Interview with Henrik Vibskov
Henrik Vibskov. The drummer, artist, fashion designer, and even café owner who transitioned from lost student on the dole to a renowned and prolific, multidisciplinary designer.
Vibskov, the creative force behind the eponymous label and the aptly named studio group, Team Vibs, has shown no signs of slowing down in the last few years, with new projects, shows, collections, designs and even paradiddles, garnering accolades, and prestigious creative awards that have set him apart from the crowd.
But he has humble beginnings. He describes his journey as being very organic, playing music in different bands, then being on the dole which led him to højskole, the Scandinavian program that provides five month long foundation courses, from philosophy to architecture, for the unemployed. Vibskov had applied for a place in an architecture and design course only to find the waiting list was too long, so he called his mother who told him his cousin had applied to another course, was successful and there were many places left open.
“That was just a strange one and they had music and it was mostly for theatre and drama. They had a bit of music, and then I took design,” says Vibskov from his Copenhagen studio. “I ended up there for five months with 20 girls who were working on their portfolios to get into the academy, and I was like whoa fashion.”
His interests still dithered between music and design, playing in various bands without any real plan. Nevertheless, his teachers encouraged him to pursue his music, packed his bags and headed for Copenhagen where he played music. The only problem was his lack of funds. Enter the student money. “I thought, hey, ‘f***k I’m broke, and I saw a small ad in the newspaper that you could join some kind of small design school and you could get student money,” he recalls.
He took it, and got the money, and started his course, what he soon found out involved old ladies chit-chatting and tea. “I was living in a collective and I was partying pretty hard. Then I was in this weird place there, which was nice, with an old lady who was in charge of [one class]…” he says. But she saw something in Vibskov. “She was like ‘Henrik, Henrik is a very special guy’,” he says imitating her voice.
Vibskov then thought perhaps he should do something more, rather than drifting around Copenhagen with bands, and studying for money, but then he met a girl who told him of her plan to attend Central St. Martin’s. He told her that he was as well. He didn’t really know what he was talking about, he admits. “I was just playing it cool,” he says. “So suddenly I was at St Martin’s and so it’s been a very strange organic…I think actually I could have ended up doing film or architecture, all kinds of other stuff, but now I ended up here, and I’m feeling good.”
Since graduating from St Martin’s in 2001 Vibskov’s collections have graced numerous runways, contributing a vibrant palette compared to his Scandinavian contemporaries. He fits within the aesthetic, but not entirely. Vibskov thinks that he gets too colourful, too surreal or weird. “I don’t see myself as a normal Danish-Scandi aesthetic,” he suggests explaining that his eclectic upbringing, schooling, surroundings, and aesthetic have definitely influenced his creative output. And it’s working. In 2011, for instance, just 10 years since graduating, he won the 2011 Söderberg prize, the highest value design prize in the world, and has exhibited at New York City’s MoMA, Palais de Tokyo in Paris, and countless other galleries.
These influences have been key in shaping his collections as he seems to represent both worlds. His shows, he explains, frame chaotic worlds. When they do the shows, for instance, the carpets are wide, are framed and are rectangular, and then all kinds of other stuff can be weird and chaotic, inside of a frame that is very conservative and strict. It’s not just a super-mess, it’s kind of a controlled mess.
Consider his collection the vivacious Salami Kitchen, which as the name suggests, revolved around the theme of salami. But through his chaotic (but not so chaotic) lens, he was able to refine the theme, molding it to a form that was fashionable, artistic, and creative. The idea, explained Vibskov evolved out of working on multiple projects at the one, one of which included a project for Art Cologne, and a gallery that represents him in Cologne. His brief was to do something “really cool”.
“We did some tapestries and we had to find a concept, or some aesthetic for the tapestry,” he recalls. “Then suddenly I woke up one night and thought maybe kind of food tables or like fruit or food maybe could be all the images, or could be the symbols on the tapestries. If you look at art histories or some of the paintings, food or fruit has always been a very a popular thing to paint, so I thought maybe we could do tapestries with salamis and sausages and all kinds of things.”
“So that’s how it started, and then it went pretty well, and then we had three forms to work on and I was like maybe what we should do for the whole big show, is that we should focus everything on salamis,” he says. Vibskov explained that the Danish salami was pretty big some years but faded out in the last 10 to 15 years because it’s largely artificial. Today it’s about all that is organic. “Then the whole perspective of meat in general, like, you see more and more vegetarians and, are we polluting the world with how much more water does it need to get one piece of beef blah blah blah, that kind of perspective, he opines. “And is meat just becoming a historic thing?”
For full disclosure, Vibskov is not a vegetarian.
To see the execution of his collection, Team Vibs (which he says is like a small family composed of himself, bookkeepers, assistants, designers, someone working in the café, some grandmothers coming here helping, making food for the models) looked into meat structures and their shapes, which then evolved into building a sci-fi world of a futuristic salami sausage factory.
“I don’t know [why], it just thought about it … because the main focus of the collection before salamis was that we looked into very Asian [themes], like martial arts, different kinds of sports, judo, … Geisha, a kind of Japanese celebration/ceremony … so the whole style of the show was looking, you could say, Asian. And then having a European strange, fake, salami factory going on… I don’t know, something like that,” he elaborates.
