Designer Highlight: Koos Van Den Akker

Remember Bill Cosby's a-little-too-artesanal-for-family-home-TV-but-hey-it's-the-1980s sweaters?! Ever get caught up drooling over Cooji sweaters, and then hoping no one saw you...like...do that?

Well, let me present to you, if you didn't know him already, the designer who is responsible for that artesanal family man look and those drooling lips.

Koos Van Den Akker, a designer from the Netherlands who brought the patchwork of your grandmother's freedom quilt onto the fashion runways and into the wardrobes of some of our fav. television shows. Starting off as a self taught designer, he later found his way to the couture backrooms of Christian Dior, and started his own label in 1966 in Holland. Then he took a hop, skip and a jump with no money and opened up a gamut of stores along Madison Ave in NYC.


Talk.about.hustle.


I appreciate you, Koss Van Den Akker, for elevating to high art the aesthetic of the artesanal that gives designs like reciclaGEM a place not only in the global visual landscape, but in fashion history.

Freedom Quilt

Women and men throughout the ages have been upcycling well before the word had any relevance, trend status or meaning. They have been upcycling by way of quilts, artfully seemed yardages of cloth created from remnants of other materials. This item had functionality, purpose, and even in some cases, served as a coded map towards freedom.

It's 1850 in the eastern coast of the United States of A, and the Fugitive Slave Law has just been instituted. Imagine squares, triangles, knots, and blanket stitches molded into code. Further imagine quilts leaning outside of window sills, over fences, and under trees as further signs leading enslaved Africans towards the next step along their journey out of enslavement towards free personhood. Imagine a cloth could have so much power as to determine someone's livelihood, citizenship and ability to eat, sleep, dress, and breath as a "free" human being.

I began reciclaGEM simply from finding scraps of old clothes and fabric around my space, freeing my mind from the constraints of conventional garment construction and trusting the fabric to tell me what it wants to do. Over the weekend, I found an old t-shirt and some old quilting cloth, and just began creating...creating in honor of the quilters who literally created freedom with their scraps and in honor of those still seeking freedom.

Free your mind and the rest will follow.



This is a piece in progress, but it's definitely a start.

Even the days when you don't feel like creating, just do something with whatever you have in your midst- as if your life depended on it in honor of those who had to.