A Kind of Guise

Origin: 2009, Munich, Germany

Field: Menswear

Bio:

A Kind Of Guise started off as a student project during the summer of 2009. What was first nothing more than creating stuff for friends and relatives, soon developed into something much bigger. From those beginnings up until today, we’ve simply tried to continue doing what we love.

While things happen on a larger scale these days, most of the influence we draw originates from our close surroundings. Our first collection consisted of bags made of leather leftovers from an old medicine ball factory in the north of Italy. Today the range of our collection has grown, but we still try to keep the whole production unique and, primarily, as local as possible. Hence we work closely together with only a few select German manufacturers, choosing from local material and always keeping an eye on functionality and quality.

Style:

The collections of A Kind Of Guise feature a mix of a wide variety of styles, putting effort into every piece’s uniqueness with a special focus on color and detail. Most importantly, we want to create long-lasting products with original ideas and great quality. Each item’s wearability is as important to us as its integration into the collection as a whole.

SS13 ‘Viva Mexico’ Collection: 

We have always had great interest in the country of Mexico with its mystically charged culture, it seemed appealing and very interesting and it was clear to us that at some point we wanted to use these influences and work with them. Unfortunately a journey to Mexico wasn’t foreseeable in the near future, but fate took its turn and in a different context, we once again got in touch with the country’s history and traditions. During the course of preparations for an upcoming exhibition at the “Weltkulturen Museum” of Frankfurt, it was once again the Mexican artefacts that caught our attention the most while wandering the Museum’s archives. This experience, paired with our growing collection of photographs and imagery from Mexico that we had already gathered from books and other media, brought us to the decision that our next summer collection should run under the title “Viva La Mexico”.

 Once we made that decision, of course the process of creating the collection had to follow. It soon became evident that next to the history and culture of Mexico, its nature would play an important part in creating the overall look of the collection. Being a country with desert-like areas as well as rain forests and the ocean, this diversity had to be taken into account somehow. We tried to translate this diversity into the collection mainly in terms of the use of colours, by working with bleached and faded shades that still have an intense and strong feeling to them. All these different influences, together with our fantasy of what this country might look like in reality, brought us to the final outcome.

 Nevertheless, the wish to visit the country one day exists more than ever. It will be interesting to compare the true Mexico to the one we build for ourselves in in the creative process that gave birth to this collection.