Helena Voss: 'Fashion Should Scare You a Little'

Helena Voss does not make comfortable clothes. She has said so herself, repeatedly, with the blunt conviction of someone who decided long ago that comfort is not the point. In a fashion landscape increasingly dominated by soft fabrics, relaxed silhouettes, and the gentle reassurance that everyone looks wonderful, Voss remains a deliberate provocation – a designer who believes that clothing should challenge the person wearing it.

We meet in her Berlin atelier, a cavernous former printing press in Kreuzberg where bolts of stiff organza and architectural wool lean against exposed brick walls. Voss, fifty-one, arrives in a sharp black jacket of her own design that appears to defy several laws of tailoring. She is warm, direct, and entirely uninterested in small talk.

Vanity Lane: Your new collection has been called confrontational. Do you agree with that word?

Helena Voss: I prefer “honest.” Confrontational implies I am trying to start a fight. I am not. I am trying to make clothes that say something true about the body and the moment we are living in. If that makes people uncomfortable, the discomfort is the point.

VL: What truth is this collection trying to tell?

HV: That we are living in an age of false softness. Everything is rounded, padded, forgiving. The culture tells you to be gentle with yourself, which is fine as therapy but terrible as a design principle. My clothes ask you to stand up straight. To take up space deliberately rather than apologetically.

VL: Critics have noted the exaggerated shoulders and rigid silhouettes. Some compared it to armour.

HV: Good. Armour is honest. It says: I know the world is difficult, and I am preparing to meet it. I would rather dress someone for battle than for brunch.

VL: You trained as an architect before moving into fashion. How does that background show up in your work?

HV: In everything. Architecture taught me that structure is not the enemy of beauty – it is the condition for it. A building that cannot stand up is not beautiful. It is rubble. The same is true of a garment. I start with the skeleton, the bones of the piece. The beauty comes from how the fabric moves across that structure.

VL: Your atelier is famously small. You employ fewer than twenty people and produce two collections a year while some of your peers produce six or eight. Is that a philosophical choice?

HV: It is a survival choice. Speed is the enemy of thought. When I see houses producing eight collections a year, I do not see ambition. I see panic. I would rather make forty pieces that I believe in than four hundred that exist only to fill a retail calendar.

VL: You have turned down acquisition offers from major luxury groups. Why?

HV: Because they would want me to be predictable. They would want a Helena Voss formula – the sharp shoulders, the monochrome palette, the difficult woman aesthetic – repeated reliably every season. And the moment you become a formula, you are dead. If everyone likes what you make, you haven’t said anything interesting.

VL: What scares you in fashion right now?

HV: Consensus. The idea that we should all agree on what is beautiful. Beauty is supposed to be an argument, not a vote.

VL: And what excites you?

HV: The young designers who have no respect for categories. They do not care whether something is fashion or art or furniture. They just make things that feel necessary. That is the only question worth asking about any creative work: is it necessary? Does the world need this object to exist? If the answer is yes, make it. If not, go for a walk instead.

She pauses, then adds with a rare half-smile: “I go for a lot of walks.”