Céline Van den Bossche in conversation with Marlo Saalmink for REVS magazine

There is something unique about transitioning. This process is no mean feat. One can transition in terms of family life, in terms of love, work, profession, or simply with time. In an issue, deeply proclaiming, that it is time, how do others see this. The Roman god, Janus, the animistic spirit of guarded door- and archways, also represented this middle ground between concrete and abstract dualities. Think, life versus death, rural and urban, barbarism and civilization, dark and light and finally the transition between peace and war, which in today's world, could not feel more relevant. Have I lost you yet? Well, he also symbolizes beginnings (or endings, if you will) and inspired Céline Van den Bossche in her decision, to craft JANUE, a brand of two faces, fluctuating from control, poise, to restlessness and even confusion. Her conceptual, but determined realist take on garments, fits to our times, as an intelligent take on the dualities we encounter deep within ourselves. We all grow in time and slowly get older, but that does not mean, we do not change, or that our minds don't adopt alternate ways of dealing with time. Where should I live? What is self? Who am I? and other inquisitions are not answered in a similar way throughout our lifetimes. As the cliché rings, when one door closes, another one opens, Janus would concur, and so would Céline.

GROUNDED. Céline, could you tell me about your youth, and your curiosities as a child?

To be honest, provincial Flanders is not the most exciting place to grow up, except for the usual experiences that many of us have passed through. There were no curiosities except for a certain interest in larger cities, in foreign countries, that I discovered along with my always supporting family. I have had a fascination with churches for as long as I can remember. I was a quiet child. I felt best at home, and I read a lot. Guess that still holds true, even today.

FAMILIAR. I can already sense this quiet and slow approach to life, from your work and how you approach art history. What did your parents do, and did they bring some artistic values into your life?

Working hard is both a duty and a virtue in Flanders. My parents did not differ on that level, but they did have artistic interests: my father is what you can call a Sunday painter and my mother played theater and loves the opera. There are moments that have influenced my (artistic) formation of course. Of equal importance is the presence of my uncle who is my father's twin brother. As of a very young age he would take me to exhibitions and would buy me these postcards afterwards which displayed the artworks and then he would organize these improvised quiz competitions. Now that's a happening you don't forget.

STRAIGHT A'S. Speaking of quizzes, what were you like as a student?

Some of us, had this luxury in Belgium to try different programs in higher education without completely ruining their families. This applies to me too; I have tried different studies - from architecture to law - and then completed a BA in fashion studies in Milan and a MA in art history in Leuven. Architecture taught me about model making and art history taught me a lot about images and sensations, movement, and representation. My earlier mentioned uncle is an art dealer, and I have worked for him for many years during my studies. I would help him out on art fairs and research objects - he specialized in the 16th century Kunstkammern - and I discovered the world through his precious collection.

TACTILITY. Your uncle sounds deeply inspiring. The transition from Wunderkammern to garments, can be quite daunting, I imagine. How was your initial approach towards fabrics?

During my art history studies I discovered this research on fabrics, conducted by Paul Vandenbroeck who has curated a few interesting exhibitions in Brussels and Antwerp on dance, fabrics, and anonymous female artists. This marked a beginning for me. Next to this, I am also interested in their fragmentary appearance and on the question whether we design clothes by subordinating fabrics to patterns or whether we see and reclaim a potential in a fabric that then becomes a design.

DEEPENING. I understand, from a theoretical point of view, so I was thinking, since you are an art historian, but coming from a fabric perspective, what artists did you initially focus on?

I have written my dissertation on the aesthetics of South Congolese textiles. So, as you mentioned before, craftsmanship and poetics have been fundamental to my approach of fabrics. Furthermore, the Baroque has influenced my take on space and movement. JANUE is based on the sensation of infinite folds. The examples are quite canonical, but we extract this duration and stir what we see in Bernini's 'Ecstasy of Saint Teresa' or in Caravaggio's 'The Inspiration of Saint Matthew'. On the other hand, there's the dark fragility of Egon Schiele or the dangerous protectiveness and gloomy authenticity of Louise Bourgeois.

WIDENING. And do some of these perspectives directly return in the story of JANUE?

Well, yes and no. JANUE translates these attributes into a completely different medium. Art is fundamental to fashion, but fashion is not to art. Therefore, I see JANUE as a professional translator: the question is how a colour in a painting, a gesture, can become a pattern, or the occasion for a beautiful movement of a garment. A lot in designing the JANUE clothes has to do with finding the right moment, the Kairos, the opportunity to see a potential in past or resent artworks.

BIBLIOTHEEK. Speaking of finding Kairos, what book truly marked you in the deepest sense?

A ground-breaking work that influenced me emotionally and intellectually is Roland Barthes' 'A Lover's Discourse'. We return here to this fragmentary thinking: the book is the genealogy of the most important feeling that he sketches in terms of intensity and variation. To me this is essential literature to deal with the complexities of this notion. This book has been under my pillow for years.

MR. SANDMAN. Sleep and reading are also directly connected to time, as it helps us reflect, to reset ourselves, therefore I was thinking about something you wrote: "Time is out of joint", could you kindly elaborate?

