Designers Desiree Heiss and Ines Kaag pose lively provocations to a host of status quos. Working as Bless, which they founded in 1995, they unite all the creative disciplines into living sculptures, hybrid garments and large-scale installations. They release fashion products seasonally but offer them in perpetuity. They embellish the shock of early surrealist art, forcing us to relook at the world with a freshly pressed awe. In the pair’s principled eccentricity, Bless presents an ode to the bumpy, curious rhythm of creative practice.
In April 2022, the duo received an invitation to collaborate with Fendi on a project for Design Miami 2023. The email – from Simon Parris, who is part of Kim Jones Studio – was met with scepticism. ‘I immediately said “why us?”’ Kaag recalls. ‘But maybe because it was so abstract, and so not what we would have expected, we became hooked on finding out more.’ Parris had been intrigued by Bless since seeing its recycled fur wigs for Margiela in i-D magazine in the late 1990s. ‘My visibility of what Bless have been doing has always ebbed and flowed,’ he says. ‘I wasn’t sure what kind of response I would get, but I was excited by the fact that I wasn’t sure. That it wasn’t a done deal.’
