Omnipresent but unseen, in bleak 1980s Berlin, a man dressed in a long woollen overcoat traverses the greyscale city. He longs to inhale the acrid smoke of a cigarette; to taste coffee, hot and melting against the inside of a polystyrene cup; to feel the sting of cold air against a warm cheek; to experience pain or touch a hand to a bloody cut; to view the world in technicolour; to be visible. Instead, he is destined to live as an observer, left to lament the restrictions of his experience. He is an angel, residing in the then-bifurcated Berlin, connected with everyone and no one simultaneously.
Fashion Design with Marketing student Johannes Warnke was not dressed in a long woollen overcoat on the evening we first met. Instead: straight blue jeans and a lilac crewneck knit, with distinctly tousled hair – the result of a long day in the studios. It was a dark Friday evening, late in February, where – tucked into the quietest corner of the College canteen we could find – the twenty-six-year-old German began to detail the plot of Wim Wenders’ 1987 Wings of Desire, one of cinema’s greatest city symphonies. It is his home country, as depicted in the film, that informed much of Warnke’s final collection Windows of Perception. The melancholy of post-war Germany, its constant clash between brutality and romance are intrinsic to Warnke’s sensibilities; he is fascinated with the sensory.
It became immediately obvious that Warnke is a meditative soul. His hands, with the mohair sleeves of his jumper pulled up around them, cradled his face as he spoke. His chin rested in the heel of his palms and his fingers reached towards his temples. Even prior to the coronavirus pandemic, Warnke spoke about Wenders’ film as a metaphor for the our cultural climate:
“It’s a bit like the human experience now – we are linked with everyone and everything, but we don’t actually participate and we don’t actually connect.”
Speaking in his softly accented English, he equates lives orchestrated on social media with those of the angels, unable to experience physical sensation. “Sense has become – in a world so over-stimulated with social media – a marketable tool.” To him, physical experience is the only true contrast, and antidote, to overwhelming digital offerings of the present.
Now in isolation and with limited access to the exterior world, while others belonging to the College’s graduating cohort have focused on rendering their designs digitally, Warnke continues to work with the importance of physicality. This has only been further encouraged by his return to his hometown of Würzburg, a sleepy region in South Germany. It was in Germany’s modernist churches, transfixed by the contrast between cool concrete and soft coloured light from stained glass windows, that Warnke found inspiration for his final collection at Central Saint Martins. This light is refracted across his collection, each garment gently fading from one hue to another. His gowns erupt at the hip, forming cubist curves. Silk jersey is draped from their frames, hand-dyed in lemon and lilac; the arrangement of silken swathes over steel alluding to the idea of the window. Organza is laser cut and layered, diffusing from a concentrated centre towards transparency.
Where Wenders’ angels see and hear everything, Warnke’s work aims either to eliminate or exaggerate an element of sensory experience. His accessories encourage interactions with sound and light. The shoes, made in an exclusive collaboration with Daniel Charkow, make music underfoot. Windchimes tinkle, while mid-century tapestries ground the wearer in their surroundings. Each look is accompanied by bespoke headpieces, created in a technical collaboration with Akiko Shinzato. These flood the gaze with colour as light filters through hand-modelled bioplastic shards. Crocheted with wire into abstract crowns, they come to resemble the sun, streaming light through stained glass.
Warnke’s collection evokes a sense of modern-lay luxury through his focus on stimulation and sensory experience, creating not only an outfit but an opportunity for engagement within the moment. Having worked in Viktor and Rolf’s Amsterdam atelier, and both Balmain and Givenchy’s design departments, the designer believes that the future of the industry lies in two opposing options: “Fashion should either be art or truly functional design.” The world will, no doubt, resume to normality and continue to turn at a rate too quick for the ruminative Warnke. However, with Windows of Perception, he aims to provide at least some pause for thought, and in hope of freeing the observatory angels of the Earth..
Explore the entire BA Fashion cohort's work at bafcsm.com