New York Times | «Playing the Lace Card»
«Fashions latest craze has revived a sleepy alpine burg» untertitelt Alix Browne ihren Artikel in der New York Times über die St. Galler Stickereitradition und deren heutige Aktualität für die internationale Modewelt.
Was sie darin insbesondere über Jakob Schlaepfer schreibt, lesen Sie hier:
«A lot designers come here for the archives,» says Martin Leuthold, who is the current creative director of the 104-year-old textile company Jakob Schlaepfer. «There is over 600 years of embroidery history in St. Gallen. We know that if you’ve seen a fabric in fashion, it’s old.»
Schlaepfer is perhaps the most wildly innovative of the remaining companies, known mostly for what are often referred to as «fantasy fabrics». (When previewing a new Schlaepfer collection, the designer Marc Jacobs has been known to ask Leuthold, «But Martin, what could I possibly make out of that?») Schlaepfer has a big market for «no-name» couture designers whose stock in trade is making gowns for princesses and queens: last May, Leuthold was working on some exclusive fabrics for the queen of Brunei. («She loves colors,» he says.) Other Schlaepfer clients include Cirque du Soleil, Disney and Chanel.
Sequined embroidery, which the company developed back in the ’60s, is a particular specialty. The tortoiseshell-looking sequins that Marc Jacobs used in one of his very first collections for Louis Vuitton, and which was in fact the L.V. logo chopped up in a blender, was a Schlaepfer creation. This season Leuthold developed additional cotton guipures for Prada as well as a sequined one for Miu Miu that was inspired by a Schlaepfer pattern designed for Courrèges in the ’60s. The original came in a combination of pink and light blue or orange and white; for Miu Miu, Leuthold did it in a matte green and burgundy. «Now it looks more like a camouflage,» he says. «You can never take something from the archive and just do it again. You can only take it as a point of inspiration. Otherwise it’s just a copy, and a copy is always wrong.»