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.