Q&A With Carlos of Arne & Carlos

Arne & Carlos have acheived a great deal in short time. At least, that was the perception – when their AW08 collection came out of nowhere and gathered a lot of press attention. Looks can be deceiving however, as the duo have been around for a while putting the work in. We caught up with half of the Arne & Carlos duo, Carlos Zachrison and quizzed him about the brands surge in popularity, growing too big and plans for the future. We also managed to snag some pictures of the SS09 collection, which will be available from Tres Bien soon. Check out the Q&A after the jump.

You guys seem to have come out of nowhere, but you’ve actually been around for a while. How did the big surge in popularity happen?
We started out as a women’s wear brand and mainly did wovens but also some knitwear. After a few years in the business, it turned out we were getting the best feedback on our knitwear, and we started getting noticed for that. After thinking about it for a while we decided to stop doing wovens and focus 100% on our knitwear and we also decided on starting to do men’s knitwear. So, when we showed our first knitwear collection for men’s, for Fall/Winter 2008 in Paris, suddenly, we started to sell to all these high-end fashion stores. I think the reson we got noticed at the time was that we manged to edit our collections in a much better way, once we got rid of everything else except the knitwear.

Is there a worry that the increased interest could make the brand too big?
Right now, we are not too worried about that… In any case, we work with artisans who finish all our garmnents by hand, so even if we could still grow quite a lot – we could never become too big, because there are limitations to how many pieces we can make by hand. What interests us the most, is to do modern garmnets in an artisan way. Even if our capacity is high, our concept could never be mass-produced into hundreds of thousands of pieces.

What did both of you do before you started Arne & Carlos?
Arne was working as a teacher in design and I was graduating from University.

Your pieces have a timelessness that places you outside of the fickle side of fashion, how have you achieved this?
By borrowing elements from our culture: We work with original knitwear patterns, that have been part of the Scandinavian culture for centuries. This is part of our heritage, but we try to re-work them and make pieces that are fresh and modern. The materials we use are softer and much lighter, unlike the original Norwegian wool, which is heavy, thick and scratchy. I think it is a combination of cultural heritage, modern cuts and lighter/softer materials that make these pieces timeless, but still up-to-date.

What are your plans for the future?
We want to keep establishing ourselves internationally as a premium knitwear brand and hopefully find other interesting projects to develop in Peru, to help create more jobs there, in order to preserve their artisan textile traditions, so that they don’t loose that part of their culture, as we have done in Norway, after becoming a rich and developed country.