OTTOLINGER Gowns for Women

Favorite Designer

Berlin-based label Ottolinger is a collaboration between Swiss-born designers Christa Bösch and Cosima Gadient. Having met during their studies at the Basel School of Design, the two quickly began making waves with their avant-garde, anti-commercial, and fearlessly destructive challenge to luxury fashion’s status quo. While the brand’s labor-intensive creations are held to the highest standards in couture quality, the founders’ signature aesthetic truly blazes through in their uniquely hands-on, after-the-fact process of abstraction and deconstruction. Immaculately finished products are calculatedly slashed, ripped, and manipulated into bold new forms. The resulting re-assemblage represents an unlikely harmony between their meticulous construction and the antithetical spirit of punk-tinged rebellion. Military-inspired trousers and outerwear are scorched into near-oblivion, exposed seams trace ragged trails through shredded skirts, and raw-edged cut-outs linked by asymmetric knots imbue casual jersey separates with disorderly seductiveness.