Andreas Mikellis’ Waiheke studio does not look like you might expect for someone who works with clothing, says the fashion designer.
“It’s more like an industrial product designer’s space, with materials, drills, sandpaper. My fingers are blackened at the moment.”
That’s because he’s finishing the costumes for Stage of Being,
Andreas, an expat Londoner who has worked with the company before, collaborating with the likes of choreographers Michael Parmenter, Shona McCullagh and Sarah Foster-Sproull, says he almost forgot the level of immersion the job of costume designer inspires. For a good four weeks, he sat in and observed the six dancers rehearse.
“When you’re there with the dancers, that connection becomes quite strong,” says Andreas, who, in his previous life, ran a successful streetwear label called Angel UK, followed by diverse NZ-based roles designing for global brands, artists and as a mentor on Project Runway. “So you then do stuff that you wouldn’t do for others. You’re much more connected to the bigger creative process.”
The choreographers’ approach to collaborating was radically different. NZDC founding member Tupua’s brief for his ode to childhood memories in LittleBits and AddOns, a dance piece told through a picture-book concept, was very challenging in that the costumes had to look as though a designer hadn’t been too involved, Andreas explains. He got around it by sourcing historical vintage pieces he then reworked, creating cohesion through the soft, natural colours, an “agrarian”, nostalgic look, washing the fabrics to age them slightly.
“The idea is that they work together as a group, but there’s no sense of where they came from or what period they’re from . . . There’s a kind of questioning around who we are and where we are.”
Meanwhile, Xin and Xiao’s Made in Them examines the structures of government and the impact they have on individuals, the costumes informed by video, visuals and storyboards featuring Chinese artists Andreas found he was familiar with. For this piece he focused on repetition and structure, the costumes all in black, the focus on silhouette, the biggest issue being the enormous head pieces that had to be lightweight enough for the dancers to move in — hence the reason for the industrial material in his studio and stained hands.
It’s challenging work, and no less so fitting it in around Andreas’ other pursuits, namely his senior lecturing role at AUT, and the new high-end menswear label that he’s launching this June in Japan (well, not new exactly in that it’s taken him four years to get to this point, a culmination of painstaking craft and the maintaining of relationships cultivated through his earlier work).
Advertisement
Advertise with NZME.He says it’s too early to disclose the name but he will say the garments are an elegant “reimagining” of utilitarian clothing. He bristles at the brutality of the short deadlines the designers get on TV shows like Project Runway, a show he appeared on as a mentor in 2018, the wise, calming presence in a world of colour and chaos and stress.
“That really isn’t how it should be,” he laughs. “I mean, from my perspective, it’s about investing a more thoughtful way about how we make things, and then that embedding its way into the clothes somehow, so it gives it a little bit more depth. So it’s been a really slow process.”
The pace and flexibility of his lifestyle has allowed him to work on several things simultaneously, including an intriguing job designing fashion for what he refers to as “digital people”. Soul Machines is a San Francisco-based company partly owned by Kiwis, and Andreas designs clothing for their scarily lifelike avatars that will eventually wind up in customer-service roles across health, banking and other service industries.
But creating the ultimate AI capsule wardrobe is a complex assignment, one in which his models must look supremely stylish without appearing to subscribe to fashion trends, complementing our subconscious expectations of what a bank teller might wear, or what we consider appropriate colours or cuts in different cultures.
“You’re trying to make the clothes appear as if they’re moving in real life, and they’re shifting and breathing and doing the things that real clothes do,” he says.
“It’s really challenging from a designer’s perspective because you’re bringing everything down to the DNA of clothing essentially, the blueprint of menswear, womenswear. You’re trying not to make it too generic. At the same time you’re not actually designing for people, not a three-dimensional body.”
Designing for AI has had him musing on the ethics of the future of fashion, the idea that if we’re not wearing things in real life, we’re not buying more and perhaps not throwing so much away. They’re the types of discussions he’s used to having in his other role as senior lecturer at the Fashion Design department at AUT.
Advertisement
Advertise with NZME.“The conversations are really looking at contemporary issues and discussing the way fashion’s going to form. It’s a really exciting space. We’ve got a particularly strong group of third years this year that are going to do some extraordinary things, and it’s lovely to be working with them because they challenge me and it’s so stimulating.”
So where does Andreas, a designer who straddles the worlds of commerce, education and the arts, see fashion heading? What does he think we’ll be wearing next year? It’s an impossible question to answer, he says, because we have access to so much.
“We’re in a space where everything is fashionable and yet nothing is, because we can buy anything at any time from anywhere.”
Still, he acknowledges the fluidity of contemporary menswear, a transition from the “old-school” and what was traditionally acceptable, to garments that might be considered more feminine.
“I think there are some really interesting shifts happening around that. Those bigger understandings of what we look like rather than individual trends.”
The future of fashion, it seems, is in good hands.
Stage of Being, by New Zealand Dance Company, plays at the ASB Waterfront Theatre, April 21-22.
