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SERVICE [ MODERATION [ VITA & ACTIVITIES [ PRESS RESPONSE [ DOWNLOADS [ CONTACT [ DOWNLOAD: MODERATION_E.RTF		For me, fashion, clothing has to do with the desire to jump out of the skin that has never been my own. From the very beginning coded by society - with regard to social status, sexual attractiveness, group affiliation -, this skin constitutes an interface between myself and my environment. It is the site of a continuous negotiation about how others want to see me and how I want to be seen by them, a stage where the drama of a society with its hopes and anxieties, its projections and repressions gets staged in its most up-dated form and in which I seek to prevail as a protagonist. Therefore, as a fashion designer, I do not start from a model body, trying to shape and heighten it according to fixed aesthetic ideals, some ostensibly eternal criteria of beauty and elegance. Nor am I concerned with creating exclusive markers of distinguished taste, whether glamorous or minimalist. Rather, I am interested in the second skin as a crumple zone where different dress codes, role models, desires meet, communicate with each other, polemicize against each other, comment on each other, etc. In this sense, I see my work as a kind of training for moderators - a type of moderator, however, who is less into smoothing over or mitigating things but who makes different opinions clash, polemically exaggerates certain positions, asks provoking questions, and insinuates seemingly absurd connections, until the mixture starts to reveal meanings whose denial was the very purpose of the stylized individual figure. Consequently, I perceive the gadgets I produce as interceptions and additions, as individually employable accessoires for wresting some exciting new scenes from the incessant social drama of fashion. These additions cannot free the person wearing them from her or his alien skin, but they can extend this skin, turn it around, fold it, and equip it with predetermined breaking-points, so as to create a strech of public space, in which you can face any encounter without having to armour yourself with role models. Let's leave the cliches to the avatars of cyberspace.. If I had any principles for my design work, they might be something like this: + Always watch out for the form never to become perfect, for the design to remain incomplete. Well-dressed people are dead - listen, bank managers! art curators! - like the money transported in your armoured cars, like the art exhibited in your white cubes. + Always take care that the (self)design leaves enough space for other designs to step in, to add their own statements. Who wants to talk in monologue? + Always set yourself off from dominant norms. Calculated deviations, bulges, tears, and little flaws are (at least in Germany) always good starting points for conversation: "Watch out, your seam is bursting!", "You've spilled something down yourself!", "Your jacket, it's buttoned up wrongly!" + Always put an (ironic) distance between the outfit and its wearer. This way clothing becomes open to all kinds of meanings, not just those attributed to it by the designer or wearer. Casual is what catches the occasion. + To find formally and aesthetically striking cuts and color combinations is the designer's business. What makes her happy are shrewd interventions in the fashion system. This can only be attained if her product is creatively employed by its wearer. + Finally, there's always the shows in which one can do one's own moderations.