Ottolinger: Show Some Skin
Words by Marlowe Bjorklund, Guest Writer
Scouring the edges of the world, I eventually found a beautiful pair of jeans.
Jeans are hard to find, even though they’re everywhere. In a similar way to plants being neutral in interiors regardless of their specific shade of green, jeans to me act as a neutral option to almost any outfit. Will my African Mask inspired CDG cut-out sweater eat more than Henry VIII paired with my perfect orange trousers from Jacquemus? Yes. Yes it will. Will anyone think less of me if I wear them with a good pair of jeans, though? Well, they’d better not.
After climbing through the webs, scrolling through volume after volume at the local library, writing and then publishing a manifesto, fighting for the revolution, dying at the hands of the oppressors, and achieving martyrdom to inspire generations of future freedom fighters to come, it found them. My Ottolinger Jeans.
Based in Berlin, and boasting over three hundred thousand Instagram followers, they were completely novel to me when I first saw their jeans on SSENSE.com. When I did, I understood what the poets meant. It was love. They created a form fitting pair of wide leg exhibitionist jeans with proper coverage and a unique vibe. You know. Casually. As described in the article from TankTV - “it’s the art of practiced imperfection which gives such life and interest to their clothing.”
With the stimulating mix of colour, cut, and style, they are a name to be known. As Vogue covered in their review of the Spring 2024 collection, the brand “remains a body-positive expression of subversive femininity enriched with energetic colour and craft” (Amy Verner, 2023, Vogue).
The collection is indeed subversive, fun, cutting, and poignant. The range of pseudo-corporate designs next to playful Baby-Ts, cut-out neck lines, the articulately dishevelled layers, the blood-like stains on gingham shirts, thong flip flops and gold boots sassing harder than a gay on prime time - it all makes for a vibrant and authentic expression of artistic curiosity and the reformation of old fashion ideals with fortified femininity.
Ottolinger asks a question with their designs, and when you wear a piece from their collection, you end up finding the answers along with a series of new questionsl. These jeans that I found were a perfect fit - as only a man can boast when he buys jeans online. Absurdism meets neo-modernism in fashion. Breaking the ideal down and rebuilding it. However, unlike most simplistic glass or concrete buildings, their recreation in pursuit of the ideal is done with a twist we could all benefit from. They don’t just try to re-understand ideals without the foundations of the classical movement that came before. It’s not a rejection of understanding. It’s understanding the classical and the modern, building something altogether new which refuses to let beauty and play fall to the wayside.
Ottolinger does not let the play, fun, beauty, or depth, die in their pursuit of understanding what clothing can do. They don’t just break down the idea of what a shirt, pair of jeans, skirt, whatever, is supposed to accomplish to its most fundamental tier. They take it there, stretch it into the absurd, and do so in style.
Beauty is hard to universally define. However, like hardcore pornography, I know it when I see it. The fact that beauty cannot be mandated - at least in broad terms - is a failing of our governments. If you are a 2024 US Presidential candidate running on the basis of building in beauty to our legal codes, you might have a friend in me. Ottolinger keeps the beauty, even if not in a traditional way. Their use of rips, stains, frayed edges, asymmetry, trompe-l’œil, is exciting. It’s new and different. It tempts me…
To understand part of what makes Ottolinger so interesting to me, is the history of how skin and displaying the body has been conceived throughout recent history.
Throughout the last century of fashion, there has been a development that I find personally thrilling. While not universally true — en masse — cultures throughout European and North-Asian history have not promoted revealing clothing as an elite form of expression. While there have always been ways of accentuation and temptation seen in clothing, it has often been within very strict rules. Decolletage in the 1700s, the use of corsetry in the 1800s, the slow movement towards re-normalising trousers fairly quick, and sadly has never been truer than in our modern era. Tempting to partake in, temptation is essential in fashion.
