Wiberg: We are sort of already in the cyborgian age…. It feels so natural that our second skin—clothes—would be able to help us a bit more. [Clothes] should not only be an expression but could also have another purpose, and perhaps it’s time now to spark that.
Brickstad: In all art forms—be it painting or poetry or fashion, everything that has a deeper thought behind it—it’s possible to convey a deeper message through a sort of shallower surface, just by the fact of being a human voice speaking to another human’s ear. You have a sender, and you have someone receiving it. It can be very subtle, and it can be so much information that we will never know about. As long as that is a human sender, even though it has cyborg-like ingredients to it, it has the possibility to land well in terms of being a profound experience. We get so bombarded and drowned by all these expressions, so what can be a profound experience these days when everything is just shallow, shallow, shallow?
Wiberg: It’s so hard to be a designer. It doesn’t matter which field you are in because the end customer is so much more here in what they can see of images and they think we can just create everything. And so they are here, and we might be elsewhere in that process. Once again, it doesn’t matter really which industry you are in. How can you really push those boundaries?
Brickstad: Human expression will always transcend those boundaries because we’re human. Until people put robotic PCBs in my head, we are going to be human.
Can this Coperni x Transparent project tell us anything about the future of fashion and technology?
Wiberg: We don’t really know where that will go. In this collaboration, we didn’t think about the long-term.
Brickstad: For me, it’s being sure that we use a modular approach and we have our design philosophy about repairability, reusability, in that context. As long as we can preserve that, the jacket can turn into a sculpture in 10 years as long as we don’t glue everything together like everyone does and then cover it with a fancy surface.
You have to do something for the right reason. We have this foundation that we do things with, and then we have to be humble about where [the ideas] take us. There’s too much nervousness about being absolutely 100% correct from the beginning, and you don’t dare to make mistakes, you don’t dare to go out there and [say,] “We believe in this, and we’ll try it, and if it fails, we’ll learn.” That is something in our philosophy: to be able to go towards the goal, not to own the goal day one, basically.