Meet Marios Schwab: the new Halston supremo

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Tim Blanks|Es Magazine. Photographs|Hamish Brown. Styled|Nicky Yates

10 April 2012

Marios Schwab likes to watch. The word he prefers is 'observe'. He is an obsessively curious individual whose 'observations' have shaped a surgically precise vision that is one of the London fashion renaissance's most fascinating.

It's something more than mere body-consciousness. His Greek mother Niki was a topographer, his Austrian father Klaus engineered brassieres, which produced in their youngest son a genetic predisposition to map the terrain of the human form. 'People keep very intimate things hidden, and through the process of putting a garment on, you're hiding your body,' Schwab explains, 'so instantly my obsession is about the body you're hiding.'

He's always been like that - not just the body, but anything hidden drew him. 'I love the secret,' Schwab says. 'My mum and auntie say I was the sneakiest child ever, always opening drawers, always wanting to observe things.' His Austrian grandmother had boxes of old family photos that were catnip to young Marios. Then there was the atmosphere in the family home in Athens, with customers stopping by to be fitted in his father's creations. 'I was seeing naked women all the time, it was a very natural thing.' It was also, he concedes, quite sexual.

Paging Dr Freud... adolescent voyeurism bordering on fetishism suggests itself as a perfect prelude to a career in fashion. Schwab knows exactly where I'm going with that train of thought and, over tuna tartare at Shoreditch House, he snorts at my predictability. Still, he admits his brother Alexis, who is a psychologist (his other brother is an investment banker), is always finding intriguing subtexts in his clothes. And he himself says, 'The interesting thing about Marios Schwab is that hint of the erotic, but it's not stereotypical. I do like to expose the body, but not by shoving cleavage in your face, more as an expansion of what you have underneath.' That's been more than enough to seduce the likes of Kylie Minogue, Victoria Beckham and Christina Ricci into buying.

Given his background, there was never much chance that there would be anything ordinary about Schwab. His mother was studying in Austria when she met and married his father. They moved to Greece when Klaus got a job with the lingerie company Triumph, and Marios was born in Athens. His family are big readers, and he describes his education as 'classical with a bit of a twist, from the clashing mentalities, Austrian and Greek'.

But he also insists he was always different. 'When I was young, I was thirsty to get all this information about art and folklore, but Athens was not the place to find eccentric things.' This must have been frustrating for Schwab - he describes himself as a hyperactive kid. He was obsessed with dancing. Every Sunday, aged ten, he would bring his favourite girlfriend to the house, his mother would play Tchaikovsky, and they would prance around, visions of Nijinsky flickering in his mind. 'I wanted to be a ballet dancer but my dad wouldn't let me,' Schwab says now.

Fashion came at him obliquely. For as long as he can remember, he was always sketching people, and he had a well-dressed and beautiful mother who made her own clothes. But when he was 12, his father arranged private French lessons for him. In his teacher's apartment, there were stacks of magazines that she insisted he look at.

Among them was the French edition of Photo, which had a huge effect on him. The magazine's mix meant a portfolio of Helmut Newton or Guy Bourdin fashion images might be followed by pages of gritty black and white photojournalism. 'That was important for me because I got to observe women performing in many environments, rather than the stereotypical fashion editorial.'

Photo didn't offer Schwab an introduction to the work of specific designers, but it helped him fall in love with the way a fashion aesthetic can create a whole little world. Although his parents found fashion scarcely more enchanting than ballet as a career option, they were open-minded enough to let their 15-year-old son leave for design school in Salzburg.

For four years Schwab studied traditional Austrian tailoring techniques, which meant he'd acquired a solid technical education by the time he moved on to the prestigious Esmod fashion school in Berlin. Unsurprisingly, all that time in Sound of Music country (his aunt's husband knew the von Trapps, and actually played himself in the movie) made Schwab want to cut loose.

When he got to Berlin, he came out (again, his parents were very accepting), and got down at hardcore dance clubs such as Tresor, E-Werk and the KitKat. His curlyhaired cuteness guaranteed a hot-property social life but he still managed to graduate with distinction and the Best Student Award.

Schwab relocated to London in 2003, where he took a job in Clements Ribeiro's studio. His skill with scissors caught the eye of Central Saint Martins' tutor Mark Tarbard, who recommended that Marios further his education.

Schwab completed an MA in womenswear under the tutelage of Louise Wilson, the Saint Martins' professor who has shaped the sensibilities of almost every major British designer of the past two decades. He launched his own label in 2005, won Best New Designer at the British Fashion Awards in 2006, and collected the Swiss Textiles Award in 2007 (100,000 buys a nice soft cushion for a fledgling fashion business).

But the bald details of that steady, award-bedecked ascent don't do full justice to the peculiarity of Schwab's achievement. Expanding on 'what you have underneath' has meant that his clothes often have an anatomical particularity. Body-conscious? At its most extreme, a Schwab dress is practically a dissection. There's a sense of veins and muscles and skin folded back. Cloth is so deeply slashed that it's like fashion meeting forensic pathology. (One memorable dress from S/S 2008 opened at the back to reveal a spine and ribcage, delicately defined in black pearls.)

