25 Years of Always Stress with BLESS

Name: 25 Years of Always Stress with BLESS
Start: 2024-02-09 00:00:00
End: 2024-05-12 00:00:00
Location: MACRO - Museum of contemporary art

MACRO - Museum of contemporary art

Rome, Lazio, Italy

The show

25 Years of Always Stress with BLESS is an exhibition dedicated to the Parisian and Berlin duo Bless, a transdisciplinary studio that works on the boundaries between fashion, design and interventions in space in the form of objects or constellations of objects. Born in 1995 from the collaboration of Desiree Heiss and Ines Kaag, Bless often identifies herself as a person: the products she creates and wears are both practical and surreal, she doesn't hold fashion shows or create exhibitions, her collections resist time and space , although they embody and embrace reality: the house, the office, the city, the museum.

Bless, also known as Bless Service, emerged in the 1990s as an experimental, anti-market response at a time when the fashion industry and its brands began to permeate and define popular culture at an unprecedented pace. The "situation designers", as Heiss and Kaag define themselves, start with the creation of clothing items and then quickly include everything related to dressing and living in a broad sense. Their first edition BLESS Debut (1995), a single transparent nylon tube top, titled Suntop, sets the tone for the following decades: minimal collections, composed of a variable number of models, strongly characterized by linguistic and visual statements, instructions or narratives that evoke reality or other possible realities. Bless thus begins to create as if nothing were defined a priori, from the structure of a brand to the nature of a fashion show, up to the design of a hairbrush. For example, with N° 05, Subscribe BLESS, they created a limited edition collection without products aimed at gaining the support of customers, inviting them to become "honorary producers of Bless" for future collections, thus bypassing the economic structures of the sector. Every occasion, collection or edition challenges the status quo in a playful but always rigorous way: more or less formal collaborations with other designers and brands, expansions outside the field of clothing and the fashion industry, investigations into the photography of fashion or on the theme of over-design. In 1998, with BLESS N° 07, Living-Room Conquerors, the designers created garments to "dress up" domestic objects and with N° 17, Design Relativators (2002) they went even further by attempting to "neutralize" and make the aspects disappear more manipulative and market-oriented than household appliances, cars and other functional objects.