Winnie’s Emotion and Expressionism

By Paul McLauchlan 

Before Idris Balogun put a pen to paper to design Winnie’s Spring-Summer ’24 collection, the New York-based designer took a moment to consider exactly how he felt in that moment and how to encapsulate those emotions in words. He arrived at sehnsucht: the German noun that denotes a wistful yearning or nostalgia. In psychology, some researchers posit that it can allow individuals to create direction towards the thing that we yearn or long for the most. This elusive concept formed the basis for the five-year-old label’s latest offering: an outing that also encompasses the aesthetics of abstract expressionist painters Edward Clark and Frank Bowling.

Despite the ambiguity of the initial inspiration, Balogun’s approach is strictly rooted in dressmaking and the idea that, beyond the runway, his garments will continue to have lives for seasons and years to come. His signature outerwear somehow exists at a cross-section between casual and couture; his tailoring so rigorous in its simplicity. Moreover, he juxtaposed classic tailored items such as blazers, shirts, and trousers with drapery. Wool flannel creates sinuous lines while silk wool gives structured blazers a surprising fluidity. Whereas tailoring required strictness, Balogun encouraged himself to play with proportion and line, creating something of a lightness. Almost perfectly, this echoed the tension between the past and future, the same way that nostalgia does. 

“As a designer, I feel like it’s my calling to explain to people how I’m feeling at the point of creation and what I’m inspired by,” said Balogun from his New York studio, where he was applying the finishing touches to the collection. 

What was the starting point for this collection?

I was inspired by the word sehnsucht, which is German and it also exists in Italian. I thought it was very poetic. I would explain it as this feeling of something that you’ve had in the past but you don’t know what it is. It’s a fleeting emotion. I thought about that as I started the collection because I’ve always felt like there’s something that I want to create and I won’t know what that is until I’m done creating it. I started to visualise what that might look like and it led me to abstract expressionist artists that I love like Edward Clark and Frank Bowling. I was thinking about the way that they create, how they don’t know what they’ve set out to create on a canvas but they know when it’s done. I thought that was very similar in the feeling so I started to pull from their work and it started to bring life to the collection. 

How did you channel your emotions into the designs? 

If this were my first-ever collection for Winnie, perhaps it would’ve been more of an elusive thing to capture; but the label already has some [defining] silhouettes, and this gave me a little bit of structure to operate in. If you look at the collection, you’ll see a lot of timeless and beautiful silhouettes and shapes that we’ve done in the past. But I also tried to create the idea of ‘classic tailored draping,’ even though that doesn’t really make sense since tailoring is the opposite of drapery. Tailoring is structured and draping is about how things fall – shape itself, and forms as they move. I wanted to merge the two and give more volume to something tailored. With the concept of sehnsucht, I tried to capture that feeling in places where I felt tailoring gave me control and tried to let go of it. 

What was the most challenging aspect of designing the collection?

The beginning was challenging because I’ve always been inspired by art or [something tangible] that sparked an idea or some type of curiosity. But, maybe apart from one collection that I did during the pandemic, this might be the first time where I’ve pulled away from that and thought about how I’ve felt before I started on the collection. I wanted to take this emotion and transfer that into the art and continue with that in a visual language.

To what extent is commerciality a consideration in your design process?

I’ve been very lucky to have the upbringing [in fashion] that I’ve had from working at Savile Row, Burberry and Tom Ford. At Savile Row, we couldn’t create without the commercial aspect because everything is bespoke. I wouldn’t make a suit or a blazer or whatever it was without the order already existing. Burberry is obviously a very commercially driven business also. With Mr. Ford, there is obviously this whimsy about him, an imagination; but he was very much grounded in the idea that he was creating clothing that would be worn. With Winnie, I’ve always maintained that I’m a creative person who is inspired by fellow creatives and I appreciate artists and the arts. But ultimately, my design background is rooted in creating actual products. I feel like the greatest designers chase two things: beauty and quality. I’ve always been a purveyor of quality, beautiful pieces and the place where I deem them actually viable is when they are worn. I always think about every single piece I’ve ever designed or made for another label and the life that those individual pieces might be having now. Maybe I wouldn’t say commerciality is the word that springs to mind, but it’s about the people who wear the clothes that we create. 

This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.