Inside the Mysterious Architecture Studio Behind Some of Fashion's Biggest Moments

By Manuela Hainz

On a nondescript street in Berlin-Schöneberg, you’ll come across a think tank devoted to contemporary culture. Subliminal Operations GmbH (Ltd), it says on the doorbell of the Sub studio. Andrea Faraguna and Niklas Bildstein Zaar’s design concepts have contributed to a number of disruptive moments in 2020s fashion, music, and art. Among their fascinating works: The set of a Balenciaga show inspired by the European Parliament, Anne Imhof’s Nature Mortes performance at Paris’s Palais de Tokyo, Kanye West’s Donda Academy, and Travis Scott’s Utopia tour.

Andrea Faraguna guides me through their spacious offices, which extend over two floors of an old industrial building. There’s plenty of stucco, wooden doors, and glass block windows. Computer screens dominate the otherwise-empty rooms, along with, here and there, an architectural model, material samples and lots of books. On the shelves, titles like Bunker Archaeology and Positive Nihilism sit next to Raf Simons’s Redux and Wolfgang Tillmans‘s 2017. Old chairs line the hallways, and a T-shirt with the Ukrainian flag along with Balenciaga Knife boots hang like ready-to-wear on the wall.

Faraguna is a trained architect. At an early age, he sought a connection to art. After college, he moved from his hometown of Venice to Berlin, where he found the freedom and the space to grow. In our joint Zoom call, Niklas Bildstein Zaar told me that he never pursued any degrees or more formal studies after age 16. “I dropped out of school then,” he says. At 17, he moved from northern Sweden, at first to London, and then to China for a language course. It was there where he discovered the first generation of online culture. He also wrote a small column for a Chinese publication about absurd aspects of contemporary life, like LARPing, live action role-playing, in which people make and wear hyper-realistic silicone masks. Bildstein Zaar stayed in Asia in his early 20s, learning Mandarin, and then later moved to Paris.

Faraguna and Bildstein Zaar met in either 2016 or 2017. Neither of them remembers exactly. In the meantime, their atypical architecture firm now has 25 employees. About half of the staff are architects, with the other half having backgrounds in 3D modeling, storytelling, welding, and industrial design. Their answer for what exactly they do is as complex as their projects. Their approach to design is cross-disciplinary and structural, interwoven with literature, architecture, art, and music—much like Bauhaus, Dada, and Futurism were in their times. Their shows and stage sets tell stories with sociological, philosophical, and political dimensions, with the experience itself a core element. Something that appears banal at first glance can become a design object. That banality is turned into a stylistic device—but the duo never simply replicates it. Instead, they employ a design language that demands up close engagement in order that you can see more than what is immediately obvious; it’s an approach that Demna Gvasalia, the creative director of Balenciaga, has also been pursuing since he co-founded the fashion house Vetements—when he was often criticized for his DHL T-shirt, and an Ikea bag that, made of fine Nappa leather rather than plastic, became a luxury object.

Bildstein Zaar: Through a mutual friend, I think. The first time we met I had been staying in his bedroom, when he was away for a year. Do you remember? And then eventually we met. I got to know your room before I got to know you, which is a little bizarre.

Farangua: That’s funny. Yeah, we met a couple of times. I remember once you came to Naples when I was living there. And then we met again in Berlin. We started working on a project in Florence in 2016 or 2017 and from then we started working together repeatedly.

Bildstein Zaar: Both of my parents were in service professions that required uniforms. I always saw my mum when she got ready for work—she would wear an air stewardess uniform. My father had his elegant uniforms ready, lined up in his wardrobe. I’m very uniform in terms of how I dress. It’s usually always in black, pathetically enough.

Bildstein Zaar: I have a lot of military gear, that’s for sure. A lot. Everything from dress uniforms to more utilitarian ones. But also items that go into sort of different types of fetish as well. That is something where Demna and I have a kind of shared history. There’s something so empowering with a uniform, I think as an idea. It comes with an ideology and a proposition.

Bildstein Zaar: The ability to become something else is most strongly represented in the idea of a uniform. Notions of uniforms today obviously can be something much broader and it’s not just something that’s connected to your profession. It can be something subcultural or it can be many different kinds of dress codes that exist beyond the formal notion of a uniform.

Bildstein Zaar: Demna initially had an idea to do something around sociocultural tropes, an interest that is really close to his heart and informs a lot of his ethos of working. What was interesting for me was really trying to identify something that’s kind of ungraspable that’s happening at a particular moment. In this case, there was a big conversation about politics in Europe and what it meant. It reached a type of peak when suddenly it was clear that one of the founding members of the European Union did not want to participate anymore. [Editor’s note: The Balenciaga Spring 2020 show with the faux parliament took place in September 2019 as the UK was in the process of exiting the European Union.] It held a lot of meaning, not just politically, but also emotionally. I think it was, for our generation, something very, very critical. Then, of course, the political situations in America were unfolding too. We started reflecting on that in terms of how to make people feel embedded within that type of decision making. And out of that, the blue space was born.