Imagine an episode of CSI staged on a catwalk during London Fashion Week. 'I don't like to see it so harsh,' Schwab counters. 'It's not that literal. I just like when you discover the body through something that is covering it, revealing something that is very intense and precious.' He compares clothes to a habitat in which we live. So is the child who used to poke through drawers looking for secrets now the man peeling back that habitat?

'No, I'm not that obsessive,' Schwab insists indignantly. 'I have a real life beyond fashion.' It includes a boyfriend who is entirely clueless about fashion and who therefore suits Schwab's contrary need for 'space and, at the same time, lots of attention'. But if getting to the heart -and guts - of things has given a macabre tinge to his work, it's also inspired a strange kind of poetry.

If fashion at its best is alchemy, transforming raw materials into objects of beauty, then Schwab is an alchemist. Consider his A/W 2009 collection, where he carved open Swarovski crystals and used their prismatic heart to create fragile, shimmering patterns. How different that approach is from all the other designers who've benefited from Swarovski's sponsorship in the past.

A year earlier, in his A/W 2008 collection, Schwab collaborated on prints with the similarly inclined artist Tom Gallant, who elaborately hand-cuts and collages images from old porn magazines. As beautiful as they were to the eye, they slowly revealed their disconcerting subtext. 'I like to twist the fabric,' the designer says, 'to push the limits of my resources and create something unique. I loved the fact of the heightened reveal, how you cut away layers, revealing the print underneath.'

It's quite a theatrical notion, yet Schwab insists he's all about reality. He says he works closely with women, 'watching the way she puts on a dress, a shoe'. Life with a lingeriedesigning father certainly equipped him for the intimacy of his job. 'Now when I'm with a girl for a fitting, I feel very open with the body,' he says. 'In fact, they might be a little bit shocked at the way I run round the body and measure them with my hands.'

Schwab comes closest to defining his ethos when he says, 'I like the thought process of manipulating the body in a more sensuous way.' That combination of the cerebral and the sensual nails his style. One obvious reference point is the modern classicist Azzedine Alaïa.

Unsurprisingly, Schwab is a fan. 'He has an amazing vision that actually transforms women,' he enthuses. And he feels the same way about Halston, which is fortunate given that in July Schwab was appointed creative director of the legendary New York label that dressed the likes of Bianca Jagger in the 1970s.

He is reluctant to reveal too much about his new position (his first designs for Halston previewed with a presentation during New York Fashion Week). His reticence makes sense given that, since Halston's death in 1990, his legacy has proved a minefield for those who seek to reanimate it.

Tamara Mellon and Harvey Weinstein joined up to buy the company in 2007, and they've already let go one designer, Marco Zanini. It's a measure of the label's durable allure that the latest candidates for the creative directorship were said to include Lars Nilsson, Narciso Rodriguez and Olivier Theyskens (rumoured to have been Anna Wintour's choice for the job). But after months of searching, Bonnie Takhar, president and CEO, was recommended to look at Schwab by Floriane de Saint Pierre, the iconic head-hunter for the fashion industry.

According to Takhar, Schwab's S/S 2009 collection clinched the deal. 'He used a lot of jersey in the collection in a very modern way,' Takhar told Women's Wear Daily. 'The silhouettes were also very fluid, and we thought they had a very modern Halston interpretation.'

At the time, that S/S 2009 collection felt like a noticeably more accessible effort on Schwab's part, even though its mixed message of easy pieces and avant-garderie made it an uneasy hotchpotch of creativity and commerce. However emphatic he is in his denial that the collection was an audition for the Halston job, hindsight underlines an innate compatibility that is surely a good thing. Although Schwab is talking about himself, he could almost mean Halston when he says, 'I like something that runs through time in a certain way that becomes timeless. Yes,

Halston is so different, but we share one very important fact. We want to create enduring fashion, something women keep and wear for years. Women want to be individual and innovative, to have an emotional attachment to what they buy, and Halston was very much like that. He designed for strong personalities. So do I.'

Schwab seems undaunted by the Halston challenge. 'I can start a new chapter,' he says, 'and I love this, discovering new things and taking a risk.' He has an unshakeable confidence in his own vision. 'I always observe things in a different way. From a very young age, I had to live on my own and I was never happy to make my own space because I knew I would move on to the next thing. So I never wanted too many things around me. I wanted to observe them and put them away. I'm still like that.' Yes, Marios Schwab still likes to watch.

Hair by Bianca Tuovi using Bumble and Bumble. Make-up by Sonia Deveney at Balcony Jump using Shu Uemura. Fashion assistant: Orsolya Szabo. Model: Rebecca at Models 1. Shot on location at the Rough Luxe Hotel, 1 Birkenhead Street, WC1 (020 7837 5338), designed by Rabih Hage (rabih-hage.com)

Meet Marios Schwab: the new Halston supremo

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