Photography Courtesy of Hartmann Nordenholz

What softens the cultural skin of couture fashion is the fact that we perpetually hyperextend it. Each season, instead of the outgrowths of developed folds, designers are driven to rack the surface of their collections with “new” ideas and “new” inspirations. Meanwhile, no one’s really encouraged to build off of old ones. So much of what’s exciting about the intimate German-Austrian collective Hartmann Nordenholz is precisely their response to this double bind: Simply put, design depth and continuity need not always get the short end of the stick.
Hartmann Nordenholz is the eight-year-old labor of fashion designers Filip Fiska (formerly under Helmut Lang) and Agnes Schorer (formerly under Viktor&Rolf). Although you might not have heard much about the collective, you can count on the duo to follow the wave of its 2002 Austrian Fashion Award (for contemporary design) to an increasingly promising crescendo.

Photography Courtesy of Diabless

“I don’t think that being a modern designer means being in front of the press,” says the usually reticent Chantal Hagège, fashion garbo behind the Diabless fashion line. The irony’s considerable. In Hagège’s case, it’s her would-be “silent partners” who do all the talking. Having worked independently in fashion for some two decades, not without success, Hagège and her highly impressive designs only became Diabless after receiving significant financial backing from the CEOs of Today’s Man and Fairchild Corporation. The resulting equation, Diabless, was a dream come true by any designer’s measure: total creative control with nil responsibility for marketing, visual merchandising, etc. Yet Hagège remains removed from the glitz. “I strongly believe my designs will be interesting for themselves without my promoting them in interviews and putting my face and views with the designs.

Molo

Less is more. How can three abusively clichéd words be used as a conceptual premise for everything from sustainable architecture to avant-garde design? For the last four years, Canada’s Stephanie Forsythe, Todd MacAllen, and Robert Pasut have been illuminating the downstage of modern design with their Vancouver-based lovechild, Molo Design, proving that minimalism and conceptuality can play nice. Molo, a multidisciplinary design platform with a concentration on materials and creative space-manipulation, is a workshop of “critique and compromise”. Since 2003, the Molo trio has been delivering the goods by constantly fluxing and fusing the designers’ perspectives. From tubular champagne flutes that make cocktails look like they’re floating in midair to sculptural rock formations made with industrial byproducts, their award-winning designs have made significant ripples on a sea of minimalism.