Bildstein Zaar: We start with more of a discourse. He, with his confidence as a designer, will maybe give us a word to interpret.

Faraguna: A feeling of a space or a visual reference or a word. Then we build on that, proposing solutions for the space and then the elaboration of the ambience. And sometimes we also propose something from scratch. And this starts the conversation. It is like latently working on you and your perception of space. You look around and this is very connected to what we were saying before. That is, it changes your way of seeing things.

Bildstein Zaar: We develop ideas from a thought to an ideology with sketches and then visualizations, modeling, renderings, and architectural drawings. We always kind of look at it from a sort of semantic point of view, trying to understand what is the common denominator of a space from its materials to its typology and to the various objects and signifiers we choose to place within those spaces. Hopefully, like an orchestra, we create a feeling that that is calibrated to what we want people to take from it. The idea of semantics holds a lot of meaning for me and trying to decipher the images of the world and condense them into a space that people get to experience.

Balenciaga Spring 2020

Faraguna: Of course, it’s not about actually being in a parliament, but about creating a space with enough information and detail to establish a connection. You give the subtle but clear idea while still allowing everyone the space to interpret it.

Bildstein Zaar: Yes. It’s something unresolved. I think also in our work, we try to identify what are these kind of clusters of ideas that come pre-existing and how can we break them apart and then reassemble them or shuffle them. It’s an example that is somewhere between abstraction and immediacy. The message is not forced, and you have space to reflect upon it. It becomes more personal.

We don’t even have a website or anything like that. People surprisingly found us somehow, and there’s something beautiful about that.

Bildstein Zaar: We don’t even have a website or anything like that. People surprisingly found us somehow, and there’s something beautiful about that. Maybe through word of mouth, or… I don’t really know how it happened.

Faraguna: It’s true. The moment we started working with Balenciaga was also when Anne approached us. And they had nothing to do with each other; it was more just about the people that surround us. It probably has to do with a similar way of thinking, a similar aesthetic, or just coincidence.

Bildstein Zaar: At this point, it’s about having a lot of trust. We have a quite developed workflow which lends itself to cutting through the noise. We almost don’t need to speak anymore.

Bildstein Zaar: The idea was, okay, we’re coming to America. In the beginning, we hadn’t decided that it would be at the New York Stock Exchange, it just needed to be somewhere emblematic of America. Something that speaks to this moment in time. The stock market is a place of great commerce that generates huge successes, but it’s also a really complicated place. That can be a really deep conversation really fast. And that was really interesting for us at the time. There wasn’t much to add; the subtext alone was strong enough. With everything we did there, we were just trying to stretch the space and give it a cinematic touch. The space itself then pulled off all the tricks. Demna of course clearly had the last word in terms of the collection that he chose to present there.

Balenciaga Resort 2023

Bildstein Zaar: We never see the collection before the show. We see it on the day of the show. That is the big excitement for me and Andrea. For the New York Stock Exchange, we had modeled a complete perfect replica. If anybody needs a 3D model of that space, we probably have the most accurate one that exists with every single screen, every single booth, every single chair. We had studied it to the point where we had a virtual facsimile.

Suddenly, when you’re atop a cliff staring out at the infinite potential, you just want to do something familiar.

Faraguna: It’s very evident in Balenciaga. In our case, we propose something that isn’t immediately recognized as subversive, but it has something operating behind what you see at first. Your perception of a space and the way you see things changes.

Bildstein Zaar: It’s about shining a light on things that are already there and that anyone can experience. Subversive can also be a word that talks a lot about power dynamics. As people choose to be attuned to their surroundings, they start seeing patterns, and they shape their lives around those patterns they see and the images that they choose to interpret. All that gets staged in the artificial construct of a fashion show. But it’s not necessarily about trying to undermine anything or the notion of power.

Bildstein Zaar: It has a personal meaning for me. My grandmother’s father was a farmer in the forests of Sweden. Later in his life, he discovered an interest in design and craft. The particular style in Swedish is called allmoge. It was a very particular kind of artisanal craftsmanship found in rural communities in Sweden, anchored in a kind of Protestant faith. It is kind of simplified—the essence or ornamentation for the very simple things in life, if you will. I discovered recently that my great-grandfather had written a book on the subject. Then I started buying these chairs obsessively. I don’t know yet exactly where they’ll end up, but they’re part of a bigger plan.

Faraguna: They are an existential manifesto. I love the thought that I could be capable of doing whatever it takes to draw and build a chair. It’s about, well, being self-reliant.

Bildstein Zaar: With all the different things that we’ve managed to do in such a short period of time, our skills, and our knowledge of how to make things have increased exponentially. Suddenly, when you’re atop a cliff staring out at the infinite potential, you just want to do something familiar. The infinite potential feels a little bit intimidating. Terrible, absolutely.

