A Comeback of Vintage Collage

If you didn’t read the labels, the clothes hanging on a rolling metal rack at Decades, a Melrose Avenue vintage boutique, might seem like samples plucked from the upcoming spring fashion collections. But the 1970s and ‘80s patchwork peasant blouses, the metallic collage blouses and the intricately appliqued silk pajamas are the work of fabric craftsman Koos van den Akker .

The Dutch-born New York designer, who rose to fame in the late ‘70s before falling into relative obscurity, is having a fashion renaissance that’s one part serendipity and two parts hard work. “What’s nice about it,” said the designer from his New York workroom, “is that those things usually happen after you’re dead.”

Virtually everything about the renewed interest in Van den Akker is out of the ordinary. The 62-year-old designer’s signature collage style has been openly acknowledged as the source of inspiration in major fashion collections, though borrowers rarely credit their sources. Even if the origins are recognized, the designer almost never profits from the new exposure, but Van den Akker is poised to see his reputation and his pocketbook rewarded. Remarkably, though high fashion is famously allergic to associations with the mass market, for three years, Van den Akker’s diffusion line called Koos Of Course! has made him one of the top-selling designers on the home shopping channel QVC.

“It’s all about old clothes,” the designer says deferentially, “but now it’s just called vintage.” Perhaps the revival of Van den Akker--who has quietly operated a small couture salon in Manhattan for nearly 30 years--is most unusual because it came not from a museum retrospective or a celebrity wearing his clothes, but largely from the efforts of Los Angeles vintage dealer Cameron Silver.

“It’s all for him that it happened,” said Van den Akker in his slightly fractured English. “Thanks for Cameron Silver.”

Silver, 30, will host a private party next Friday launching a retrospective of the designer’s 39-year career at Decades Gallery, the new show space at his 41/2-year-old boutique. While patrons sip Heineken beers and nibble Dutch chocolates, they will meet the gregarious Van den Akker and see firsthand the source of the distinctive patchwork patterns and peasant styles that appeared in the spring 2002 collections of Jill Stuart, Marc Jacobs, Louis Vuitton and Paris designer Nicolas Ghesquiere, whose Balenciaga Le Dix collections have been top trendsetters for the past few years. His spring Balenciaga collection of intricately pieced prints, metallics and metal mesh was an instant hit. Leading designers recognized the significance of collage to fashion today. “Van den Akker was the 1970s and ‘80s interpretation of that moment we loved about the ‘60s,” said Robert Duffy, chairman of Marc Jacobs, who also designs Louis Vuitton. “His was the grown-up, designer version. There were a lot of artsy, craftsy collections back then, but Koos, I think, did it the best.”

As a dealer in designer vintage pieces, Silver was among the few privy to the often-secretive fashion research that led to Van den Akker. When Ghesquiere arrived at Silver’s shop late last summer and asked to see vintage Van den Akker, Silver adroitly realized the significance of his request. He tracked down Van den Akker’s publicist and convinced the designer to stage a retrospective at his Los Angeles gallery. Silver began promoting the show with press releases and a phone call to a well-placed friend who helped land a mention in Harper’s Bazaar. Later, Vogue published a story about the designer’s influence.

Silver himself hadn’t always appreciated the artsy-crafty feel of the clothes. About three years ago, the vintage dealer bought several pieces from a New York client. “I didn’t know if they were good or not, so I put them in my ‘nobody-gets-it’ bag,” he said. “It took me a couple of years to see the relevancy of his clothes.” That bag wound up in the garage of his assistant, Jarred Cairns, who was sent to immediately fetch it as Ghesquiere inspected other Van den Akker pieces at the store. The bag contained items that are very likely to become a key look of this spring and beyond: peasant blouses with intricate collage.

“And a revolution was born,” Silver quipped. “Now I wish I had 30 of them.”

Silver will have dozens of new works that he commissioned from Van den Akker, who personally handcrafts his collage designs. The designer is making a small collection of $600 men’s shirts, similar to the sample that Silver frequently wears these days--a fanciful blend of contrasting top-stitching running across twisted strips of red fabric, Asian-inspired prints and colorful patterns.

“A lot of people ask, ‘is that [Roberto] Cavalli?’” Silver said. The Italian designer’s wildly colored and handcrafted clothes heralded fashion’s ongoing return to color, pattern and gypsy shapes these past few seasons. Now that many other designers have adopted color and patchwork, stores have come calling to one of the craft’s premier practitioners. The best of Van den Akker’s work combines a rustic and naive silhouette with sophisticated sewing techniques and color palettes, a combination that defines current fashion.

