for Vice Style and Vice Romania

Interview by Anca Macavei

26-year-old Romanian designer Lucian Broscățean is one of the country’s weirdest, but most promising designers, and VICE Romania are nuts about him. He designs hyper-conceptual clothes based on plays, films, and minimalist Japanese architecture thought up in his big academic brain. he’s currently studying for a PhD at the University of Cluj-Napoca, which is weirdly—given that it’s nearly 300 miles away from Romania’s capital Bucharest—the heart of Romania’s fashion scene.

VICE: Basic question, but why fashion?

Lucian Broscățean: Because it’s the place I find it easiest to express myself and tell a story about certain aspects of the society we live in.

So what are you trying to do? Each of my collections can be seen as pilgrimage through the urban labyrinth which is dominated by different characters and contexts. Nomadic lifestyles, mobility, contemporary dance, and architecture are all in there. What really preoccupies me, and what I’m trying to understand, are the issues arising from the new world we live in. I do that by channeling, amongst other stuff, Beckett’s plays, the austere spaces created by Tadao Ando or Mona Hatoum’s installations.

What was the latest collection about specifically?
 Avant-garde director Peter Tscherkassky was one of the starting points for my Inverted Perspective SS12 collection - his universe has this strange unsetteling beauty. I’d actually like to talk to him one day about the way in which he manages to transfer such a force through visual metaphor. (watch the collection at Berlin Fashion Week)

And the collection before?
 Enclosed Garden is a story about a character that wants to escape the tech background of the metropolis. Such a breakaway implies an inevitable passage - a sort of transgressive ritual that projects the character into a different space, another dimension.

What sort of materials did you have in focus?
 Fabrics like wool, felt, knit, cotton, neoprene - I was after different, atypical textures.

Are you obsessed with black?
 In a way, black does appear in all my collections. It’s this non-color, it’s deeply symbolic and mystic. I added the odd flash of white and for this show cobalt blue - used as more than a color - it’s a sign of the character in the story passing through a ritual and entering the enclosed garden.

I read somewhere that you insisted the music at your Berlin Fashion Week show featured the semantron.
 I’ve always been inspired by the music, austerity, and the profound symbolism of orthodox religion. I was trying to underline a super-dark atmosphere, which is why I used the semantron—the instrument monks in this part of Europe use to summon people to prayer. I was working with Romania’s best stylist Marian Pălie and we were trying to make the show as Romanian as possible, both with the music and the styling, that’s why we included the the semantron and the traditional Romanian astrakhan hats.

You teach too, right? Yeah, I’m studying for my PhD in the fashion design department of the Arts and Design University of Cluj-Napoca and I teach as part of that.

Does studying in Cluj make for a different take on fashion compared to the fashion scene in Bucharest?
 In Cluj, fashion is mostly about the university’s fashion design department and they’re really active in connecting with national and international design competitions, so the students are constantly thinking about the outside world.

Can you make it as a designer in Romania? Will you still be here in seven years?
 I don’t dare to think on such in such a long-term way.

Do you ever take any time off from fashion? Yes. I like to read, watch a good movie, meditate—anything that helps me break out of this hyper-alert state I’m stuck in.