Ann Demeulemeester’s fine china
Ann Demeulemeester brings her distinctive style to the table
It’s impossible not to look for aesthetic continuity between Ann Demeulemeester’s iconic men’s and women’s clothing design — with its tendency towards the willowy, the gothic and the monochromatic — and the new range of ceramics she has produced for Belgian homewares company Serax, her first major creative endeavour since leaving her eponymous label six years ago. And sure enough, it’s there: the stark blacks and intense off-whites (also, some reds), the delicate yet decisive detailing, the uncanny ability to take a familiar object — say, a 14cm side plate — and turn it into a portal for contemplation of the unknowability of the universe (you see it too, right?!). They may be plates and cups, not coats and boots, but their progenitor is unmistakable.
“Whether you’re working on a piece of tableware or a piece of clothing, the mental process is very similar, only the materials and techniques you’re working with are different,” Demeulemeester tells Esquire, not unfairly. As one of the ground-breaking Belgian fashion designers known as the Antwerp Six (alongside names including Dries Van Noten and Walter
Van Beirendonck), Demeulemeester has always had a reputation for singular vision: during the 28 years she ran her label she is reputed to have rebuffed the advances of a number of other fashion houses. When she left it in 2013, she did so on her own terms, announcing her departure with a handwritten letter: “I feel it’s time to separate our paths”.
That path that led her to hole herself up in the country house outside Antwerp she shares with her photographer husband Patrick Robyn, where she spent five years learning the techniques that would eventually lead to the Dé collection with its dégradé painting style, and the other ranges she has designed for Serax (glassware, cutlery and a second tableware collection, all available now; a lighting range will launch in January 2020).
When Dé went into production, she gave WhatsApp tutorials to the porcelain painters in China who were tasked with replicating her brushwork. “The pleasure,” she says, is of “making something that would never have existed without you.” In her case, perhaps more than most, she means it absolutely.
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