The Couture-Like Details Make These Everyday Pieces Extra-Special
Each season, AZ FACTORY invites an independent guest designer into its collaborative studio – for spring/summer ’23, it welcomes LUTZ HUELLE, who puts a playful spin on wardrobe essentials
Launched in 2021 by Alber Elbaz, AZ Factory was described by the late designer as his very own “dream factory”, where he could bring together talent across the industry to explore and create “smart fashion that cares”. In order to continue his legacy and help build this original vision, the label now opens its doors every season to new guest designers, which it calls its ‘amigos’. The studio is a space where design talent can be nurtured and designers are given the freedom and space to explore what exactly it is that we all need from our clothes.
For spring/summer ’23, AZ Factory welcomed Lutz Huelle as its guest designer, who first started his career as an assistant to Martin Margiela, and has owned his independent label, which shows at Paris Fashion Week, for two decades. He explains that there is one question that he always comes back to when designing any of his collections: “What is it that my friends want to wear?” Although Huelle only met Elbaz once, it was clear to him when working on this project that they both shared a passion for designing clothes that will primarily make people feel comfortable and can be worn in lots of different ways.
“The only way positive things can happen is when you feel good working together… I myself do my best work when I feel good and am surrounded with people I enjoy being around
”Lutz Huelle
Huelle’s collection functions as a versatile, modern capsule, made up of essential wardrobe pieces: pleated or short dresses, oversized dress-shirts, denim ensembles. Indeed, Huelle’s signature aesthetic is to take functional clothes and to add unexpected glamour (often with luminous print or theatrical ruffles) and he has certainly brought this playfulness to his AZ Factory designs. He plays with conventional proportions and adds couture-like details to everyday basics, such as adding swirly ruffles to the neckline of a cotton dress or making a white shirt so oversized you can wear it alone. The designer offers a contemporary take on denim with a directional jacket and mini skirt ensemble. Elsewhere in the collection, the black stretch-jersey midi dress is a standout piece – at the top, it has a relaxed tank-top-style neckline, but then the dress falls into a dramatic bubble hem made from recycled taffeta. It’s the ultimate lesson in modern styling.
For Huelle’s product story, he played with the idea of the AZ Factory alphabet, and settled on the letter F, exploring the theme of friendship. It was a natural choice, given the collaborative structure of the label’s partnership with the ‘amigos’, as well as knowing this was also a core value of Elbaz. Friendship has always been an important element of Huelle’s work, even at the beginning of his career. In 1992, Edward Enninful commissioned Huelle to create an editorial shoot for i-D magazine with his close friends Wolfgang Tillmans and Alexandra Bircken, and they turned the story into an expression of friendship. “No one knew it would resonate with people so much,” he says. “It touched people because it was about freedom, about possibility.”
AZ Factory is all about creating a new collaborative way of designing clothes, and amplifying the work of others. “The only way positive things can happen is when you feel good working together,” says Huelle. “This notion that you should suffer at work is so outdated. I myself do my best work when I feel good and am surrounded with people I enjoy being around. Collaborating with AZ Factory didn’t feel like work at all.” And it shows in the clothes – if we had to use one word to describe them, it would be fun.
Disover A-Z Factory x Lutz Huelle
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