Matthew Ames x Weekday
Here are the pictures from the Weekday x Matthew Ames launch in Amsterdam. We had the chance to do a short interview with Matthew:
Anywho: We are big fans of your work, but we’ve missed your designs the past few seasons. What have you been up to?
Matthew Ames: I have been on a bit of a hiatus from my own collection. I decided to take a break from it and I’m living in Savannah right now. I went down there about a year and a half ago to work with the Savannah college department of art and design.
Anywho: Are we going to see a new collection from you at some point?
Matthew Ames: Yes. I’m working on that now and it’s going to be a different format in the way that it’s shown and the way the collection will be developed. However it’s coming out soon.
Anywho: Do you have a constant inspiration or does it change from season to season?
Matthew Ames: There are things that always inspire me and are very consistent. With the collection with Weekday, for example, I was inspired a lot by Georgia O’Keeffe and the South West. But more by Georgia O’Keeffe as a person than the paintings – although I love Georgia O’Keeffe’s paintings. I was looking at a lot at images of her as well as the praire architecture. Luis Barragán is another architect that always inspires me. The lines and the proportions always interest me.
Anywho: What inspired the Matthew Ames for Weekday collection?
Matthew Ames: I was really thinking about the Weekday brand and the Weekday costumer, and I wanted to adapt the kind of design I’ve been doing in my own mind and filter it through Weekday. So the idea behind the collection was to create a wardrobe focusing on the essentials in the pieces and pieces that could all be combined in different ways. That’s where the idea of the Prarie came in – that simplicity and stripped-down sort of feeling.
I wanted to work with denim and I know Weekday works with denim in their collections already. That was a central focus of the collection and something really American. So, that’s where we started and from there we had just a few other colors like navy, a washed black colour and khaki green. It was really centered on the idea of creating a wardrobe focusing on proportion and line, and where all the pieces can be mixed or adapted together in somebody’s own, personal style – or even with people’s existing pieces.
Anywho: Who would you like to see wearing your design?
Matthew Ames: I don’t have a muse. I like the idea of people being individual with their dressing, so I’d find that inspiring regardless of who it is. I show one way of wearing the clothes in the pictures, but I’m not interested in dictating how they are worn. What excites me is when I see people wearing the clothes in different and new ways. To me that’s what fashion is: an expression of yourself.
