Above: Tim Groen: Bas Kosters, Amsterdam.

“It ain’t what you do, it’s the way that you do it,” could be the mantra of Bas Kosters, the energizer bunny of the Dutch fashion scene. His bright, cartoonish, vaguely 1970’s children’s television-inspired characters appear on anthing from baby carriages and beer cans, to, of course, his own collections. Fairly new to prêt-a-porter, he has been creating one-off fashion items for a small group of eccentric devotees since 2005, when he founded Bas Kosters Studio. Additionally he has been crafting fabric dolls; life size dolls, small dolls, cushion dolls, dolls with genitalia, all kinds of dolls, as if to populate his own parallel universe with whimsy. But whatever it is that Bas is doing, and whomever he is doing it with or for, it all clearly leads back to his own, highly personal narrative.

TG: The Dutch will probably describe you as a fashion designer first. But you’re quite a multi-disciplinarian. So how else can we describe what you do?
BK: I frequently refer to what I do as ‘Fashion Entertainment’; as a DJ, dancer, performer—I have a kind of bitter clown persona—I’m pretty involved in the night life scene. So, I deliver fashion entertainment from a multidisciplinary studio, and I always strife for purity.

TG: Purity in the sense of having all your output reflect who you are?
BK: Certainly, the visual story I’m telling is pretty much untouched by others. When we produce my show, I strife to control all aspects involved, from the graphics to the music, to the staging. Which, I must mention, is impossible without the help of all the people I work with.

TG: What you’re doing is fairly unconventional. Would you consider yourself an ‘outsider designer’?
BK: Mmm. I don’t know; I think I have in common with most working designers that I don’t give a hoot about trend reports and forecasts. That’s stuff to worry about for people in other segments of the creative world. When I see that one of my collections or presentations incorporated elements that fit right in with the zeitgeist, I always think it’s funny, because it’s entirely unintentional.

TG: While your work is hyper personal, you’ve collaborated with some pretty established, commercial names. Bugaboo, Heineken, and Herman Miller, for example. How do you explain your popularity in the corporate marketing world?
BK: The sense that I get is that it isn’t so much about who I am, or what I’m doing, as it is about how I’m doing it. The openness, or outspokenness, or relentless energy, or whatever you want to call it, is something a major established brand can’t generate on their own accord anymore. And yet we have something in common, or else a collaboration would be out of the question. They brew beer, or build furniture, and I like making fabric dolls with dicks, so we have to kind of figure out together how to make sense of what we’re doing together. And I find that super interesting.

TG: Do you think that, by osmosis, you’ve become kind of a brand yourself?
BK: (laughs) Well, look, what I did with Bugaboo generated heaps of publicity, for both of us. And when something like that happens your work reaches an audience you’d never have thought of. And of course, when people like what you’re doing, and it’s for sale, you can’t help but grow!

TG: So what is next for Bas the brand, or the man?
BK: I’m doing one more collab with another brand in the near future, and after that I think it’s time to give my projects in Holland a bit of rest. I’d love for both the prêt-a-porter and the collaborations to start taking place on a more international platform. Spending time in Paris to really grow up, creatively speaking, sounds like a very good plan to me right now. (Laughs) It’s time to shed the last remnants of my Dutch provincial self!

Links:
>Bas Kosters, his own site.
>Bugaboo, a page about the Bugaboo/Bas Kosters collaboration
>Bas Kosters and the Herman Miller Setu chair: a short vimeo