(Neue Journal)
I want to start somewhere unexpected. You studied architecture before fashion. Do you still think of yourself as an architect?
(Neue Journal)
I want to start somewhere unexpected. You studied architecture before fashion. Do you still think of yourself as an architect?
(Ellie)
I think I never stopped. Architecture is a way of reading space — how bodies move through it, how a structure makes you feel before you understand why. Clothing is the same thing, scaled down. A sleeve is a corridor. A collar is a threshold. When I'm draping, I'm thinking about passage. Where does the body enter, and how does it leave?
(Ellie)
I think I never stopped. Architecture is a way of reading space — how bodies move through it, how a structure makes you feel before you understand why. Clothing is the same thing, scaled down. A sleeve is a corridor. A collar is a threshold. When I'm draping, I'm thinking about passage. Where does the body enter, and how does it leave?
(Neue Journal
VLAK began the same year your mother died. I know you've spoken about that elsewhere, but I want to ask something different — did you set out to make grief visible, or was it more that grief was simply what you had to work with?
(Neue Journal
VLAK began the same year your mother died. I know you've spoken about that elsewhere, but I want to ask something different — did you set out to make grief visible, or was it more that grief was simply what you had to work with?
(Ellie)
The second one. I wasn't making a statement about loss. I had no distance from it — you can't aestheticize something while you're still inside it. What I had was an inability to make anything decorative. Everything superfluous fell away. The first samples were almost embarrassing in how plain they were. But there was something in that plainness that felt honest. I thought, maybe plainness is the material. Maybe that's what I'm working with.
(Ellie)
The second one. I wasn't making a statement about loss. I had no distance from it — you can't aestheticize something while you're still inside it. What I had was an inability to make anything decorative. Everything superfluous fell away. The first samples were almost embarrassing in how plain they were. But there was something in that plainness that felt honest. I thought, maybe plainness is the material. Maybe that's what I'm working with.
(Neue Journal)
Your palette has barely shifted in seven years. Earth tones, near-blacks, the occasional dusty blue. Is that a constraint you impose, or does it just keep happening?
(Neue Journal)
Your palette has barely shifted in seven years. Earth tones, near-blacks, the occasional dusty blue. Is that a constraint you impose, or does it just keep happening?
(Ellie)
It keeps happening, which I take as a sign that it's real and not a brand strategy. I don't want to wear a signal. I want to wear something that asks nothing of the room. There's a kind of garment that announces you've arrived — and I understand the appeal of that, I do — but what I'm more interested in is the garment that lets you be private in public. You're wearing it, but you're not performing it.
(Ellie)
It keeps happening, which I take as a sign that it's real and not a brand strategy. I don't want to wear a signal. I want to wear something that asks nothing of the room. There's a kind of garment that announces you've arrived — and I understand the appeal of that, I do — but what I'm more interested in is the garment that lets you be private in public. You're wearing it, but you're not performing it.