The designer's soft spots

Last month, on a broad lawn in the center of Paris, passersby were no doubt surprised to encounter a group of good-looking young people absorbed in a game of croquet. For hours on end they swung large mallets, trying to get colored wooden balls though wickets stuck into the grass, stopping now and then to sip Pimm's from tall glass tumblers.

	From the Ehud 2010-11 fall-winter collection. Joseph imagined a man leaving a military career behind.

The group had also met for a round of games in Amsterdam the month before. Due to bad weather conditions, a smaller model of the lawn was built inside the white space of one of the city's galleries.

Ehud Joseph, a 35-year-old Israeli-born fashion designer who has been working in Amsterdam for the past three years, is the man behind the croquet tournament - which was not initiated for the purposes of sport. Instead, it's aimed at showing the 2011 spring-summer menswear collection for the brand bearing his name, Ehud - currently sold only in Holland.

"I tell stories," he says by phone from his apartment. "Every time I set about designing a collection, I tell myself a little story."

Military influence

Joseph designed his debut collection, for the 2010-11 fall-winter season, in his childhood home on Moshav Sde Warburg. Over the course of two and a half days last September, he drew 150 sketches, from which he later filtered out selected models. His starting point was the imaginary trip of a young man who has left behind a long period of military service for a new life as a civilian in a big city. Though he never served in the army himself, Joseph's concept of military service is quite well-articulated: "Something very dangerous, which at the same time provides for a supportive and protective environment."

The collection focuses on the period when one lifestyle replaces another and collective uniforms are abandoned for the creation of new, personal uniforms. The clothes are characterized by strong, rigid structures and borrow elements of military garments, which have then been refined. Thus, for example, purplish Rorschach blots, with origins in military camouflage prints, adorn a grayish turtleneck sweater; a gray wool trench coat, epaulets and all, is worn open like a bathrobe, gathered around the waist with a tied belt and creating a soft hourglass shape; a black wool coat classically tailored, including waterproof polyester lining (material usually used to seal tents or raincoats ) can be worn on either side. It is sewn in such a way that in all the joins one can see both the materials at the same time.

A navy blue coat adorned with quilting is connected to one of Joseph's childhood memories.

"In Israel I belonged to a youth movement and when I moved with my family to New Zealand, when I was 10, I joined the Habonim-Dror youth movement [an international Jewish youth movement that defines itself a sister movement of Hanoar Haoved Vehalomed in Israel]," Joseph says. "As part of my activity in the group, I spent summer vacations in tents in the middle of nowhere - therefore this sort of clothing is very nostalgic for me. In New Zealand it rains during the summer and I remember wearing a blue military anorak. I have a soft spot for quilting."

While Joseph says he does not have a strong emotional attachment to Israel, this kind of clothing still fascinates him.

"Because I was uprooted from my native land at an early age, and because of my nomadic feeling, I find the idea of clothing as something that shapes identity very interesting," Joseph explains. "The idea of a garment that affiliates you with a tribe - be it a youth movement, a sub-culture like punk or a professional affiliation like police uniforms - is foreign to me. I have no country that I feel is my home. I always say my country is my own room, where my bed is located is where my home is."

London calling

Joseph completed his bachelor's degree in the plastic arts department at Massey University in New Zealand. "Art didn't suit me," he says. "I felt I didn't know what to say, that I wasn't managing to find my voice."

A conversation with a close friend sharpened his fondness for fashion and at the end of the 1990s, while he also worked as a lecturer in the art department, he started taking basic courses in the fashion design department. Initially he sewed clothes for himself and within a short time Joseph had an offer from a local boutique owner who wanted to sell them in his shop.

In 2001 he participated in New Zealand's Fashion Week, held in Auckland, which was then followed by a significant turning point.

"I was 27 years old at the time," he recalls, "and I felt a need to travel abroad, so I moved my life to England." He completed a master's degree in fashion at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design in London where, he says, his identity as a fashion designer began to shape.

After working for a number of years as a designer for various fashion companies in Europe, Joseph returned to the academy in New Zealand where he'd started out, this time as a lecturer in the fashion department. But after just one semester, a job offer from a mass-market Dutch clothing company brought him back to Europe.

"I had to design coats that would sell in quantities of tens of thousands. This was very different from what I'd done at Saint Martins, where they focus on the creative aspect of fashion," Joseph explains.

Last year, after forming good connections in Holland in particular and in Europe on the whole, he felt it was the right time to embark on an independent path.

In Ehud's 2011 spring-summer collection, which showed recently in Paris and Amsterdam, Joseph returned to his memories from the youth movement summer camp.

"The idea of an idyllic summer vacation as a child greatly inspired me during the course of the work," he says. He decided to capture a kind of nostalgic vacation fantasy, with some of the designs displayed on hangers hung from tent-like poles.

Unlike its predecessor, the new collection has a feeling of relaxed softness. "One of the main questions I had while creating the pieces was what would happen if these clothes were forgotten at the beach. How would they look after a while?" Joseph says.

Baked in the sun

And indeed, his designs succeed in giving off the impression of something baked in the sun over a long period of time. The clothes use a faded palette of hues (pale blue, grayish purple, light camel and so on ) and some have spots where the dye is partly faded - seen for example in a beautiful wool boucle suit in shades of blue and white (with a few silver threads ), hand-dyed after the sewing was completed.

In addition to their faded quality, a great many of the garments have a thinness to them, as though they had been spread on sand for some time and had undergone a natural process of flattening. A wooly camel tailored cardigan demonstrates this best, though a thin fisherman's jacket in a shade of stone gray, or a light-blue hooded cape that resembles a tent, both also convey the message in a captivating way.

"The way I think about clothes is very similar to the way I thought about art. Somehow with art this didn't work for me as well as it does with clothes," Joseph says. "Usually I start with a story and then I build my research on it. I starts with one simple idea and then look for images that build the story more completely. The story changes along the way, of course. There are elements that don't work and new ideas get born along the way. At the end of the day, the clothes fit onto the skeleton of the initial idea."

Through his creations, it seems Joseph has found a way to combine his artistic and fashion tendencies. "The next stage will be a fashion show at Fashion Week in Paris. In a show that includes models walking down a runway, people can understand the collection in a very different way. When the clothes are shown on hangers it creates a different experience and I am interested in both [forms of exhibition]," he says. "The idea is to explain the story in as many ways as possible. There are lots of clothes, but there aren't lots of stories. At the end of the day, what differentiates the large fashion brands is the story they tell. But a white shirt from Gucci and a white shirt from Dior - ultimately they are both white shirts."