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Ones to Watch
Four emerging houses hitting fashion week.Tim LabendaA look for spring.
TIM LABENDA: SWITCHING GEARS
Wurzburg isn't exactly the city you'd expect an aspiring young designer to settle in. Even a local taxi driver was skeptical as he turned into a narrow residential lane on the outskirts of this hamlet, studded with cathedrals, castles, fortresses and vineyard-studded. But it's precisely the setting's quietness, and his atelier in what was meant to be the swimming pool house of this Seventies-era architect's home, that made Tim Labenda fall in love with this "hick town," as he put it.
"I have so much peace and quiet that I can really concentrate on my work, without distractions," he said, sitting under the shade of the weeping willow in the studio's adjoining garden. "And being in the middle of Germany, I can get everywhere I need to quickly, be it Paris, Berlin, Munich..."
Labenda trained as a men's tailor at Hugo Boss, then went to fashion school in Pforzheim, during which time he held a men's internship at Kenneth Cole and spent a guest semester in Halifax studying textile design. A stint with men's wear designer Ute Ploier in Vienna followed. When the 28-year-old founded his own label here last summer, however, he switched gears to focus on women's wear. While he'd like to do both men's and women's at some point, "for the beginning, it's important to do one thing right," he said.
"For the beginning, it's important to do one thing right."
-- TIM LABENDA
It's been an eventful first year. Vogue Germany editor in chief Christiane Arp -- who spotted Labenda's first stab at women's fashion while guest-mentoring on the local version of TV reality modeling competition "The Fashion Hero" -- invited him to participate in Vogue Salon during fashion week in Berlin in July. His second Vogue Salon season in January attracted the attention of German e-commerce giant Zalando, which signed him to design a 10-piece "Tim Labenda for Zalando" fall 2014 capsule collection. It hits the site's Premium section Sept. 1.
Labenda won the German Apparel Industry's 2013 European Fashion Award, and in April, captured the Steffl Best Newcomer Award, which provides him with sales space in Steffl, Vienna's oldest department store. He's...