Wolfgang Joop

A MASTER OF ALL STYLES

The multi-talented Wolfgang Joop had clear role models: the ice-cold beauty of Tamara de Lempicka’s paintings that reflect the 1930s and their ideals of beauty and the expressive, slightly heinous drawings by Egon Schiele. Both artists followed their own paths against the current of society, not submitting themselves to the tastes of the times and therefore creating an individual visual world concentrated on peoples and their bodies. Based on these artists and the many other experiences in his eventful and always independent life as a designer, actor, and author, Wolfgang Joop has developed a type of fashion drawing completely his own, in which “pose and personal demeanor become one.”

For him, art and fashion are most impressive when the objects have the spark of an old master, whom he studied extensively, and possess “an aura of unintentionalness; or the intention to be completely self-satisfied.” The French call this l’art pour l’art. Wolfgang Joop’s sketches are art for art’s sake. “My sketches should look as though they emerged effortlessly. They explain my sense of time, my concept of beauty, with the most minimalist and yet self-assuredly effective means.”

Horst Klöver

Wolfgang Joop was born in Potsdam, Germany, in 1944. After completing high school he studied art, art education, and the psychology of advertising at various schools in Germany. Together with his later wife Karin, Joop took part in a fashion competition thrown by Constanze magazine in 1970, in which the two swept all three awards. Till 1971 Joop worked as a fashion editor, after which he designed for numerous fashion companies in Italy, France, and Germany until 1980.

In 1982 Joop presented his own prêt-a-porter women’s collection and in 1985 his first men’s collection. Additionally he taught classes in design at Berlin’s college of arts, which conferred an honorary professorship on him in 1987. In the same year, Joop founded JOOP!, in which he held shares until 2001. During the 1990s, Joop also designed dinnerware pieces for Meißener porcelain manufacturers.

Today Wolfgang Joop is owner of Wunderkind (founded 2003), is involved in the community, and writes for high-end national newspapers and magazines.