Wolfgang Joop’s new collection: Hessnatur brings back the child prodigy

In his brown oversize suit, a sky-blue hooded sweater and Nike sneakers, Wolfgang Joop looks like a somewhat outdated but typical Berlin scene hipster when he appears at the press event in Berlin-Mitte. Together with Andrea Homann, who forms part of the dual leadership on the board at Hessnatur, he is presenting the new capsule collection called Wunderkind X Hessnatur.

The collection consists of 18 garments and will be available in stores next week. These include a pair of fairly simple fine rib shirts in peach and pastel blue, a pair of straight jeans and a pair of long sleeves, but also a pair of cargo trousers, a denim blazer and more complicated apron and shirt dresses with eye-catching floral patterns. These prints, says Joop, he took from his richly stocked archive, one reminds of the pattern of a kimono from the 19th century, another inspired him to leaf through early issues of American Vogue and the pictures of Erwin Blumenfeld. “It’s better to copy it well than design it yourself,” he says in his typical, blunt way and with a mischievous laugh. This is how the designer is known, who always considers fashion “fashionably, sociologically, psychologically” and who rarely minces his words.

The fact that innocence seduced him of all people, who caused a sensation a few years ago with the statement that fashion lives from sin, is not exactly easy to explain. “I don’t want to give up my passion for fashion,” he says, but I do want to be unreasonable. “Knowing what you no longer want is also a way,” explains Joop and speaks of a “re-education” in terms of luxury.

“There used to be a huge range of fabrics and I felt qualities for weeks. Today I get a white sheet of paper with four fluffs on it and then I can design a coat out of it. Not fifteen, one.” This limitation is exhausting, but also a new form of luxury for him. “Since then, I’ve had a completely different kind of fun making fashion.” That’s why the two are already working on the next capsule collection, which is due to appear in autumn.

It was all about uncompromising style, but also sustainability. “We wanted to make a statement: high fashion, sustainable,” says Andrea Homann, summing up the raison d’être of the collection and the reason for the collaboration. “So that all people who love fashion, as we both love them, can wear them with a clear conscience.” It was a rocky road at this moment, but “there is no other for us.”

This uncompromising attitude is the basis of existence at Hessnatur. For more than 45 years, the company from Butzbach near Frankfurt has been a pioneer in the field of what fashion circles at the time still dismissed contemptuously as ‘eco fashion’. The founder, Heinz Hess, was a chemist and wanted to dress his children in clothes that were healthy for them and the planet. Together with his wife Dorothea they founded Hessnatur in 1976. “Back then, nobody was thinking about sustainability, let alone that it was a topic in fashion,” says Homann.

So now, with Wolfgang Joop, one of the great German designers has been brought on board. Top-class image support, because although sustainability is considered good manners on all catwalks in the world today, Hessnatur still has a last-ditch ecological reputation that is difficult to get rid of completely. Perhaps that is precisely the core of the problem: when sustainability becomes a matter of course, who needs a specialist?

“We are where others wish to be,” says Homann, referring to the well-rehearsed and reliable suppliers that one or the other fashion label might be jealous of, the long-collected certifications that other brands are now working on in complex processes have to make an effort and the numerous awards. After all, Hessnatur was already growing organic cotton when others were still celebrating sin.