(Source: https://ottolinger.com/aw23-show)
Temptation is something that throughout fashion history has always been an element. Even when you picture reserved eras in fashion, like the Victorians, there was still a focus on building the idealised sensual body beneath the clothes. In particular, fashion as a means to sensualise women’s bodies. If the idea was modesty in its purest form, there would have been no focus on bustles to accentuate a woman’s rear, no use of corsets to draw the eye to a waistline and bust. As Hannah Aspinall from the University of Brighton states in her paper: “The female body has long been idealised, objectified and fetishized and this can be seen particularly in Victorian culture” (Source). In the Victorian era, despite the modern conceptualisation of it being a hyper-modest and rigidly sex shy society, they still used fashion to commodify and sexualise women. Elements of Victorian fashion still are used in our era, and in particular are used in sexually provocative stylings. Corset-tops are still used to slim a waist and build a bigger and more accentuated bust. However, the dramatic shifts to ongoing personal and sexual liberation in clothing has continued some of those misconceptions.
The ideas of sexually provocative fashion developed throughout eras, with what was considered “sexy” in one era dramatically shifting into the next. The normalised decolletage in Royal Courts in the 1700s disappeared in the Victorian era. The ways bodies have and have not been able to be seen throughout fashion can always tell us something about the socio-political machinations of the era. Fashion is a means of control, and it’s always tempting to break these social boundaries, but in the elite echelons of society, there is more pressure to adhere to fashion norms and expectations. Why else would you see women at Debutante Balls still in white dresses, a single strand of pearls, and long gloves? It’s the continued traditional playing at the ideals of the past. This then filters down to all rungs of society where people want to climb and partake in the social atmosphere fashion allows for. However, the notion of how fashion can and should be used to impose regulations against people and their individualist self-expression, has been on the rise.
To me, this has to do with ever ongoing social revolutions. The sexual liberalisation movement from the 1960s, the constantly ongoing fight for continued freedoms for people of all gender expressions, the recentring of patriarchal notions of culpability of rape and assaults away from victim/survivors and onto perpetrators. The videos of people of different gender expressions wearing the same outfits to school and the typically-female presenting person always being the one “dress-coded” because regulations about fashion often centre around the sexual and sensualisation of the female, and not male, body. It is a continuation in the fight for freedom of self-expression and personal identity. To me, Ottolinger is among the companies in this ongoing social reformation.
Throughout feminist history, there has been the question of “how can women engage with norms established in patriarchal societies while maintaining personal empowerment?” For instance, it is considered attractive to wear red-lipstick. When a woman wears red lipstick, and she claims to enjoy it on a personal level, can she truly claim that she is expressing her unique identity and a liberated woman given the patriarchal structures behind the perception of women’s presentation? As a man, I am sure you’re looking for me to answer the question of authentic female liberation, and so I will politely be leaving through the rear exit.
Now all jokes aside, it is a big question. Philosophical questions are often raised in considering fashion. Fashion is entrenched in societal systems and norms. It’s literally woven into the fabric of our cultures. How one can engage in principles of fashion without engaging with the principles of their home culture, as well as colonial norms that have been globally established, is a question for our age. It is there where I find Ottolinger. They, like Mies van der Rohe, like Frank Lloyd Wright, like le Courbusier, are questioning the historical and cultural norms of society. However, unlike the men I mentioned, who shirked pre-established architectural norms of ornamentation and structure, creating a new movement still inspired by lessons of architectural philosophies from the past, Ottolinger is doing so in a uniquely female lead way.
“With its cult following, and punk approach to couture level tailoring, Ottolinger poses an absolute challenge to the status quo of luxury fashion.” (Source). They are pushing the boundaries of how clothing is supposed to be, how to layer unique textiles, prints, and the like, in an interview the founders discussed their philosophy. Christina Bosch and Cosima Gadient, the founding designers who met in Switzerland though now are based out of Berlin, stated that when it came to their ethos, they “were thinking about couture and the traditional notion of a precious garment” and that they “wanted to get to the same final product, but just with a different approach” (Source). That they do. However, to me, one of the hugely interesting aspects of their creations is their use of the playful and the modest. In their own words, their designs are centred around “what [they] feel and what [they] aim to be in society” (Source.)
Their approach to sensuality, bold expression, and a female centric notion of creation, is spearheading a movement for fashion folk. They play with the ideas of how people are, can be expected to, and should present in the world. They push the boundaries of societal norms, like what and how we should define the process of couture. They are leaders in a movement of destabilising the forms of fashion for a freer future.