Words by Kate Finnigan
Photography by Ben Harries
It’s all very well Michael van der Ham showing me cool swathes of translucent marbled organza, lengths of glistering metallic jacquards, sequined embroidery, gold tassels, touchy-feely bits of plaster-pink knit… But on a cold January morning in N16, three weeks before his London show, no one knows how they will be incorporated into the Dutch designer’s Autumn/Winter 2012 collection. Not even Mr Van der Ham.
This isn’t a case of the designer keeping his cards close to his chest; it’s simply how he works. In the studio that he shares with menswear designer Christopher Shannon, the usual visual clues as to what a designer is cooking up for a new collection are few and far between. Van der Ham may have been an avid sketcher as a boy growing up in Holland, drawing dresses and girls (“ridiculous, really”) since as long back as he can remember, but not these days. His mood board and worktop are sketch-free.
“It’s funny, but I actually don’t illustrate now,” he says, in a voice as soft as he can manage without actually whispering, “because I can’t word what I do in a drawing any more. I work with pattern cutters and then I change things, working on the dummy. It’s all done through fittings now.”
He approaches design as a 3D medium, meaning that the collection largely comes together at the last minute, when his self-designed prints and knits are gathered together and he can get into the rhythm of the Van der Ham signature thing: collaging the fabrics, moulding and shaping them into gowns, dresses, trousers, skirts; editing, cutting, letting the textiles do the talking.
The technique is one that he has been honing since 2009, when he grabbed everyone’s attention with his Central Saint Martins MA collection, inspired by a trio of hybrid dresses made by Andy Warhol in the Seventies. Warhol created his rather frigid-looking frocks by cutting up contemporary couture or designer dresses and mixing up their various elements – a sleeve from one, a bodice from another. Van der Ham moved this notion on, sourcing vintage fabrics and working them into dresses that blended different retro elements. He emerged on the other side of the pop artist’s cool statement with a living, breathing collection of clothing; dresses that in their craftsmanship and daring felt different and absolutely right.
Since then, the 26 year old, who showed his debut S/S 10 collection with Lulu Kennedy’s Fashion East, has refined the collage process that has become such a signature. For S/S 12, his second show under the Topshop-sponsored BFC NEWGEN scheme, he designed original prints as great tears of fabric, resulting in a look that was still patently Van der Ham but noticeably more polished. It went down well with the critics (the British Fashion Council’s Ambassador for Emerging Talent Sarah Mower pondering whether we might one day be in the presence of London’s answer to Dries Van Noten) and the buyers, including Net-a-Porter, which came on board for the first time.
After such success, Van der Ham was keen to progress with prints again for autumn. “I think I’m known for the collage and I can do that with print as well,” he explains. “And I was getting really tired of people calling me ‘patchwork this’ and ‘patchwork that’, because the MA collection wasn’t patchwork at all, it was huge chunks of really expensive dresses!” The move also made sense commercially. “I think all the layering was too much for some people to wear,” he admits. “They think it’s too crazy. So using print is another option that people can buy into. I don’t think ‘commercial’ is a bad thing.”
When we meet he’s working on simpler pieces – shift dresses and t-shirts, with a few “elaborate” dresses that he started and wants to keep “cutting into”. But he’s still waiting for some fabrics and embellishments, which will be going on gowns and short dresses. He’s also mourning a precious bundle of French cloth that has been irredeemably lost by a courier company. At £90 a metre, it probably wasn’t going to be a big feature, he says, balefully, but still…
Textiles are where it all starts for Van der Ham. For A/W 12, the qualities of organza proved to be the catalyst. “I wanted to do stiff things, but light rather than heavy, so that was a starting point. I’ve been looking at a lot of Cecil Beaton pictures. I’ve taken lots away now but there were loads of them here,” he says, pointing at the board behind his desk. A few tears remain, including a black and white portrait of the Thirties American actress Helen Hayes, in a white organza gown by Patou. “It’s kind of translucent. While I didn’t really stick with the Thirties feel, it was translucency, the stiffness that I loved. We haven’t seen that for a while. It’s really elegant. So I looked at quite a lot of Patou and it was fun to start off from there and then make it my own: chop it all up, change the proportion and the fabric.”
As for the prints, which will be used in skirts (pencil and circle) and gowns, there are small-scale designs, although some will be blown up to 10 times the original scale. “I wanted prints that could be abstract, or not,” says Van der Ham, referring to the array of almost florals and the barely there starbursts scattered over black organza and textured pearl satin. The marbelling, wonderful in blues, he painted and then “played with” on the computer.
The colour palette samples rusts, dark autumn shades, burnt orange, brown and navy, offset with acids and aqua. “There are gold and silver jacquards and a lot of black in the collection, too,” he says. “I enjoy the offsetting of nice, pretty autumn tones with something unexpected. It’s a bit boring otherwise.”
His elaborate dresses sold well for summer, so expect more today, along with some of the simpler shift dresses he introduced last season, and twice the volume of knits compared with a year ago, following on from their success. A self-confessed non-knitter, Van der Ham works with a factory in Italy on these, but enjoys the directing as a change to being hands-on. As with the woven fabric, he likes to sample different textures and yarns – a bouclé with viscose, for instance, has a great noodly quality. “It’s a mixture of cashmere, mohair and bouclé, in different stitches, all mixed in with the other fabrics,” he says of autumn’s offering. “Some will be full-knit dresses, some will be knitted tops or tops with knitted sleeves.”
Although Van der Ham is sweetly mortified when asked how he wants a woman to feel in his clothes (“Oh God, I don’t know, just nice and confident…”), it’s testament to his work that two of the most idiosyncratic and respected women in the music industry, Björk and Tori Amos, have not simply worn pieces from his collection, but championed Van der Ham and collaborated with him. Amos’s stylist originally called in a S/S 11 black and white dress for a shoot. “We didn’t hear anything for months and months, and then, suddenly, there it was on the cover of her album, Night of Hunters.” Van der Ham has since made more showpieces for the singer.
After Björk’s stylist called in a dress for an Inez and Vinoodh shoot, Van der Ham offered to make something specially for the singer’s upcoming tour. He went on to design 15 dresses in different colours for Björk’s Biophilia, one of the cultural highlightsof last year. “All bespoke to her, all big, long, floaty gowns,” he says. “They were showpieces – really elaborate, really full-on, so it was a different way of approaching design for me.” Proof that she likes his ready-to-wear, too, though, is sitting here in a cardboard box labelled “Björk”. It contains a skirt and dress from the current collection. What’s she like, anyway, I ask? He laughs. “She’s really funny. She’s really good at social things. She likes keeping everyone happy.”
Both experiences have given Van der Ham, who referenced Hollywood costumer Adrian in his S/S 11 collection, a taste of the stage. “I’d like to do more costume in the future,” he says. “Opera? I’d love that.”
Back to today, where, for the first time, Van der Ham will be unveiling a fine jewellery collection. It’s a range of ornate, floral-inspired cuffs and rings that go from cocktail size to “really huge knuckledusters” that bloom gloriously across four fingers in vivid coloured stones. “It’s really exciting,” he says. “Again, it’s about the 3D form, the sculpting and the moulding, and just great to do something different.” There will also be more of his covetable collaged bags and Christian Louboutin show shoes, each in a different vintage jacquard, although sadly these don’t go into production.
Having crammed so much into the short season, Van der Ham is now ready to consider squeezing in his first pre-collection. “It depends how autumn sales go,” he says, “but it would be a great thing to do and I think I’m ready for it. I’m always a bit bored in the summer anyway…” Something tells me that won’t be the case for much longer.
