The evocative combination of leather and lace defines a new collection from Tsatsas, seeing the German leather brand unite with cult 1990s designer Kostas Murkudis on a series of clothing and accessories made entirely from natural Scandinavian calfskin and delicate French lace.
Murkudis rose to prominence in the 1980s working alongside fellow German designer Helmut Lang as his first assistant, the pair defining the cool and seductive minimalism of Lang’s eponymous label, which would in turn reshape 1990s style. Later, Murkudis would found his own label, which he says is rooted in a desire ’to find a balance between contrary things’, as he described in a 2015 Prestel-published monograph of his work. He remains creative director of the label today, which first showed from 1996 to 2001 in Paris, before being relaunched in 2006.
First look: Tsatsas x Kostas Murkudis ’Session 1’
The collaboration with Tsatsas – best known for its sleek and innovative leather goods and projects alongside design luminaries, from Dieter Rams to David Chipperfield – began in 2021, when Murkudis first met husband-and-wife founders Esther and Dimitrios Tsatsas in Paris. They would continue to meet regularly in the years which followed in France and Germany – including in Frankfurt/Main, where Tsatsas is based, and Berlin, where Murkudis calls home – exchanging ideas and testing materials, before ’finally crystallising a central topic that fascinated and challenged them’. ’It would not have been possible unless it came from this organic relationship,’ say Esther and Dimitrios Tsatsas of the collaboration.
That ’topic’ was the opposition of leather and lace – the former a fabric long at the heart of Tsatsas, which has strong links to Offenbach/Main, the leather capital of Germany, the second new to the label and created by a more-than-a-century-old family business in the French town of Caudry. ’[We wanted] to juxtapose the natural calfskin with a certain lightness, transparency and delicacy – and so came the French lace,’ say the designers.
This opposition runs through the various garments and accessories, whereby panels of lace and leather are clashed to make raw-edged tabard tops and shift dresses, while cutaway pieces of lace float over versions of Tsatsas’ handbags. Other pieces are cut entirely from leather and feel intuitive in their design, able to shift and transform to their wearer’s desires. A wrapped skirt, for example, is simply a rectangular piece of calfskin which can be tied around the body in various ways to ’tenderly embrace the silhouette’, while the ’gaiter’ is a panel of leather designed to tie around the ankle over shoes, giving the appearance of boots. Details include a gently embossed lace motif, which was achieved by pressing a panel of the fabric between two pieces of leather.
As for the leather itself, the calfskin is the by-product of Scandinavian cattle farming – each piece traceable back to a particular farm – while tanning takes place in a tannery awarded the gold standard for sustainability by the LWG Leather Working Group. The collection, as with all the brand’s designs, was created in Tsatsas’ leather workshop in Germany, following traditional methods which date back over four decades, to when Dimitros Tsatsas’ father first opened a bag-making studio in the Offenbach/Main region. Tsatsas, in its current iteration, was established in 2012, and works out of the same leather workshop, as well as in Frankfurt/Main, where Esther and Dimitros Tsatsas are based.
Seassion 1 is available from selected retailers as well as online at tsatsas.com.
