When stuck for inspiration listen to the material you want to use for advice, architect Louis Kahn suggested his students. Yet, while this may seem like the most natural thing to do to genuinely grasp the essence of your designs, the fast rhythms of the fashion industry rarely allow you to sit, experiment and eventually develop innovative pieces and materials. That is not the case, though, with Orli Tesler and Itamar Mendelovitch.
After their studies at the Shenkar College Of Engineering And Design in Tel Aviv, Israel, fascinated by the possibilities that different materials could offer them, they founded the Textile Design Team Tesler + Mendelovitch and started an intensive research based around a personal obsession - looking for a way to make a hard material soft and a soft material hard.
Three and a half years later, after creating also the plinths for Sigalit Landau's "Madonna and Child" marble sculptures, they evetually got there. The duo developed a series of small and extra large clutches in different types of wood, including ebony and rosewood, characterised by a geometrically architectural design.
Architecture fans may spot in the "Wood Skin" clutches echoes of Louis Kahn's concrete tetrahedral ceiling at the Yale University Art Gallery; interior designers may link them to Art Deco furniture pieces, but the principle behind the clutches is very simple - the design duo just employed wood as if it were a fabric.
Besides, there is a precise aim behind this series of bags: while offering the wearer a timeless product made in a natural material reinvented in a modern key, Tesler + Mendelovitch are setting their own manufacturing codes based around high quality and slower production rhythms to oppose the rigid laws of the fashion industry and of mass production that want us all to look the same and that put too much pressure upon designers, depriving them of the necessary time to research and experiment more. To this purpose, the design duo mainly sells their made to order and limited edition products on their online store and on their Etsy shop, a choice that allows them to keep in touch with their clients while still being able to spend time on researching new and exciting materials.
Can you tell us more about your backgrounds?
Orli Tesler: We studied at the Shenkar College of Engineering and Design in Tel Aviv. It's a school that offers degrees in different disciplines from industrial and graphic design to fashion design, textiles and art. The facilities are extremely good: since they have a science, engineering and plastics faculty, the facilities are open to everyone who wants to experiment and mess around with materials. So I have to give a lot of credit to our lecturers and to the school facilities for giving us the freedom and allowing us to go beyond our specific field, textile design.
You seem to have a fascination with materials rather than just textiles, did you develop it while at university?
Orli Tesler: We started our first year studying traditional textile techniques, such as weaving, knitting and printing. I met Itamar who is my life and business partner at school where we realised we got along very well and had a good dynamic. Together we started thinking about interesting ways to incorporate textile techniques in different materials and we took a few courses in different kinds of plastics to understand polymers and fibres, be able to identify certain materials and incorporate them in our designs. The courses offered us the freedom to mess around and experiment without anybody telling us what or how to do things and that was great.
How long did it take to develop the material for your clutches?
Orli Tesler: We started three and a half years ago and at the beginning it was a mess. We had decided to get a hard material and try to make it soft and vice versa to create a sort of illusion. We tried to see what we could do with the wood in our workshop, leftovers that were sitting there and we started to just cut it down, or fold it and bend it without breaking it. We just started experimenting giving it a soft layer or a polymer layer to add some sort of flexibility. At the beginning it looked terrible, but then eventually we got there almost by accident. I guess one of the key things was that we worked on surfaces for two years, so we didn't do any products or any shapes, just surfaces to experiment with different cutting techniques to see what worked and how to work with the fibres and the wood, because every material has its own direction when it comes to fibres, so you have to understand the direction of the fibre to cut against the grain or with the grain, since every cut causes the surface to change in a different way. Working on a surface frees you up as you're not so locked into the shape, since you're not creating a product. When you make a surface you can make it with tons of applications in mind that could be used in fashion, architecture, interior design, textiles and so on.
The surface of your clutches is very geometrical and architectural, did you reference any architects while working on it?
Orli Tesler: A lot of it came through trials and errors, even though we worked following a specific method to understand how things work and how things are built, after all we're not engineers or scientists, but designers. In our case the material basically informed the shape, it told us what shape it was going to be according to how it behaved.
