Creative Profile: Lernert & Sander

If the pace of life leaves you in a tangle, you’d do well to take a moment to watch such meditative treats as Prada sweaters being literally unravelled, or a chocolate bunny gently dissolving, courtesy of the Dutch duo Lernert & Sander. Now making their wry, meticulously planned, minimalist films for brands such as COS and Kenzo, they tell Tim Cumming about finding the funny in fashion

There’s not so much a line as a busy two-lane blacktop running between the worlds of art and commerce, and Amsterdam-based creative duo Lernert & Sander have travelled back and forth along that route for the best part of a decade. They’ve delivered art films, installations and painstakingly crafted spots for fashion brands such as COS, and window displays for Selfridges and Maastricht’s Kiki Niesten, for which the Dutch duo set about unravelling sweaters by Prada, Jil Sander, Céline and Chloe to their womb state as balls of yarn, which they sold with stills of the meticulous reversal to private collectors. In the film Everything they mixed all 1,400 of the perfumes released in 2012 into one giant bottle, and installed it at the Colette shop in Paris, where patrons could try it for themselves. Some said it was redolent of Chanel No 5, while a New York Times reviewer detected a variety of notes ranging from rotten peaches to baseball mitts.

Lernert Engelberts and Sander Plug first connected in the early 2000s when they found themselves in the same room wearing “the same pair of hideous shoes”. However, they later admit that this is an artificial construct, to be changed any time a journalist asks them how they first met – it could be “wearing the same hideous glasses”, for instance, or “in hospital having the same hideous organ removed”.

Their first collaboration was 2007’s Chocolate Bunny, a commission for Dutch TV channel KRO. “We were invited by a broadcaster who wanted to make art films for children, Big Art For Small People,” says Sander. “We are quite moralistic sometimes in our work, and we wanted to show them that they cannot always get what they want. So we thought, let’s make something beautiful, then destroy it in front of their eyes.” Lernert adds that “it was showing them something they want to have, then taking it away from them.” Perhaps unsurprisingly, it received just one 7am showing. “The broadcaster got a lot of complaints from parents,” says Sander. “They said their children didn’t want to go to school anymore. So they took it out. We were censored.” While it may have bypassed the kids, it attracted clientele. For a while, though, they felt pigeon-holed by Chocolate Bunny’s colour aesthetic. “The colourfulness was more of a loop to give children the aesthetic world they were already aware of on TV,” says Lernert. “But it’s a style that stuck to us a bit after that piece, because it was a success. That’s the tricky part – you make something successful and people want you to revisit it. But we think colour should be effective and used in a communicative way, we don’t want to do something in a random way.”

Puddles of bunny and pop-up eye shops

Their horror of the random (“We don’t jam”) and penchant for planning is one of their core strengths and part of the creative diet that helps them to preserve a robust constitution. Others include eschewing CGI, preparing every detail before a shoot, never indulging in fancy camerawork, and avoiding the internet for expanding (or constricting) imagination and its subsequent creative production.

Following on from the brown puddle that was Chocolate Bunny came a series of confessional films titled Procrastinators (“It was only after making that series that we realised we were definitely not procrastinating.”) in which creative types discuss the fine art of wasting time, and How To Explain It To My Parents, for which they invited young abstract artists to explain their difficult and complicated art to their parents. The static camera, monochrome set-up, bottles of beer and pots of tea on a plain wooden table that was placed between the generations like some visual metaphor, made for a tightly focussed work that was at the same time sly, funny, ironic and sad – communicating one’s inner creative drive to an uncomprehending other, even your mum or dad – can prove to be a Sisyphean task. These films found their way onto the screening circuit of museums and galleries – they were art-world filmmakers at that point. “Then we wanted to make more money, rather than just get slaps on the back,” says Sander. “So we moved towards advertising and fashion film.”

The first step was to find an agency, so they went to London and signed with Blink (they have since signed to Academy Films in the UK, Adult in Brussels for Benelux territories, and Hornet in the US). Their first commercial spot was for an optician, Pearle. “The agency came to us and asked if we wanted to lend our ‘colourful aesthetic’ to a digital piece,” says Sander with almost tangible disdain. “They wanted to create a big pop-up book that actors lived in, but in CGI.”

But digital trickery is not their style. “It’s no fun to recreate in a computer something you wanted to do for real,” says Lernert, “and to have to sit in a dark cave for 12 days.” Sander adds: “As an experience, it’s just draining. We want to be able to work collaboratively on something that can only work because you bring all the elements together so it shines; that’s what films should be about.” So they agreed to do it, but for real, which meant a book with an eight-metre span. To help get this tall order off the ground they turned to a Dutch pop-up manufacturer. “He was our pop-up mentor.” The key to its success depended on meticulous preparation. “Everything needed to be done in front of the shoot. We created the design and storyboard, and the books had to be made a month in advance.”

