The Fluid Hybridity of Enigmatic Brand BLESS

For MANIFESTO 2024, a selection of pieces from BLESS inspired by Espace Niemeyer are available for purchase at the festival and on GOAT.

Over the last 25 years, BLESS has crafted one of the most singularly interesting and beguiling bodies of work in the world of fashion. Both a part of and apart from the wider industry, the brand’s work exists in a space where the fashion garment, the art object and the lifestyle product coalesce, exploring the various ways in which these modes shape us. An interrogation of both form and function, utility and decoration, BLESS is interested in how we express ourselves through things that look cool, uncool, uncomfortable, useful or weird. It’s a label that resists categorization, instead occupying the space between boundaries.

Founded by Desiree Heiss and Ines Kaag, and based between Paris and Berlin—the two have actually never lived or worked in the same city—BLESS was conceived as a way to entertain themselves while searching for steadier, possibly more sensible employment. To their amazement, they almost instantly secured a commission from Martin Margiela, who tasked them to create the wig accessories for the house’s Fall/Winter 1997 collection. The seal of approval inspired confidence that the nascent project might just succeed. Such a spirit of collaboration has persisted with the label over the years, BLESS-ifying those they deem worthy, from Supreme to Fendi.

With total sincerity, BLESS has pulled at the ideologies that underpin all these creative worlds, subverting the structures that hold them in place while emphasizing recycling and reappropriating. The label has created some of the most thought-provoking, humorous and stylish responses to getting dressed and being alive in the 21st century: trainers you have to assemble yourself, hybrid sweatpant jeans, trompe-l’œil wallpaper and even embellished cable jewelry and decorative shells for household appliances.

Such madcap creations are a natural fit for a project that aims to highlight the hybridity of everyday life. Below, BLESS opens up about their unique design philosophy.