show and tell

Ohne Titel Is Not Concerned With Dressing Celebrities

Emanuel Ungaro may be fixated on bringing caché to the brand with Lindsay Lohan’s face, but Ohne Titel designers Flora Gill and Alexa Adams have very different — and refreshing — ideas about how to grow their brand. This afternoon they presented a spring 2010 collection they felt was their best yet (many in the audience seemed to agree), and said that’s how they plan to grow in today’s very difficult economy. “You just need to make a strong collection, and that’s what we focus on,” Alexa said. The ladies hadn’t heard the news about Ungaro since they’d “been holed up in the studio for the past week-and-a-half,” but they don’t plan to seek celebrity assistance themselves. “The lucky thing for us is we don’t have to be part of a larger brand — we don’t have to do something we don’t feel like doing,” Alexa said. “We’re not really a celebrity-driven brand,” Flora seconded. Could they be? “I think we could always get bigger, but I don’t think that we’d ever focus on celebrities, no,” Alexa replied.

With clothes like the ones they showed today, they shouldn’t need to. Their signature knit pieces came in graphic Egyptian-inspired prints and with beautiful hand-embroidering. It all started with “Egyptian silhouettes — the whole idea of kind of graphic pattern from Egyptian artwork, especially from the New Kingdom,” Alexa explained. “We looked at a lot of wall painting and sculptures, and so we’re kind of playing with taking those same kind of proportions and applying them on the body.” The designers work closely with mills to develop unique fabrics for their knit pieces, which retail for $400 to $3,000. They were recently nominated along with five other labels for the prestigious Swiss Textile Award, which has already brought them a lot of extra attention. “People came [to the show] that haven’t come before,” Flora said. They won’t find out until November who won, but they’ll celebrate their new collection and nomination tomorrow night at their first-ever after-party. Sounds like they’re growing! Keep your eye on these two.

Ohne Titel Is Not Concerned With Dressing Celebrities