Kenzo colour blinds and the sound of fashion

The precision of marrying idea and end product so that they remain as closely bonded as possible has stood them in great stead when it comes to their fashion work. (“It’s the new music video.”) Their first piece, Shades Of Kenzo, was a simple but brilliant installation of blinds whose colours matched the brand’s new collection. Soon afterwards came Natural Beauty for NOWNESS, featuring Belgian model Hannelore Knuts, her face framed by whiteboard, getting plastered with a year’s worth of slap, so that natural beauty ends up looking like baked meringue. “That was the start of our focus on fashion,” says Lernert. “We realised we could use our voice in that world. It was very simple. It was a joke, but it worked very well.”

That humour – and their sense of minimalism and style – has led to some of their most striking pieces. The Sound Of COS was a beautifully choreographed ballet of live sound effects mapped to the zipping, buttoning, clipping and pulling-on of COS’s AW14 collection. A screen displayed close-up details of the clothes being fitted and worn while, in the foreground, in thrilling live-action, foley artists Freddie Web and Joe Farley employ a range of sundry devices to fashion an entirely analogue, ingenious audio design, the way Michelin chefs create sauces. It’s illuminating, thought-provoking, disciplined and funny.

“Fashion allows us to open up our sense of humour,” says Sander, and nowhere is this demonstrated more clearly  than in Last Season, for Dutch fashion retailer Kiki Niesten, another film balanced on a taut, high-strung conceptual line uncluttered by decoration or decadence, but faultlessly choreographed in its depiction of beautiful garments being unmade. “Kiki Niesten asked us to do something for her windows, to display last season’s products and show where they come from,” says Sander. “We decided to unravel them back to yarn. The film was a documenting of the action.”

Art and fashion are boon companions in contemporary culture, and that two-lane blacktop between aesthetics and commerce is, for Lernert & Sander, less a crossing point than a conduit – you don’t get one without the other. “We engage in the same way for a music video, a piece of our own work or a commercial. We love doing that, it’s our passion and we are dedicated to it, and we spend the same amount of time and dedication on those pieces as on anything else. So there’s no line between them, but the voice sometimes may be diluted a little bit, the sharpness may be blunted. That’s not necessarily a bad thing,” says Sander. “It is the commercial world that pays the rent,” adds Lernert, “but the way we approach the different projects that end up on our plate is the same.”

Inspired by hideous hula-hoop hokum

As their reputation grows, the duo have found that ways of doing business are changing – and in their favour. “Nowadays we find agencies and brands approach us directly,” says Lernert. “People want to work directly with us and that is a new thing and we really applaud it. We find a piece works out better if there is a more direct relationship with the brand.”

They’ve just finished a new shoot for COS, which they describe as “the perfect 360°”, inspired by an earlier work of theirs for Fantastic Man, featuring ice skaters, and a “hideous” YouTube video of bikini-clad hula girls dancing with GoPros fixed to their hoops. The premise is, as always, very simple – you want to see new clothes in the round, all the way around.

The use of the internet for inspiration is something they rarely turn to, however. “We are almost afraid of it. We don’t want to use it as a reference for what we should do,” admits Lernert. “The problem with the internet is that everything there is already finished and designed,” says Sander. “If you use the aesthetics there for inspiration, you start to make these aesthetics your own. We see it a lot with students. They use the internet as a reference tool and start copying a style they’ve seen rather than creating these styles themselves.”

There’s an almost scientific precision and functionality running through Lernert and Sander’s work, allied with a simple, audacious central concept – whether that’s turning couture clothing back to yarn, mixing 1,400 perfumes into one, or that chocolate bunny getting facepalmed into a puddle by a hot iron.

Until now, they have tended to opt for completely controlled interior environments. However, that aesthetic is about to change. On a recent shoot in Japan for a Campari campaign, their DP actually got them to move the camera about a bit. “He worked against our stubbornness to add a bit more sauce to the shoot,” says Sander. “We were always quite afraid of that, but now we have embraced it. And it’s a little more filmic.”

Not only that, but they had decided to expand their horizons. “Anyone who wants to work with us will get a studio piece up until 31 December,” says Lernert, “and after that we are going to go outside, and not work in the studio for a whole year. We want to break out of that aesthetic, to find other territories and locations.”

How the big wide world beyond the studio cooperates with their aesthetics of precision and control is yet to be determined, but there’s no question there’ll be a long queue of clients, creatives, viewers and the plain curious ready to watch how this new creative space unfolds and where it takes them. But will it be safe for the children?