Austrian designer Marina Hoermanseder – whose trademark material is leather – presents her fourth collection at Berlin Fashion Week.
Marina Hoermanseder wants this. She wants to build a brand, a fashion house of her own – with her name on it. You can feel it when you talk to her. Every fibre in her body and every word she says is directed towards that goal.
I meet Hoermanseder an hour before the presentation of her Spring / Summer 2016 collection. She’s impeccably groomed and composed – just as if she’s been putting on fashion shows and giving interviews for the last ten years. Yet, it is only her fourth season.
She tells me about the inspiration of the collection. Hoermanseder is Austrian, so she’s digging in her country’s history, going back to the days of the Austrian-Hungarian monarchy. We speak about volume and flowers. 8’000 of the latter were sculpted from leather, the designer’s trademark material. She makes one of those statements that you might only hear from a fashion designer, “The collection has my signature all over it. It’s similar to the one before, yet very different.” Yet, it’s true.
On the one hand she sticks to her signature buckles, straps and moulds made from leather (although that mostly works fine, the moulded pieces come across as rather alien in the otherwise very feminine feel of the collection), on the other, with every collection, she moves further and further away from the fetish character that is hard to avoid when working with the kind of solid leather she uses.
The level of professionalism of Hoermanseder’s presentation is incredible after four seasons only. Most of her peers take years to reach this kind of finish – from the quality of the clothes to the staging of the show. Parts feel a bit too laboured. However, there must be some wiggle room for experiment (and who can be blamed for trying to be too professional?). After all it is only her fourth season.
The collection itself has – yet again – been pushed further. It’s well thought through, it’s coherent and a pleasure to watch. I’m curious to see where Hoermanseder’s journey is taking herself, her brand and us.
