my own private fashion week

with london fashion week in full swing and the streets around somerset house and the college awash with fantastic looking people i was acutely reminded that i too once dabbled in hot garments - or so. over to google and the results are above. no more traces of jane&john, the company i was 'chief designer' for (or untrained but eager to learn as i remember it) but this hopeful posting on ebay with one of the jackets i at least partly designed (the other part was probably stolen from a better jacket by a proper company). which means the jacket is also likely to be more than 25 years old as jane&john didn't survive their move from a small hand-to-mouth dye shop to much larger premises with 200 seamstresses around 1984.

it was good fun most of the times even if it included long nights since without formal training i had to try out the pattern I was expected to hand in the next day. and even then it happened more than once that the head seamstress, who had been assigned to make the sample from my pattern, would come with a funny looking piece in her hand, holding it up with a puzzled look, "is that really what you wanted it to look like??" 

easiest way out of this dilemma was usually to put the blame firmly on the cutter, who as a musician had even less experience but was in desperate need of the money and who, as my flatmate, had organized the job for me. totally bored by the work and resolutely unwilling to co-operate he didn't last very long with jane&john but, folks, this was probably a blessing in disguise as good ol' kai later made it big as frontman of the german rockband fury in the slaughterhouse....

so for a while it was all fun and visiting fashing shows in munich and dusseldorf was great, and i'll never forget the pride when one of my master pieces was in the shop window of one of hanover's largest fashion stores. but once the routine started to set in it was clear that it wasn't meant to be. i didn't have the drive to push for new stuff all the time nor the willingness to properly learn the tools. nor the patience to discuss fashion every waking moment, and so i returned ruefully to my kafka seminars...