There I was, patiently waiting to plug in my iBook at a party in Berlin, and, ahem, “rock da house with my DJ skillz,” when suddenly the guerrilla stitchers from Additional pounced. “Can we customize your eye patch?” they asked.
I decided to trust them with my number-two patch, the chunky winter model made of brown wool. In the twinkling of an eye they’d covered it in eloquent red and pink stitches, then hung a couple of white school-tag labels off it. I must say it looked bloody chic, like a map with all the B roads picked out. Like you could see the veins in my fucked eyeball glowing through the wool. Luvverly.
VICE: So, Additional, what’s the big idea?
Rudiger: The idea behind Additional is to have a parasitic brand that attaches to things instead of making our own products. Our parasitic textile consists of a red thread and a label. Most of the components are taken from regular retail shops, so anyone can copy it, and thereby help spread it. We don’t want Additional to be limited to fashion. It should spread to text, architecture, and sound, too.
You were part of the DesignMai festival in Berlin this year doing something called “textile terror.” What was that all about?
Additional and another fashion designer named Florinda Schnitzel usually do rather polite “stitching on demand,” but for DesignMai we teamed up and hacked into a vintage workshop, creating “textile terror”! The results were then sold at Galeries Lafayette, the big department store in Paris, so you could say we hacked them, too. But the distinction between hacking into and being swallowed by a host is sometimes hard to define.
MOMUS
For additional information, check out www.additional02.net
