Conversation with Henriette Sabroe Ebbesen, Jens Laugesen & Valdemar Mørkeberg

As part of the GENESIS exhibition hosted during Copenhagen Fashion Week we had a conversation with Henriette Sabroe Ebbesen, Jens Laugesen & Valdemar Mørkeberg in order to find out more about their art/video/fashion project and how they came to collaborate.

Q. How did the transdisciplinary fashion/art film collaboration come about between all of you?

Henriette - I knew for a long time I wanted to experiment with film-making after working only with still photography for a while, so I reached out to people from different backgrounds with a range of skills that were required to make the film.  

Jens - I met Henriette last year at Copenhagen Fashion Film Festival when one of my films, created in collaboration with RE-EDITION magazine, was a finalist in the International Fashion Film Award. She was interested in my work as a fashion video artist and later sent me an email asking if I would like to collaborate. 

Valdemar - Henriette contacted me because she was new to film-making and wanted to experiment with the medium. I have previously worked on a number of film projects but nothing quite like this. The project had a different style and work method compared to any other project I have worked on. That made it very interesting for me.

Q. How did the creative ideas evolve when collaborating for the GENESIS fashion/art film project? 

Jens - When I viewed Henriette’s personal art photography work and her signature use of mirrors I really loved it. In my own design process I have always worked with mirroring concepts and gender so it felt like a natural connection. I see the origin of my creative process as unisex, I always think about attitude and personality rather than the traditional binary gender of the person. 

Before the project Henriette had only seen the last HYRECON collection of clothes but I thought that this project would be a good opportunity to show the width of my design thinking. The selection of black and white garments became a mini archive selection from the best designs that reflect my Hybrid Reconstruction design philosophy created since graduating from Central Saint Martins with an MA in 2002. The coincidence of the mirroring of the numbers in the years 2002 and 2020 is also super interesting. This film collaboration feels like a full circle creative journey for me and an opening to new collaborative creative projects.

Henriette - Jens and I were brainstorming about ideas and how to connect both of our creative universes in the film. Valdemar and I then discussed how to visually create the scenes and what special effects and tools we would need for each shot to come alive. During the editing process Hellas came up with some sketches for the film soundtrack and we were then discussing how the music and the film would work together. During the whole process we had meetings with everyone involved to brainstorm and connect ideas between us all. Even though we all had our own special area of expertise the whole process was pretty organic and everyone came up with great ideas for each other. 

Valdemar - Jens, Henriette and I brainstormed the style of the film, we discussed the different elements and how the overall visual style should look. Some of the effects in the film Henriette had only tried on still photography, film is a very different medium to work in and is sometimes much more complex so we had to figure out how to make it work. It was a very exciting process because I come from the movie world and Henriette from the still photography world, it made the process very fun and instructive.

Q. You have all collaborated with a long list of other creatives for this film and installation opening, with live music by Hellas. How did that happen?

Henriette - You need a lot of different skills to make a film, so we reached out to different creatives and asked if they would want to collaborate. No one involved could have made the project by themselves, so it was a great experience to see how everyone complimented each other.

Jens - In the past when I have worked on fashion film I have always collaborated with different creative artist and magazines. But being located in London it was really great that Henriette had a network of like-minded creatives in Copenhagen that allowed the projects to take place, from production, creative thinking, music and the exhibition space at SIRIN gallery. The gallery is a beautiful metamodern space which reflects my design thinking and connects in a hybrid manner to a certain nostalgia of the past with a white box modern vision of the future.

Valdemar – The style and story of GENESIS could only be possible because of all the different, talented and hardworking people that became a part of the film. 

Q. You are all of Danish origin, but do you see yourself as a Danish artist and how does your creativity relate to the Danish visual art and design tradition?

Henriette - I see myself as a Danish artist, however my style is more related to contemporary photography on the international art, fashion and photography scene rather than on the Danish scene. I never studied photography in Denmark, so maybe that’s why. However, I think living in Denmark has had an influence on the way I always use strong sunlight and bright colours in my work, this is what I miss the most during the long winters and therefore what I find most beautiful. 

Valdemar – I do not think my style of film-making is very Danish. The thing I like the most about making films is finding the style that tells the story of the particular project the best. That is never the same style. But I find the Scandinavian simplicity and minimalistic style very intriguing, so that is often used in my work.

Question to Jens - How has living in London changed your Danish culture and helped shape your approach to creativity, tradition, craft? 

Jens - My approach to design is a triptych hybrid between my Danish culture and a democratic approach to functionality and design tradition combined with Paris Haute Couture craftsmanship and marketing thinking with a strong London design aesthetic. 

My creative journey started when I went to Paris in 1998 to study Haute Couture Chambre Syndicale de la Couture where I trained in the traditional craft of draping. I later undertook a master’s degree in Fashion Management from Institut Francais de la Mode, working in the more classic traditional sphere of the fashion industry. I decided at the age of 30 to move to London to reposition my creative profile with an MA at Central Saint Martins to study ‘what is in fashion after deconstruction’. Inspired by 9/11 I came up with my own design philosophy named Hybrid Reconstruction, which is about morphing deconstructed elements of clothing design into new hybrids of in-between garments. Illustrated in the GENESIS exhibition by the triple neckline shirt-t-shirt.

When launching my brand in London Fashion Week, my aesthetic was more London punk than Danish, with a conceptual de/reconstructed design vocabulary. At the time the press linked my more functional and conceptual approach to my Danish origin. Through the exploration of the puritan black and white wardrobe, for example the white shirt and black tuxedo jacket, I started developing the post-protestant black and white design vocabulary that you see in the pieces in the exhibition, resulting in pleated white frill collars and long black tailoring.

Q. Since you all work in fashion, what do you think is the future of the fashion industry, where will it go? 

Valdemar – I like working with fashion films. There isn’t a right or wrong way of doing fashion films. They are very experimental and visually different from other film genres. I think that it will continue to get even more experimental in the future because the fashion brands have to stand out from each other even more.

Henriette - I like working with fashion as a medium for my work, but I don’t necessarily see myself as a fashion photographer or art photographer. I think I'm rather someone in between the two genres and I like doing both as long as I can show consistency in my style. I think we will see more of these "in-between" projects that are not necessarily of one genre or the other, but a mix of many different genres being fashion, documentary or fine art. I also think that video or moving image will become more important as online publication becomes the norm.

Jens - I think the current fashion system is totally unsustainable and requires a lot of cleaning up. The way I worked before as an independent self-funded designer is not possible for me anymore because I am more interested in the concept and art processes behind the design. When I received the Danish Arts Foundation work bursary in 2018 I knew I wanted to develop my video art practice in order to create more work in a sustainable manner.

I decided to relaunch with a visual creative art project in-between design and video with one collection named HYRECON TRILOGY (an abbreviation of Hybrid Reconstruction) consisting of new designs that have been documented in three film collaborations with different film artists and magazines. GENESIS is the third collaboration revisiting the design archive, thus marking the completion of a full circle and the beginning of something new. I am currently working on a new 21st century brand concept with an innovative on/offline community platform that will integrate democratic design thinking, process, art collaborations and visual communication in a new metamodern manner. It is the ambition to start this collaborative platform with a clean slate since there is no point in starting a new fashion concept brand without integrating all ethical and sustainable considerations in order to make it as circular as possible from inception.