I met Swedish designer Amanda Ericsson in a dark little bar in Paris. After a few minutes spent exchanging pleasantries, she flashed me a coy smile and removed her coat. There, pinned to the front and dead-center of her pants, was a small, white tassled brooch. A grappe de chatte, she calls it (literally, a pussy cluster, jewelry designed to draw attention to la chatte). It was the latest in a string of projects related to dreamandawake, Amanda’s workshop-based dress-refashioning collective. In addition to remaking dresses and other garments that are painstakingly collected in flea markets all over the world, the designer routinely collaborates with a stable of fashion photographers – Lina Scheynius, Richard Kern, Ana Kras, Chris Heads and Roberto Rubalcava, among them – to photograph the dresses with Amanda as their model and muse.
The concept for dreamandawake is simple. Amanda travels the world buying vintage dresses and brings them back to her London studio to take them apart and resew them. Each object has a precious history. Amanda can tell you the story of every dress she’s sold, like one she tells below about an Algerian doctor who cured her sick friend. From today until Saturday, dreamandawake will be participating an exhibition of erotic photography in Sweden, called Ne te promène donc pas toute nue! (translation: Don’t walk naked) curated by Emeric Glayse.

Julie Cirelli: How does photography relate to your dress-making project?

Amanda Ericsson: I have found it more workable for me to speak about recycling and sustainability in the terms of pictures and photos. I like to go back to basics, to remind people why we wear clothes- that fashion is a concept beyond those basic needs we once had. We do more than cover up our naked bodies, we are driven by wishes for transformation, renewal and demand. Today, an enormous amount of clothes are mass-produced in huge factory cities. Materials travel from one or more corners of the world, trimmings from another, the assembly is made in yet another – and then we can multiply this complexity by 100 and still not get the picture of the history of a garment. How could I sell something with a sense of responsibility when I no longer have control over its heritage? And I am not talking about a manufactured heritage like the stories created by branding agencies – but the actual history of the production of the garment. How can I, as a producer, assure that every person along the chain has been treated well and has had his or her basic needs fulfilled? Finally, in the end, when so much effort has gone into producing this something, this little piece of clothing, from the first person picking the cotton from the ground to the last person putting it on the shelf- I think it would be disrespectful if we didn’t use this little bit of textile until the last fiber in it has vanished and been transformed into dust.

Julie: You and Lina Scheynius seem to work on everything together: you model for her photos and she for yours, and you make such lovely videos together. Tell me a good story about something you did or made together recently.

Amanda: One of my all-time favorite clips is this one. I remember these three separate moments – the first is on the Trans-Mongolian train, the second in Shanghai and third in Beijing. But it is the eating-the-plum scene in the third that I particularly like, because it was shot in a small hotel room in Beijing during one of our little moments of rest in 2007. Lina was terribly sick and I was just about to go out and find her a doctor. I found an Algerian doctor in a long white dress that treated Lina with chocolates and dried apples. He also touched her stomach and told her that it was time for her to have a child. Me, he told it was time to work harder, and later that night I joined the doctor for a dance at the disco. Lina got better and we took off on a train to Ulan Bataar where we met the man who later shot The Man of Our Life in Moscow.

Julie: How about the other photographers you work with. Who are they and how do you work together with them?

Amanda: They all get free hands to play around with the dresses, and they decide exactly where, what and with whom they want to shoot. Some of them improvise with sudden impulses, others plan their shoots carefully. I always find it intriguing to watch their different techniques and ways of depicting the dresses in different places and situations.

Julie: Tell me about the book you made. Who and what is inside it?

Amanda: dreamandawake 01 is a photo book that we made in 2008 as a printed version of some of the series that are shown in the online gallery. The book contains the first of the many photo series that have been made with the dresses. The photographers included are Lina Scheynius, Benoit Grimalt, Vincent Ferrané, Yin John, Roberto Rubalcava, Daniele Ratti, Jesper Ulvelius. Each series has its own story (as well as each book, since every cover is hand-folded by Yin John/temptemps herself). Barbie Blues was shot on a Sunday morning in Paris by Roberto Rubalcava, who had just woken up during his little visit to the old studio that Lina and I shared in 2008. He soon started to fiddle around with his last pack of polaroids, which he fired off within an hour. Ten dresses later, we had the series that became the first dreamandawake exhibition at Mycroft gallery in Paris 2008. Dream was shot by Lina in a friend’s studio in Shanghai where we stayed just before heading off to Beijing, and on the Trans-Mongolian railway. The Man of Our Life was shot in Moscow by Italian photographer Daniele Ratti, who showed up an hour before our planned meeting time and immediately started to shoot us in the room. This man kind of excited me and I got trapped in the daze and haze of enjoyment of his company.

Julie: You make some rather unusual jewelry, can you tell me a little bit about it?

Amanda: The minge cluster! Or maybe let’s rather say, la grappe the original word in Swedish was fitt klase, in French it is grappe de chatte. This is a little spicy brooch used to make boring trousers or tights look better, when you don’t feel like wearing a dress. This is a rather happy jewelry to be used for happy moments or for moments you would like to become happy.

Julie: If the history of dream and awake were a story you were telling to a child, how would you tell it?

Once upon a time in a dream, a naked girl awoke in a bin,
She took a golden sewing thing, threads the needle then begin,
Stitching blankets rugs and scrubs, making water into wine,
Dresses then comes flying out, people start to twist and shout,
For the girl had turned back time, without committing any crime.