"Time is out of joint" is an impression that our dramaturge, the philosopher of art, Vlad Ionescu, had when he saw our first creations. We talked a lot about how fashion deals with time in terms of constant change on the one hand and, one the other hand, as recurring gestures, desires, and sensations. The sentence comes from Hamlet and in our context, we associate it with a reaction towards the intensity of change that characterizes today's world. Furthermore, it emphasizes JANUE's relation to time which is: "take your time".

OPEN ENDING. I also like that in the notes accompanying JANUE, you wrote that: "she resists growing in time and adopts a new approach towards individuals not bothered by ends". What is your own personal relation to time?

Art historians work with different notions of time. If you understand time as a "decoupage" of chronologically arranged works, objects and so on, then you are already close to how modern fashion works. "Seasons" follow each other year after year and designers are forced to think in terms of this chronology. Alternatively, JANUE conceives time not so much as a "decoupage" but as a "montage" of moments, forms, and sensations. Any Warburg's "Mnemosyne Atlas" is a truly monumental work of this kind of conception of time. The idea is to pick up reoccurring sensations, images, movements, relations to the body and space that we can modulate, work out in different materials, edit, and reedit. JANUE looks in different directions and in this sense, she looks to the future through a profoundly aesthetic reconsideration of the past. So, we don't think in terms of seasons but in terms of "montages" of sensations, reflections, and spaces.

FUTURIST. Aside from being in the moment by thinking in montages and reflection, how do you approach the future?

Our relationship to time can also be explained from a cultural perspective: the idea of a "development" and "evolution" is a very modern position. It is the believe that the future will be better than the past which has defined Europe since the 19th century. Today's relationship to time - if you ask people of my generation - is slightly different. How many of us daresay that the future will surely be better than the present (which is already the past)? Very few, I guess. That enthusiasm that is so typically modern is today quite curbed. The idea is to look at the future of fashion not so much in terms of radical chance but in terms of care, attention, duration, and durability, not so much as rushing time but in literally taking your time.

"Taking one's time" is not so much our label or marketing plan but an attitude, a culture and sensation that we implement in our clothes as much as in their representations, in our images and our recent film. The future of clothing is an opportunity to yield new ideas, to inspire and to make one aware of one's life.

FIRESTARTER. Céline, but if you speak of a culture, attitude, a mindset, how do you connect, contradict, or rebel against the ever turning (but not reflective) fashion world?

Marlo, I would like to say that we do not so much rebel towards the current world of fashion because rebellion is such a cliché, right? We think more like architects or gardeners who consider a situation, reflect on it, and try to generate something new. That is the attitude we have towards the fabrics that are indeed highly qualitative and that other designers have used. So JANUE looks at the world of fashion in a similar way as Shakespeare did: as a theatre where each one is an actor on one big stage. And in theatre each scene has a potential to be played differently, to be reinterpreted. So JANUE is a reader who is driven by a desire to reinterpret these different texts and type of scenography, that we all consume. Fashion is not a world - it is theatre!

EXCLAIM. We state in this issue, ´´Its Time´´, so if I ask you; It’s time to…..?

It’s time to take our time.

DREAMWEAVER. To me, the intellectual approach you take with JANUE, also comes from a deeper understanding of culture, leisure, and travel. How do you journey? And which places do you carry in your soul?

As the Swiss art historian Jacob Burckhardt once said: you can have the world, give me Italy.

RESEARCHER. If you could share some words of advice to younger creatives, what would you tell them, in terms of your own process and creation of JANUE?

I am a young creative. And I would humbly just want to share with you what I have experienced myself: think about carefully looking at the world from the perspective of other creatives, like architects or writers, gardeners or musicians.

ART(WAS)FOREVER. A last one, thank you for your time, as I work as a curator, we discuss the digitalization, NFTs, blockchain and other time-consuming, art streams. How do you personally see the tension between physical and digital, what are the challenges, do we need to look to history more, or look ahead?

Fashion is not just an industry that changes constantly. Fashion is a way of thinking about everything we do, from the way we talk and we dress, already under the ancien régime in Versailles to the new sneakers that are made in China. Product X is fashionable means that it has temporarily the potential to capture the attention of the masses. But that says nothing about its beauty, about its quality or about the personal relation that you have with it. A worn out dress from your childhood can mean much more than anything coming from a sweatshop and signed by a major label. Janue is aware of these tensions and thinks about them in a serene yet critical way. A bit of Stoicism is needed today for Janue as much as for Marcus Aurelius.

Firstly, digitalization is not so much a fashion as a broader global phenomenon that changes our lives. The world is no longer just a play - as I mentioned earlier - but one big screen. The question is what do screens do to us? Do we read better, are we more attentive and intelligent, do we know more, do we imagine better and are we happier than without or with less screens? That is a question as an answer to your question.

Secondly, strictly speaking there is no such a thing as a digital image. All images - even on screens - surround our embodies existence. We move around them, we watch them with our eyes and our mind can focus on them for so long. So images - digital or not - always speak to our bodies. Fashion designers know well the difference between image and sensation. Even though they exploit the former as much as they can, they know that clothes are about sensations and space, about this body that changes in time, that has its own memory and temporary existence. So, yet another example of our serene way of thinking, we are not that much bothered with digital trends because Janue wants to share with you a specific sensation of movement, of space and touch. On the other hand, we do invest a lot of time and attention in our visual archive: images and a film translate this sensation of movement so that we can share and remember it.