“Out of this, I got an account for Bendel’s,” the designer said of the famed Henri Bendel fashion emporium in New York. Later this month, the heavy-set Dutchman will wear his signature round glasses and striped bib apron and enact what may be the store’s first fashion performance art. “I’m going to sit in the window for three days sewing.” At last, the fashion elite will get to see what Middle America, and Van den Akker’s select couture clients, such as Harry and Julie Belafonte, Lou Reed and Barbara Walters, will have witnessed for years: A designer who actually sews his own collection.

For his debut on QVC in 1998, Van den Akker sat at his sewing machine while glibly chatting about life and fashion. “They gave me an hour, and in less than half an hour, we were sold out,” the designer recalled. “You can imagine, all my life, all my time in New York, I sit behind a sewing machine with a handful of people around me, and all of a sudden, we are on the air and the set up was the same thing, but with 68 million people watching.”

His monthly appearances are enormously satisfying to the designer, in part because they help secure his financial future. “Camera stuff is easy. I’m good at it,” he said. “That’s the easy stuff because you don’t have to deal with them [the customers]. They just call in. It’s like being in vaudeville. You make people happy for $60.”

It’s easy to appreciate why viewers find the designer, so entertaining--he tells wonderful stories that make fun of fashion and his quirky personality. “I went into the [Dutch] army with a portable sewing machine when I was 18 years old,” begins one tale. “I had with me a bridesmaid collection that I was working on. I have photos of me and the guys sitting around the sewing machine. That never happened before. They always sit around firearms.” The story ends with the fledgling designer being shuttled off to a remote basement, making clothes for the wife and daughters of a top-ranking officer.

Never taking himself too seriously has helped and hindered his career. Van den Akker may be the only working designer who simultaneously operates a couture salon selling one-of-a-kind $1,200 lace dresses, as well as a $30 to $70 mass-market collection that interprets his originals for a fraction of their cost. “I make a sample for $35 a yard in brocade, they come back at $1.75,” he said slightly exaggerating the low wholesale cost of QVC’s offshore replications. He’s thrilled that his ideas reach a wider audience.

“It’s the crown of my work,” he said. “It came at the right time. I’m old and I need some money for getting older. I haven’t been very good in business. But I sew well.”

The history of Van den Akker’s career is as patchworked as his designs. The onetime apprentice to Christian Dior set up his first store in The Hague in 1965 and operated it for about two years. “I had a beautiful salon, like an apple--beautiful on the outside, but rotten on the inside,” he said.

The subsequent death of his father jolted him into acting on a long-held desire to leave his native Netherlands in 1968 for New York. “A month after my father died, I just literally walked out,” he said. “My friends paid the bills and cleaned it all up. I took the boat because I couldn’t imagine that I could change my life in five hours on a plane. The first thing I did was climb up the Empire State Building and look around. I thought, ‘I’m home.’” He sat his sewing machine on a New York sidewalk, and piece by piece, built a business until he could afford to open a store on Columbus Avenue in Manhattan in 1971.

Though Van den Akker says he understands New York well (“it’s very Dutch somehow”) other cities proved to be less hospitable. He opened a short-lived boutique on Camden Drive in Beverly Hills in 1978, at the apex of his popularity.

“We spent money like water,” he said of his time in Los Angeles. “I had a ball. But it didn’t work at all. I was so unprepared.” In his heyday, his colorful sweaters appeared regularly on Bill Cosby when he starred in his TV show, and ended up as the favorite items of a cross-section of society. When Van den Akker called past clients seeking items for the upcoming retrospective and sale, many would only lend them, such as New York socialite Blaine Trump, who wouldn’t part with her 1980s collage tweed skirt. Now his vintage pieces sell at Decades and flea markets for $200 for blouses to $1,200 for an intricately pieced cashmere coat.

Looking over the Decades collection, Van den Akker’s craft is apparent. For example, the designer cut a simple blouse from floral chiffon, but then slashed the same fabric into ribbons that he knitted into a sweater vest. An unusual range of fabrics cover his pieces, though they combine in surprising harmony. Van den Akker often scours New York flea markets for antique textiles that he’ll freely apply to his originals. “It really is non-ostentatious haute couture,” Silver said. “He does make something for everybody, which is really refreshing in American fashion.”

Whether they are new or old, pricey or affordable, many of Van den Akker’s pieces are roomy. “They are big shapes and it’s easy,” said Van den Akker. “That is why I have such a big success with QVC. They are not size 6 or 8. I don’t give a damn. The bigger the better! The more space to make a collage!”

The designer’s revival comes at a time when fashion is seeking unique voices, particularly ones that evoke the reassuring comfort of a colorful, handmade garment. “I haven’t compromised. I still sit here behind my sewing machine and I still make beautiful things,” he said. “I haven’t changed. But the world around me has.”

The retrospective runs Jan. 12 through February at Decades, 8214 1/2 Melrose Ave., L.A.. 11:30 a.m. to 6 p.m. Monday through Saturday. Free. (323) 655-0223.