Sofie D’Hoore (° 1962) grew up in a doctor’s family in Antwerp. Her father is a great music lover and artists and immaculately dressed women regularly came to the house for the concerts he gave at home. With her mother, she regularly went shopping in Paris - excursions that D’Hoore says first inspired her love of clothes and fashion. She knew that she wanted to work in fashion when she attended a fashion show at the Academy of Fashion in Antwerp. In the end, however, the doctors in the family had the upper hand and Sofie D’Hoore studied dentistry for five years - even working for a year in practice. This was until she decided to go her own way and, in 1984, enrolled on a textiles engineering course in Ghent. Nevertheless, she left after six months after finding the content of the course too narrow. In 1985, D’Hoore moved back to Antwerp to study fashion at the Antwerp Royal Academy of Fine Arts. The 1980s was a period of intense and unprecedented creativity for the school. The so-called ‘Antwerp Six’ - Dries Van Noten, Ann Demeulemeester, Dirk Van Saene, Walter Van Beirendonck, Dirk Bikkembergs and Marina Yee - had all graduated in 1980-1981. Walter Van Beirendonck, who was teaching at the Academy at this time (he is now Director), was her tutor and despite the totally different world of Van Beirendonck’s creations, he exerted a profound influence on the designer. Unlike the ‘Antwerp Six’, who achieved almost overnight success in 1988, Sofie D’Hoore’s reputation has been built over time. After graduating, the designer gained experience in the prêt-à-porter business, before moving to Milan in 1987 as the production leader of the Belgian label Private Collection, a clothing range for young girls and women that was sold by Dujardin, a prestigious, well-known clothing shop on the Avenue Louise in Brussels (now closed). Although this didn’t work out, another door opened for the designer in 1990, when the Italian fashion distributor Franco Bruccoleri invited her to design a collection entitled, simply, Dresses. Barneys in New York and other prestigious boutiques showed an interest but sales weren’t quite high enough to justify putting the designs into production. Nevertheless, the Dresses collection crystallised the designer’s ideas and gave her the confidence, and the push she needed to begin producing under her own name. Returning to Belgium, she designed her first complete collection and, together with her mother, sold it directly to several shops. Shortly afterwards, she met Chantal Spaas, who was working in sales and distribution for Dujardin. Together, they founded Fashion Ink and launched their first joint venture, a collection by Sofie D’Hoore, in September 1992. One of the keys to the commercial success that the label enjoys today is the slow, steady and careful way that D’Hoore and Spaas have built their business. The talents of the two women complement each other perfectly - D’Hoore concentrates on designing and Spaas handles sales, distribution and finance. The stability of the business has been hard won. In the early days, the company struggled commercially and, at one point, Spaas supported the company by tapping into the equity available in her family home. Today, the business is thriving, but operating costs are still carefully monitored. Chantal Spaas and Sofie D’Hoore have worked together for almost all of their professional lives, and pattern cutter Daniel has worked for the company for such a long time that hardly anyone remembers life in the studio before him. Although the designer herself tends to shun the limelight, and prefers to focus her attention on sourcing fabrics and sketching in her Brussels studio (or her apartment near the dunes on the Belgian coast), both she and Spaas do, in fact, know almost everyone they deal with - from manufacturers to stockists, textile producers to clients - personally. It’s a rare quality in a fast-moving, digital age but one that creates a solid business foundation. D’Hoore’s earliest clients were Belgian, many of whom remain loyal to the brand to this day - notably her creative colleagues from the world of theatre, dance, architecture and the visual arts. Nowadays, however, her work has a global reach and is worn by women from all walks of life. In the last decade, in particular, the audience for her work has grown enormously. Sales in Belgium have now exceeded sales abroad and some twenty shops in Belgium stock Sofie D’Hoore, as well as fifty stockists in Europe, twenty in Japan, three in London and ten in America. The company’s strong international sales growth - which has stayed stable despite the financial crisis - is perhaps due to the fact that D’Hoore’s clothes sell. Which means, of course, that she is producing clothes that women really do want to wear. Interestingly, marketing plays only a very limited role, and advertising absolutely none - the clothes reach the shops, and the women who love them, via the business personally conducted by Spaas at twice yearly annual presentations of the collection in Paris and Milan. In the often fast and furious world of fashion, it’s this traditional approach to doing business - talking to clients and letting them see the collection up close - that seems to work. What Sofie D’Hoore offers, and what sets her apart, are clothes that are not only beautiful