“When we start collections and you do one we maybe try to choose four circuits, it can be a little bit random, or it can be something like hey it may be nice to look into something like that, but it could be all kind of weirdness,” he says. “We start researching on that, and sometimes it gives something and other times it’s just a dead-end road, you know? And sometimes it goes like ‘woah hey it fits together’, just like does the salami and martial art go hand in hand, maybe, maybe not let’s see. Or what else?
The ‘what else’ could be anything: it could be weird ways of walking on water, it could also be dance moves because they have to create 30-40 different artworks for the collections. But that is, he says, how they work. “Sometimes we choose four to five directions and maybe only two end up being the one where they gain a lot of ideas and material,” he says.
Running short of ideas and material seems like an irrational thought when it comes to Vibskov, who says that he has been in fashion for 20 or more years, including 34 years as a musician which he also says that really helped him to enter the creative world. But what spurs him forward is his interest in his craft.
“I’ve just been doing it for many, many years and just kept on doing things that I think that I’m still passionate about,” he muses. “I think you have to have to visionary, exciting and everything becomes easier. But if you sit a little, and are a little fed up then you should change position or route, and other things and different worlds. I think it kind of has to do a little bit with entertaining my brain: I need to activate my brain and keep it alive.”
Speed is key to keeping his brain active. “I like when things are moving fast and I like to work on many projects, so I don’t know what I do, I just hang a bit around and everything seems very laissez-faire but it’s not. But I do quite a lot.”
“Working on many projects and that kind of gives something to the next, or it can be a form, or I don’t know. It’s also a demand maybe, I’m like an old tractor, you know drummer who plays the same beat, and we get a lot of requests, hey do you want to do that, or that, can you do that, and sometimes yes we can and then we do it and then it kind of grows as well, and in general there’s never been a plan,” he says. “It’s mostly been a demand and just saying yes or no.”
He admits, however, that this isn’t always easy, especially for recent graduates and students. Everyone has ideas, but the difficulty lies in realising the ideas. “The whole of mankind has ideas and it’s also finding a balance, how you can realise them and I think that’s the most difficult thing, how do you realise if you want to blow up a pink balloon over Australia, it’s a great idea but how can you realise it? And they have to figure out the possibilities but most of people’s ideas don’t happen.”
To help combat this, he set up the Practical Intelligent Genius (PIG) foundation, that seeks out young PIGs and supports their creative ventures as well as holding various events. The foundation is really an act of reciprocity, resulting from his win of a Nordic design prize. He decided that since he received something, he should give something back. After navigating through the legal and financial realities of establishing a trust or foundation, he says that it was simpler to have it as a sign of recognition to young practical intelligent geniuses, receiving an award, and a little money prize, but it’s actually Vibskov who has to go out and work or do something to which someone would donate some money for that.
It’s a practical solution to a complex problem, but Vibskov says that it is also a little annoying. “I have to get out and get some money, but it’s a good idea. I have to give a talk in a month’s time at a university … the place where I’m actually a professor, and they wanted to give me a fee, and I was like hey great, and but maybe you should not give the fee to me, but maybe if you want to donate the money to the foundation. It’s also a bit stupid. But that’s how it works. Maybe I’ll have to do something for a day and I can give that amount because I can maybe get a little bit more than a young talent,” he says.
In fact, it’s a great act of reciprocity. Much like the old ladies that encouraged him during højskole, his award encourages others to continue pursuing their creative projects. It’s two-fold: PIGs receive financial support, and also encouragement from an imminent designer and creative, to help them jump any hurdles, such as, moving from home which is a reality for many. Vibskov himself moved from the countryside to Copenhagen and found it to be a massive culture shock. “They had buildings that were on five levels, and the people were so cool and were into all kinds of weird music and underground stuff,” he recalls. “I got a little bit lost when is started moving in, but then after living in other cities, then of course it’s just a very small city, it’s very easy and it’s kind of easy logistically for me that we have about 15 minutes to the airport, you can go around easily and of course it would be much cooler to live in New York or Paris, but I don’t know…I have been thinking about going somewhere else…if it kind of works out.” He’s been thinking of moving to somewhere like New York or Paris or somewhere sunny but he also has young children to think of.
His schedule remains full as Team Vibs is currently working on future collections. “We just started working slowly … slowly is a bad word … we’re working on the pre-collection, that is the first we need to send off and then we’re starting to work on the big collection for a presentation in Paris mid-January I think it is, but that’s the fashion schedule. Then we’re also working on a lot of other things. Quite a lot.”
And for the future, (the future, he retorts in his jocular Vibskov voice) he doesn’t know because he doesn’t have a plan. “But I know what we have to do next year: different projects, exhibitions, Paris a solo exhibition there coming up in the spring, a group exhibition at the Met Museum in the Spring in New York. I’m the curator and I’m doing an exhibition design for Salone del Mobile for Milan Design Week (“maybe it’s going to be a massive success, maybe it’s going to be a disaster,” he questions).
But such is the life of a prolific fashion designer, artist, drummer, café owner, professor, fundraiser and father. It is, like his designs, full, vibrant, seemingly chaotic, but ultimately a very controlled mess.
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