Artwork Archive Collector Spotlight: Erling Løken Andersen

Vanity is the healthiest thing in life. Design is a series of creative choices – it’s a collaborative effort, an evolutionary process. You choose your fabrics depending upon what you want to say, then you work with mills to get those fabrics. Fashion is made to become unfashionable. We have got to change our ethics and our financial system and our whole way of understanding the world. It has to be a world in which people live rather than die; a sustainable world. It could be great. I love to design things that people can actually buy. I’m staggered by what a boot costs today. I believe that my clothes can give people a better image of themselves – that it can increase their feelings of confidence and happiness.

I don’t try to be in fashion; I don’t try to follow trends. You just end up out of fashion that way.

Certificates of Authenticity in the Digital Era

I do not have one theme for each season, I just try to make beautiful clothes all year round. I’ve treated the waistcoat as if it were a corset, so that it becomes the first layer in the process of putting clothes on the body. There is constant motion between layering and revealing. I get ideas about what’s essential when packing my suitcase. I don’t really know how to do casual clothes. Sometimes the simplest things are the most profound.

My relationships with producers or photographers – these are relationships that took years. Brides today are increasingly sensitive to the tastes, feelings and finances of their attendants. We have got to change our ethics and our financial system and our whole way of understanding the world.

Fashion is always of the time in which you live. It is not something standing alone. But the grand problem, the most important problem, is to rejeuvenate women. To make women look young. Then their outlook changes. They feel more joyous. The difference between style and fashion is quality. There are always protests, whether you do something good or bad. Even if you do something beneficial, people say you do it because it’s advertising. Fashion moves so quickly that, unless you have a strong point of view, you can lose integrity. My learning process is by eye alone; it’s not at all scientific.

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Over the years I have learned that what is important in a dress is the woman who is wearing it. Design is a constant challenge to balance comfort with luxe, the practical with the desirable. I get ideas about what’s essential when packing my suitcase. Attention to detail is of utmost importance when you want to look good. My shows are about the complete woman who swallows it all. It’s a question of survival. It’s really easy to get colors right. It’s really hard to get black – and neutrals – right. Black is certainly a color but it’s also an illusion. A woman has the age she deserves. We look our best in subdued colors, sophisticated cuts, and a general air of sleek understatement. Doing collections, doing fashion is like a non-stop dialogue. Vanity is the healthiest thing in life.

For me, art is about learning and about living with people. It’s alive. I design from instinct. It’s the only way I know how to live. What feels good. What feels right. What is needed. Give me a problem and I will approach it creatively, from my gut. Fashion is to please your eye. Shapes and proportions are for your intellect. I think the idea of mixing luxury and mass-market fashion is very modern, very now – no one wears head-to-toe designer anymore. It is difficult to talk about fashion in the abstract, without a human body before my eyes, without drawings, without a choice of fabric – without a practical or visual reality.

I’m a fashion designer and people think, what do I know? An evening dress that reveals a woman’s ankles while walking is the most disgusting thing I have ever seen. I’m used to always deciding everything myself. It’s a blessing, but also a terrible defect. Age and size are only numbers. It’s the attitude you bring to clothes that make the difference. I think God is the most fantastic designer.

It is important to be chic. People said making clothes inside out was not proper. I disagreed, because clothes that are inside out are as beautiful as a cathedral. You have to always work against what you did before, and even against your taste. You cannot be creative with people around you. Attention to detail is of utmost importance when you want to look good. Fashions fade, style is eternal. Fashion is not something that exists in dresses only. Fashion is in the sky, in the street, fashion has to do with ideas, the way we live, what is happening. The difference between style and fashion is quality. I adore the challenge of creating truly modern clothes, where a woman’s personality and sense of self are revealed. I want people to see the dress, but focus on the woman. Those fashion designers are just crazy; but aren’t we all?