A brand new Rizzoli e book celebrates Sies Marjan’s daring, emotive use of color. Right here, its inventive director Sander Lak talks about his vivid use of chroma, and why the now-shuttered model was “so its personal factor”
The very first thing I ask Sander Lak on Zoom is what color his sweater is. Fuchsia? Magenta? “I’d name this, like, Pepto-Bismol pink,” he says of the turtleneck with a sky-high collar cradling his head. “Sies Marjan; an archival piece.” The New York-based model that Lak based shuttered in 2020 after solely 5 years, however it left an outsized affect on trend.
Lak, who was Dries Van Noten’s former head of design for 5 years, created impeccably constructed but wearable garments that telegraphed exuberance and daring individuality – all in a vivid, evocative palette. With every luxurious, jewel-toned assortment, Lak constructed a case research on the emotive energy of color. To memorialise the model’s legacy, Lak and Rizzoli have launched The Colours of Sies Marjan, a 400-page tome organised not by yr or season, however by Lak’s love language: color.
The e book is a richly captured compendium of certainly one of American trend’s most influential homes. Photographs from unseen runway seems, advert campaigns, and located objects are a window into the thoughts of a color maestro and grasp designer. Interviews with inventive luminaries together with Marc Jacobs, Donna Tartt, Rem Koolhaas and Hanya Yanagihara additionally characteristic – all devoted followers of Sies Marjan. Right here, in his personal phrases, Lak talks about color, creativity, and Sies Marjan’s legacy.
“My first reminiscence of color was after I realised that it was one thing extra than simply the floor of every thing round us. My father used to work for Shell and we lived all all over the world. I used to be born in Brunei, and lived in Malaysia, Africa, Scotland. After we had been residing in Africa, we had been residing in Gabon, which is on the equator and it’s extraordinarily inexperienced and luxurious. Me and my brothers, we might at all times play outdoors, and my mother would gown us in crimson garments so she might discover us. Inexperienced and crimson are good opposites, so my mother was being very protecting and sensible. In order that was the primary time that I realised that colors do issues to one another; you may make issues disappear, you may make issues pop. That [was the] first second that I actually took that idea and began enjoying with it.
“For these individuals who see color, color is in all places. Color is one thing you virtually take as a right. Color may be actually overwhelming for me, the place some individuals can simply transfer via it very simply; for me, it may be quite a bit. Typically it’s additionally limiting. I can’t dwell, for instance, in my home with too many colors, as a result of it simply screams too loud. I’m too delicate to it. So it’s one thing that I dwell with, one thing that I like. It’s additionally one thing that I’ve been capable of make a profession out of. So it’s additionally an financial, skilled part now, which it wasn’t earlier than.
“Within the studio, it might be actually attention-grabbing to take a look at a shade of inexperienced and my designer can be like, that jogs my memory of a toy I had after I was a baby so it offers me a classic, traditional feeling. After which anyone in advertising and marketing would say, that jogs my memory of a gemstone that my grandma had as an earring. I’d then filter all that info and begin making a world of materials inside these colors. So then it might be like, if it is a actually artificial color, I’m doing one thing actually pure with the fabric or different approach round. Solely then would we be like, okay, so what sort of garments are we making with these elements?
“I wasn’t planning on not having the corporate. I wasn’t planning forward in that type of approach of like, let’s make [the clothes] timeless. However whereas doing the e book, I actually seen that that was the case, that [Sies Marjan] wasn’t caught on this referential interval of trend. Sies Marjan was so its personal factor. And that’s why the order of the e book is by color. It’s not chronological as a result of it doesn’t matter for those who’re wanting on the first look from the primary present or the final present – it’s all Sies Marjan, it’s all inside that lens. And the references are every thing and nothing as a result of color is every thing and nothing.”
The Colours of Sies Marjan is revealed by Rizzoli and is out now.
