found materials is quite hard to slot into a factory system of production. But in the years since I was first using a lot of found materials, what I've continued to do is go to very old tailors - and at the back of their stock rooms they'll generally have one metre samples of fabric that they can't sell but don't want to chuck away. I buy those and I use various techniques to join them back together again, and then they can be used in factory production. So I am still using a resource which would have otherwise just been discarded.
As a longterm resident of Tokyo, do you still try to stay abreast of what is happening in London - the city where it all started for you? No. And Judy is totally the opposite to me in that respect. I tend to look at paintings, and since I've been in Japan I've been more and more influenced by a lot of Zen stuff. You've got to get to a place where you can create without being inhibited.
Christopher Nemeth's All Time Favourite: Film: The Grapes of Wrath by John Ford. Book: Tortilla Flat by John Steinbeck.
Place in London: The National Gallery.
Place in Tokyo: Art event space, Super Deluxe.
Album: Martin Carthy's first album.
Shop: Christopher Nemeth, Tokyo.
Song: Pretty Boy Floyd by Woody Guthrie.