Ammerman Schlösberg: Outfits for Lolita and Dominatrix
IN THE WEEKLY RUBRIC "NEW MARK" Wonderzine presents young designers and tells where and how you can buy their things. Our heroes this week are young American designers Erik Schlesberg and Elizabeth Ammerman, who launched the Ammerman Schlösberg brand impressed by Halloween costumes and Japanese anime.
New York brand Ammerman Schlösberg is the creative duet of Eric Schlesberg and Elizabeth Ammerman. Behind both is a serious design education: Erik moved from Miami Beach to New York to study at the main American fashion-school Parsons The New School for Design on the course of fine arts and fashion design, and Elizabeth is from a small Texas town Amarillo studied theatrical costume in the prestigious Pratt Institute. The guys met in 2006 while working at the boutique Seven New York, which had already subsided in Soho, and immediately understood: they were created to work together.
The first Ammerman Schlösberg collection was shown a year and a half ago, and despite the fact that it contained only 9 bows, the baby doll dresses in the spirit of the hares from the Japanese quarter of Harajuku and the colorful crazy fur made the hearts of fashion editors and buyers beat more often. Soon the VFILES resource became interested in the brand - so Schlesberg and Ammerman ended up on the line-up of the annual MADE fashion show, which is held as part of New York Fashion Week. Erik and Elizabeth call this event a turning point in their careers: after the show, where they presented the collection of the spring-summer 2014 season, Ammerman Schlösberg began to write all the time in glossy from Elle Brazil and Italian Vogue to Interview, Korean Vogue and Oyster Magazine, and Chinese L'Officiel even put Naomi Campbell on the cover in a dress brand. The famous American concept store Carol Kim and Umberto Leon of Opening Ceremony immediately arrived and offered an exclusive contract with the brand: the Ammerman Schlösberg collection was sold in Opening Ceremony boutiques in New York and Los Angeles, as well as on the official website, plus young designers provided powerful information support. Erik Schlesberg and Elizabeth Ammerman are a live advertisement of their own brand. The first, a fan of Marilyn Manson, loves to roam around New York in women's skirts, T-shirts with provocative inscriptions like "Kill God, kill your mom and kill yourself" and sum up red eyes, while the second could easily get lost in a crowd of Japanese harajuku girls And the designers themselves admit: everything they do for Ammerman Schlösberg is the things they would like to see in their own wardrobe.
In a nutshell, the brand's aesthetics can be described as “kitsch and sex” and ugly-cute: here there is a clear bias in costume in the best traditions of cosplay and Halloween costumes, frank fetishization of the lolita style, and the grim sexuality of underground sex clubs. What attracts most to Ammerman Schlösberg is spontaneity. It becomes obvious: for Eric and Elizabeth, the brand’s idea is not a shocking for the sake of outrageous, but a creative outlet. The guys broadcast a simple idea: you need to live and dress in a fun and easy way. Their heroines look like superwomen - both from The Matrix and Sailor Moon, their images look like dominatrix and Carroll Alice on acid. They complement their lookbooks with striptizer sandals on a huge platform and deliberately refuse to make loud shows and presentations, preferring to invest in the development of the brand.
Another Ammerman Schlösberg feature is the use of non-standard materials such as latex, plastic, or vinyl, which is cut under the skin of an alligator, whose cost price is much higher than real leather due to sophisticated production technology. The tendency for designers not to create materials for clothing remained from student days: for example, studying the visual arts in Parsons, Eric made installation costumes, which he decorated with industrial wires and dental floss.
Especially for the current autumn-winter collection, the guys invited their long-time friend, photographer William Idon, to collaborate, with whom they shot a book resembling sets from the movie "Suker Punch". After the successful first sales season, Opening Ceremony bought out this collection and now they are selling Ammerman Schlösberg exclusively throughout North America. However, there is no doubt: the next season will bring the brand more than one contract beyond the borders of the continent.
After the presentation of each new collection, we give each other a break and do not overlap for a week, and sometimes longer. After that, we meet and begin to discuss what each of us is interested and concerned about at the moment - personally or professionally. The most interesting thing is that as soon as we converge again after separation, our ideas about the next collection are absolutely the same. We begin to think: "What if we did this and add a little bit of this — it would be too weird?" We are conducting a really deep survey, looking for inspirational pictures that could be the starting point of the collection, and gradually the picture becomes more and more complete and clear. Our design aesthetics is very complex, there are a lot of costumes in it, so we need to think through everything to the smallest detail. For the collection of spring-summer season, we could not choose any one historical period to which to turn, so we simply took all of our beloved and mixed together. It turned out as if someone was sick with costumes from different eras. Perhaps this may offend the eyes of some costume designers, but we do not care.
Where to buy things Ammerman Schlösberg
You can buy Ammerman Schlösberg items in the VFiles online store and the Opening Ceremony concept store in New York and Los Angeles, as well as in its online version.