There is still something of the art student about Marios Schwab, despite the fact that he graduated from Central St Martin’s eight years ago. As you walk up the open-air concrete stairs to his studio in Dalston, there’s a plastic chair and a cracked dish filled with cigarette stubs as well as a couple of portfolios in the stairwell. The studio itself is sparse with little on the walls and no curtains; it’s like he’s about to pack up and move back home to his parents’ place.
He looks exhausted. It’s no surprise: he has only just got back from selling his collection in Paris. Before that he staged his label’s autumn/winter show at London Fashion Week, immediately after unveiling his collection for Halston of New York, the iconic label that he has worked with for two years as creative director.
One of the items in Schwab’s spring/summer 2011 collection
But Schwab hasn’t stopped since his return home and is already working on his spring/summer 2012 collection, which won’t hit the runway until September. It explains all the elaborate patterns and intricate drawings that have been hurried off the work top as we sit down to talk.
“We pretty much have to start straight away. We have to send designs out to factories in Italy and the shoe designs have to be done quite early because that’s an entirely different process. There are stages that require early strategies and an early thought process. When you’re in this mindset, you are fully in fashion.
“But it’s such a relief to finish a collection, especially in fashion, because you work with so many people and you’re commuting between so many places – it’s very intense.”
He says that his most creative ideas often come in the lull after the storm of the international shows. The positive response to his latest show must be inspirational. After the marmite effect of the Joan Jett mullets he teamed with slip dresses and leather harnesses for spring/summer 2011 (pictured), the leather dresses in rusts, limes and blood hues won back critical approval.
And the best ideas come to him in the Dalston studio and his home which is downstairs.
He finds this oppressive at times, but likes the short walk to work in the morning. His most recent collection was inspired by two essays on aesthetics, but Schwab rejects the suggestion that his work is an academic concept. He will often take a traditional technique – brogueing in his latest work – and turn the “uptight” practice on its head.
“We start as amateurs and then specialise in something. It involves a lot of experimenting. We want to make things that have personality and a soul inside. The garment should pay tribute to the one who crafts it and who makes it. It’s so important to have an ideology behind what you’re doing and not just for the sake of being worn once or twice. I believe in enduring fashion that can last for longer than just one season.”
When asked about his thoughts on designer John Galliano, who was reported last month saying that he “loves Hitler”, Marios said: “It’s hard to believe, with somebody like that, who has such open-minded creativity, that this is what he is really like.”
He was born in Athens to Austrian and Greek parents and studied in Berlin, but was ultimately drawn to Dalston 12 years ago because of its Turkish communities. “I feel more at home here than any other place. I love the colours, the range of cultures that you meet here. It’s fascinating to go into the market and see this explosion of colour and sound.”
His favourite haunts are local ones; the Turkish eateries, the Rio cinema, the Dalston Superstores.
He loved having the Arcola theatre at the end of the road before it moved. Schwab is very nostalgic about Dalston rewound 10 years. He fears that the Olympics and the speed of regeneration in the area will jeopardise its unique community spirit. “So many things have changed and so many places have closed down since I moved here.
“I find it a little bit sad when you have a truly unique cultural part of town and then it changes drastically. I just don’t like it when things are getting lost because of major changes. But then again I’m very interested in the future – that’s part of what I do.”
Although Dalston is no longer his little secret, he has no plans to move. “We love our landlord and we have made our own history here.” But it won’t be long before he’s off on holiday for a well-deserved Easter break in his native Greece to visit family. It’s the first time in the interview that he has allowed himself to smile – the memories are clearly fond ones. For all his professionalism, and the intensity of his working life, Schwab is a home bird through and through.