Bildstein Zaar: We started developing our own custom AI a while ago to generate something that aligns with our references. In the beginning it was not so successful and we called it the slot machine because when we started to put in some different inputs, a degree of randomness came out. What we wanted to achieve was to combine the randomness with something more specific. And that proved to be quite challenging as a task.

Bildstein Zaar: There are these scraping websites that simply output and showcase all the different types of ideas and the different types of diffusion models that are open source of things that people have done. It’s fascinating when you look at these text-based prompts that different people have tried to create, because there are so many recurring themes. There are cats, there are astronauts, there are unicorns. People always type the same shit. When you’re sitting there looking at that empty prompt bar and faced with infinite potential, what do you want to create? People are like, well, I’ll do a cat then.

Bildstein Zaar: When people seek a vocabulary to describe what we do, they lean towards the term Brutalism. As an architectural movement, Brutalism is about more than just the use of concrete, which I guess is a common denominator between that movement and what we do. For us, Brutalism comes with specific forms and geometries that were also an expression of the deployment of that material. We consider different interpretations, and we use a range of materials that still represent a notion of the standard. The traditional understanding of what constitutes formal Brutalism does not really appear in our work; but the idea does of a kind of a building shell with various expressionist or surrealist interpretations of building elements.

Balenciaga Store Berlin

Faraguna: It connects with what we’re trying to do with the shows. Entering these environments, one experiences a moment of disorientation. You see a collection of things that already had a life before the store opened. So it’s a narrative, a storytelling approach. You enter a space and you’re in the middle of a story, in the middle of an event that started long before you encountered it. It’s about taking building materials, a fragment of the city, a fragment of the ordinary, and putting it all together in an orchestrated way into a spatial composition. You forget the fact that you are in a store and you need to understand how to use that space. It triggers a reaction that is interesting for us and for the users when they are inside.

Bildstein Zaar: One of the new seats that Andrea designed has a typical polyurethane leg cap at the base that you pop on the steel tubing. It’s a very banal little thing that exists everywhere. The idea behind the original design was to find something cheap that wouldn’t scratch the floor. We study the language of form, research it, and incorporate it into the tenets of our design language. Something mundane becomes an essential element of our strategy. For some Balenciaga shelves, we looked at different types of aluminum profiles for generic, cheaply produced windows that we extrude in another type of way so they can hold a bag. Or we take a very standardized type of lighting for construction sites: We redesign them in aluminum and change this geometry to kind of glisten, really. This redefines the re-engineered. These are beautiful things that people weren’t aware of.

It's always about capturing a moment. We reflect on identity and how it all starts with the mind, with our sensory capacities.

Bildstein Zaar: It’s really funny that when we send our designs to different manufacturers to engineer them, then they don’t notice that, you know, it’s kind of like this incessant type of detailing where we spend hours defining the curve on such a small plastic cap to a seat. We always notice that people think it’s just hocus-pocus, something you come across with Bauhaus. They ignore the intense endeavor that goes into perfecting something, and then they quite readily substitute it for anything off the shelf. We hate that.

Faraguna: Niklas comes from the fashion world. I come from architecture. The ways we see things meet in the middle. Both relate to bodies. The different ways in which fashion and architecture deal with bodies is interesting. Garments are, in the truest sense of the word, man’s second skin. And architecture is the third. Fashion is directly about the body, while buildings are more of an extension of it. What interests me is the way they relate differently to time. The interaction between our body and architecture is different. Fashion is immediate, in the here and now. But architecture functions on a different time scale; it wants to last for eternity.

Bildstein Zaar: It’s the circadian rhythm of the fashion world. When we first started working with Demna, we were invited into, let’s say, his schedule. There’s an exact rhythm to how things have to be produced. It’s always about capturing a moment. We reflect on identity and how it all starts with the mind, with our sensory capacities. It’s like the layers of an onion. Those concentric circles of reality. Within these circles lies a particular dynamic between the individual and space. There are the garments, then comes the space, then the room, then the building, then it becomes the street and the community.

Balenciaga Fall 2022

Bildstein Zaar: We’ve been experimenting with the impermanent and ephemeral for a long time. Collaborations are beautiful, but always really challenging. The idea of a collaboration means striving for something fantastic together. Giving up your ego and realizing that the best idea is the one that needs to survive, but that’s not always the reality. When you talk about ideas, the dialogue you have with people, it’s more like speed dating. I’m interested in exploring something that holds a bit more permanence. A nest, something that stands the test of time. A space where I can have more constancy for myself. With the knowledge that we are all just a flicker in time in the universe.

Bildstein Zaar: Perhaps that’s what I mean. Maybe. Yes.

Manuela Hainz is style editor at GQ.

This story originally appeared in GQ Germany. It was translated by John Oseid.