What would you like us to know about the FW26 collection?
Cosima Gadient: It’s a continuation from the last collection. It’s about being girlfriends and supporting each other. Each season, we’re inspired by artists or artworks and, this season, it was Isa Genzken. Her work resonates with us. She has this amazing book where discusses everything from how her hair grows to her experiences in different cities. This collection has all of these different touchpoints—it’s about how a woman stands in this world today and how she goes through life. This collection has a lot of outerwear which feels like armour. The world isn’t really in a good place right now, so we try to give hope that things can be better. It feels like a hug. It feels like a very subtle collection, somehow, because there’s a lot more calm prints than usual. It’s more precise.
Did it feel like the right moment to pare things back?
Christa Bosch: What’s interesting in the work of Isa Genzken is that her work started during the minimalism period but, at one point, she made a work called ‘Fuck Bauhaus’ because she got so annoyed at all the minimalism. What we always try to do is have this Ottolinger girl in our language, and not the perfect polished girl – there’s this edge to [her], because we all have that person in us.
Ottolinger interrogates power, femininity, and disruption. What did you want to challenge within this collection?
CB: Isa Genzken had an exhibition called ‘The Only Female Fool’ where she included selected works from her artist friends – all male artists. She was the wilder one out of them so it’s kind of fun; and for us, it was about this idea of ‘it’s fun to be you.’ We want women to be free and express themselves. It’s nice to be pretty but that’s not the most interesting thing about a person. It’s why we called the collection ‘Female Fools’ because it represents who we are and that we are a bit foolish too. It should be light, not too heavy. It should encourage women to stand up and be themselves without having to be perfect.
Besides art, are there other influences outside of fashion that informed the collection?
CB: Nature. Cosima is always laughing about it but I love how nature has this asymmetry and imperfect forms. It’s something we try to achieve in some pieces, to have this perfect asymmetry.
CG: How things grow in the world. They’re so perfect but they feel so natural. We try to have an aspect in our collection that feels like it’s freely grown and not contained, which is freedom, again.
How do you see the evolution of Ottoligner?
CB: I mean, we get older, so she gets a little older too.
CG: This marks our 10th year. We’ve been doing it for a second and there’s certain things we don’t need to experiment with anymore so we can pronounce things more and be more precise. It was important we develop our own language and it was hard to catch that because when you start to do something and realise it works but you can’t repeat yourself, you need to grow. You have to keep going. We’re our own house with our own philosophy and we’re just trying to be better and stronger at that.
CB: We want to get better every season. We don’t have an investor that can give us €10 million to get the best factories but not make profit for a few years. It has to work. It just means some things take longer because we have to make the money first.
CG: Because of that, we can’t do whatever we want, but it triggers the creative way of thinking of how we can achieve things.
CB: But also we can do everything we want, because nobody is there to give us the rules. Sometimes we get to do silly things that don’t make sense or try out abstract ideas.
This interview has been lightly edited.
