Again hearty words from fashion designer Wolfgang Joop (78). In an interview with the “Neue Osnabrücker Zeitung”, the designer doesn’t mince his words and is clear about women’s current taste in clothing: “Many women seem to have agreed to wear the same style.” They are currently emphasizing their buttocks in particular: “I have no idea who taught them that, Jennifer Lopez or Kim Kardashian?”
In his opinion, fashion trends spread like an epidemic and influencers try to force this or that trend on young people, “even though they often don’t even know how to spell androgyny, haute couture, tunnel waistband or flounces.” In his eyes, we are dealing with a suspicious superficiality. “This is so damn tiring,” Joop continued.
Joop recently received criticism because of an interview with “Spiegel”. In it he said about earlier times in the fashion world: “This world was so wonderfully frivolous and frigid. Everything was for sale. The agencies gave the keys to the rooms of the models who didn’t make that much money to rich men.” The fact that he apparently linked the wonderful frivolity of the fashion scene with the sexual exploitation of unsuccessful models caused critical voices.
In an interview with “Welt am Sonntag” a few days later, Joop tried to correct his statements. “I described the state of the fashion world in the years before smartphones, with all the excesses and cynical frigidity that prevailed back then. That’s about it,” said the designer. You could understand that correctly, but you could also understand it wrongly if you wanted. He should have paid more attention to that, Joop admits. With the sentence “It’s better to have contact with rich men than to sit at the supermarket checkout” he only reflected the popular opinion of the models.
Joop, who was born in Potsdam, began working successfully as a designer in the 1970s and presented a fur collection in New York in 1979. In the 80s he founded his own company under the label “JOOP!” to this day sells clothing, shoes, jewelry, glasses and perfume worldwide. In 2003, he and his partner Edwin Lemberg created the fashion brand Wunderkind, which he separated from in 2017.