to look at, but are a joy to wear and, crucially, are incredibly well made. Her work can be described as a constant search for refinement in terms of cut, colour and execution. It is a personal design journey that has evolved, over the course of two decades, into a highly sophisticated design philosophy that imbues her work with a rare coherence. Fabric is the starting point for every collection. Each season, the designer researches hundreds of textiles before making the choices that will influence her designs; only then does she begin to sketch. The integrity of the materials is paramount. Natural fabrics, such as wool, cotton and silk, feature heavily and are of the finest quality. As a result, the materials maintain their beauty, or even improve with age. Texture and contrast play an important role. The designer will often present several models within a single collection, with great expertise and precision, in harmonious colours and contrasting fabrics. Underpinning everything is an obsessive attention to detail in terms of the cut, construction and craftsmanship of each garment. For Sofie D’Hoore, how the clothes feel when worn is as important as how they look. Her work is about freedom in the broadest sense. Her clothes are always elegant and feminine, but allow great liberty of movement. Every garment is created so that it is comfortable, practical and easy to wear. Just as important to the designer, however, is psychological freedom. In other words, the ease of mind that is generated by the natural simplicity of the clothes that makes them fit effortlessly into the realities of everyday life. As such, they require nothing complicated of the wearer. The beauty of Sofie D’Hoore’s designs also lies in the fact that everything goes with everything else - which allows for endless possible combinations over any number of collections. It is an intelligent and sustainable approach that focuses on the creation of a highly adaptable wardrobe that never dates, or goes out of fashion. It taps into what has been dubbed by the media as ‘slow fashion’ or, what perhaps an earlier generation of women called ‘investment dressing’ - in other words, well-made clothes, in superior fabrics, that can be worn season after season. The slow fashion movement is the alternative to mass produced clothing (or ‘fast-fashion’). Choosing to purchase carefully crafted products with a distinct provenance from smaller businesses (i.e. quality garments that won’t date, last longer and transcend trends) and by slowing the rate of consumption (buying fewer clothes less often, quality versus quantity) is an intelligent, contemporary approach to the problem of what to wear. It is in this context that her work can be said to represent a new form of modern luxury. Clothes by Sofie D’Hoore are thoughtful and discreet, simple and sophisticated, classic yet wholly contemporary. The constant dialogue between these aspects of her work is what makes it so fascinating. In addition to being meticulously cut, carefully made and exquisite to touch and behold, every collection offers the rare pleasure of finding fresh perspectives amongst familiar themes. D’Hoore cites the childhood shopping trips to Paris as instilling a passion for beauty, colour and style. Her love for the fashion of the sixties and seventies remains an important source of inspiration to this day. For her own archive she systematically collects garments from this period, ranging from couture by great masters such as Yves Saint Laurent and Cristobal Balenciaga to anonymous creations with a certain je ne sais quoi from the flea market in Brussels’ Marolles. Her interests, however, do not lie exclusively in the past and she is as equally fascinated by the work of contemporary designers, such as Miuccia Prada (of Prada) and Rei Kawakubo (of Comme des Garçons), as well as artists, architects and performers. In 2005, she was one of several designers to produce costumes for Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker’s productie Cassandre, parlant en douze voix, and in 2007 she collaborated with the actors Jan De Corte and Sigrid Vinks on costumes for their performance of dieu & les esprits vivants (the music was by Arno and, for this performance, Jan Decorte and Sigrid Vinks also collaborated with De Keersmaeker). Twenty years after her first collection, Sofie D’Hoore has branched out into menswear. A twice-yearly capsule collection, that reflects the fabrics, colours and inspiration of the women’s wear, includes a tightly edited group of mix and match trousers and jackets in wool, cotton or corduroy. Shirts, knitwear and accessories, in some of the most wonderful colours and textures imaginable, finally make the holy grail of everyday dressing - comfort, simplicity and modernity - available to men. But most interesting of all, perhaps, is that Sofie D’Hoore’s clothes continue to fascinate and inspire, both conceptually and technically. She prefers to call herself a ‘dressmaker’, as opposed to a fashion designer. Perhaps she has a point. Her collections are, indeed, all about the process of ‘making’ and ‘constructing’, and it’s visible in every garment. More than anything, these are clothes that, quite simply, make sense.
Posted on: Fri, 19 Jul 2013 22:16:50 +0000
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