Real Niels

>> I’m currently in Antwerp where I can fan girl on many levels.  I can go to the beautiful Het Modepaleis, Dries van Noten’s hometown flagship store and just marvel at everything.  I am honoured to be sitting on the jury for the Antwerp Royal Academy show (more about that later… ) and will once again attempt to embarrassingly fangirl Walter van Beirendonck.  I’m hoping he won’t remember our awkward encounter at the Charlie le Mindu show when I might have said something along the lines of… “I LAV you!”, leaving him with a bewildered expression.  I can also pay compliments in person to designers I’ve been writing about but not had the opportunity to physically meet.  Recent Antwerp graduate Minju Kim is one.  Breakout accessories designer Niels Peeraer is another.

The ins and outs of are conversation will play out later on in the book that I’m writing, but the important short of it is that Peeraer is definitely one of the most intriguing and fascinating young accessories designers to have emerged in recent years.  He handles a fine balancing act between technical perfection and leathercraft prowess and a more lofty idea of “cuteness”.  His tagline in fact is “There is no limit to cuteness,” which isn’t to say that Peeraer goes wild with abandon when playing with notions of kawaii.  He’s drawing some finite lines, physically and figuratively as he constructs his boxy bags made out of vegetable tanned leather and fixed not with stitching but with brass fittings, rarely straying from the nude shade of leather, which he so loves.

For A/W 14 entitled “Blindfolded, robin, have hope”, carrying on from S/S 14, white features heavily in the collection as well as honed and perfected shapes from previous seasons.  I love the way Peeraer’s shapes hint at something familiar like bunny ears or finger signs but that he leaves things a bit ambiguous and open to interpretation.  In any case, there is the immediate reaction to what are aesthetically brilliant bags.

As well as meeting the Peeraer himself, I also got to touch and feel the product.  I’m now a lucky and proud owner of a beautiful “Winged” bag and a pair of Wander 7 bracelets and I can fully appreciate the detail and work that goes into them.  They’re impressive feats of simultaneous complexity and simplicity.  Not surprisingly, walking around Antwerp today with the rest of the jury, they all immediately recognised the bag and its source.  That’s how much progress Peeraer has made in a relatively short period of time, that he has left an aesthetic imprint already.