I don’t know how you say fourth-floor-walk-up in German, all I know is that I am climbing a staircase to one. It’s for the presentation of the spring 2027 Ioannes collection: Salon 01, a sinuous, spiraling tale of monochromatic jersey, lace, and washed silk, which is being held in designer Johannes Boehl Cronau’s apartment in Berlin’s Mitte neighborhood. (In the designer’s defense, the elevator is out of order.)
Cronau had been thinking about how he could buck the system in a way that felt meaningful to him, and would benefit his business; getting out of the idea you can only do runway shows, and sell, sell, sell to whichever stores show the slightest interest in you, whether it makes sense or not, and, of course, overproduce when all you are asking yourself is why?!
The salon-style presentation was personal, intimate, and for Cronau himself, much more real. “I’ve always loved the idea that a century ago women could use the salon to express opinions and access power that was denied to them, and I made a little note of that for myself” he said. “This is where I live and where I work, and the idea of doing something here has been a guiding light for me these last few months; I had to show in a way that suited the architecture of this brand.” It was a tightly focused—and also tight, as in tight—series of 16 looks, stripped back, pared down, and in black and white; the only showiness coming from the occasional flash, in both senses of the word, of the brightly hued bras, or via a print that looked like a highly abstracted petal motif but which turned out to made by scorching a piece of wood and then screen-printing the resulting charred timber onto fabric, and much more delicate than the procedure sounds.
Cronau’s place provided a great contrast to the clothing, decorated by the hip Berlin creative agency Tor Studio, who’d added a strangely beguiling fecundity with arrangements of brightly colored dahlias and calla lilies, and food in hyper-lush deep shades of pink and purple piled up on the dining table. This Ioannes collection, he says, will be available via DTC, or through a smaller network of boutiques than he previously had, and it’s an exercise in back-to-basics, if you can call a white lace bandeau worn on the bias with a slinky black tubular skirt, or a black shirt and long skirt that started life as a dress basic. Going into his archives, pulling things out, and ripping them apart before stitching them back into something new, is just another way Cronau is addressing the past to find the future.