Did interior design inspire you?
Orli Tesler: Itamar worked as assistant to Israeli artist, Sigalit Landau, and our work somehow started with furniture in mind since Landau commissioned us plinths for her marble sculptures, after seeing our surfaces. From the plinths we thought about tables and stools and then from there we kept on working on a smaller scale and we eventually got to the clutches.
Your clutches could be considered as timeless pieces, did you create your designs with the aim of being non-dependent from trends?
Orli Tesler: That's a very important part of what we do - going back to handmade production and personalising a product and a design. Everything that we send out of our studio has been made according to the highest standards and with love, and it's not mass produced, so it doesn't come from a factory. This is vitally important for us. I always tell all those people who ask us when we are going to release our new product that we are a bit like the Slow Food movement - we do things at a slow pace. We all know the horror stories behind the mass produced garbage out there and there is no need to produce more of that stuff and become slaves to production. At the beginning we were really afraid about being copied, but we realised we produce a highly researched product with a unique method that it would be very difficult to reproduce if you hadn't gone through the same research stages we went through for three years, so there are no risks.
Do you feel that your products reflect the place you're living and working in?
Orli Tesler: That's a good question. We do live in a warm climate and are surrounded by a passionate and loud society that is also a bit crazy. I guess it's not just by chance that we are attracted to wood: it is a warm material that connects you to nature and I have also realised that the people who are drawn to our clutches, but also to wood in general, are those who have a warm personality. Itamar and I have been living in Tel Aviv in a very urban environment for years. The south of the city is very interesting and intense, with lots of artists, but it's also very crowded, and you do feel at times out of touch with a more natural environment. So wood - but also other organic materials like cotton - can help you giving the impression that they bring some balance and calmness into your life. You hold a clutch near your body, so we naturally wanted it to feel good and somehow provide a balance for the wearer.
What's the creative scene like in Tel Aviv?
Orli Tesler: It's vibrant in this city, but also in the rest of the country. There are a lot of pop up stores, and there is also a craft movement with people creating small quantities of things at a slower pace. We do know a lot of people who are designers, but also many talented artists and film-makers producing amazing work. In the last couple of years textile designers in Israel got a lot more recognition and that's great because they are bringing in new things. I love fashion design, but sometimes you get the feeling that what's out there is just a variation of something else that was popular in the past. But there are people here doing great things in different disciplines and that is really exciting. I have friends who are doing amazing things in knitwear, combining old techniques with new technologies and this is a very innovative approach that also comforts me a lot as this is a reaction to mass production.
Where do you sell your products?
Orli Tesler: We did work with a couple of shops in Tel Aviv, but we sell most of the bags through our studio. We don't want to mass produce things as we want to have time to develop our products further. When you have other people selling your products, you sometimes feel that you're losing the interaction with the client while it's so nice to talk to people, email them or Skype with them. They tell me who they are and what they do and our relation becomes nicer and more personal as well.
Would you experiment with synthetic materials in future?
Orli Tesler: We are actually working on a product that is synthetic and non-woven and also filters pollution. We are also trying to figure out a way to make a product that people can dispose of in a way that can be reused again. We are very much into sustainable products, but we must remember that the question of keeping something environmentally friendly is debatable. There are people who believe that cotton is more environmentally friendly than synthetic fibres, but a lot of energy and other resources go into cotton production. Polymers for example are wonderful, and if they are done in the right way they can be environmentally friendly, sometimes better than their natural counterparts. The most important point for us is to employ polymers that are reusable, so you can melt them down, remould and reuse them again. A heat sensitive polymer can be heated and reused and its quality would be as high as it was the first time it was employed. In a nutshell, for us it's fine to use polymers, it just depends from how you use them and how your product is manufactured.
All images in this post courtesy/copyright Tesler + Mendelovitch
Member of the Boxxet Network of Blogs, Videos and PhotosMember of the Boxxet Network of Blogs, Videos and Photos
Comments