Selects from Ann-Sofie Back Atelje and Back collections on Vogue Runway.
As I see it, the takeaway from the exhibition will be that Back was (too) ahead of her time. Her work isn’t well documented and will be new to many, but also familiar. Many visitors will understand her work through designers who have come after her, like Demna (at Vetements and Balenciaga), All-in, Hodakova, Vaquera. “The last four years I’ve seen a picture of her layered sunglasses on 15 different moodboards,” said Walker. “But I think nobody knows that they’re Ann-Sofie’s.” In this time when niche fashion is tracked like sports, a new collecting area will open up. One of the distinguishing features of Back’s work is its nuanced sense of humor. The in-jokeness also seems related to the brand’s true IYKYK status. Failed glamour is how Back describes her aesthetic. “No heterosexual man is liking what I do, ever,” she says wryly. “But it is also true that if you wear my clothes, it could be seen like you’re ridiculing yourself a bit, and that’s not something that’s easily sellable, because most people want to become better through their clothes, more perfect, more attractive and sexy. For me, that’s too boring and easy. I need to play with that vanity.” Later in the conversation she notes, “it’s a bit like if you meet that person [wearing Back]; you don’t know if they know what they’re doing or not. Is it someone who is fashionable or is it a mistake?” That in-betweenness, the space in which two things can be true, where the good shoulder angel engages with the bad one, is where Back is most alive. “I don’t want it to be easy to read my designs. I want to cause confusion because I’m confused and I changed my mind,” said Back. “Ambivalence is very important; I don’t see things as so black and white.”
Says Anders Edström, the Swedish photographer and filmmaker, and Back’s closest partner in crime: “It feels like Ann-Sofie turns all of her weaknesses into strengths by facing them, accepting them and using them for her work. She laughs at her own embarrassment. The thought of people scratching their heads makes her laugh. She embraces her own failures. She quickly accepts when things don’t turn out as she’d thought they would and tries to see something interesting in them. She’s brutally honest but she is a very funny person. When I look at things she has made I can hear her giggling in my head.” The two returned to Back’s hometown with archival pieces and models who they worked with over the years to create images that are on show in the exhibition. Some of them, explains Edström, will also be published in Self-Service Magazine, “who suggested for us to meet for the first time, in March, 1998.”
“Ann-Sofie cannot do anything the easy way; it’s impossible for her,” says Walker. “In the Swedish press they always write that she’s complicated or things like this; I don’t know how many men [they would] portray that way.” The Swedish stylist Naomi Itkes also sees Back as a force. “She was looking at everything like an anthropologist, looking at society and people. And she brought up topics like feminism, paparazzi, horror in American culture. She took in everything. She’s like the Cindy Sherman of fashion… In the times that we’re in, Ann-Sofie is going to have a value to us, to the industry in her sideways approach, her uncompromising ways…..”