The Fabulous Work of Alexander Serafimov by Michael Sones
If two years ago someone had said, "Michael, two years from now you will be writing an article about a Russian knitwear designer who lives in Chelyabinsk, Russia" I would have thought them mad and politely found an exit from the room. Despite being the editor of 'Beauty Worlds: The Culture of Beauty' I am definitely not a fashionista. Most of the fashion web-sites I have been on and the zillions of fashion photos I have looked at leave me uninterested and unmoved. The women may be beautiful but the combination of women and designer clothes rarely grabs my imagination.
However, towards the end of January of 2003 a Russian by the name of Alexander Serafimov sent me an email. Now, I get a lot of email and that one lay unopen in my INBOX for about three weeks before I got around to having a look at it. But when I started looking at the images he had sent I felt something different. In some unfamiliar way these images stirred my imagination. Very intrigued, I emailed Alexander and this is what he told me about himself. He's forty-two and graduated from the polytechnic in engineering and had several responsible but not particularly creative jobs. However, he had very wide interests including art, literature, ancient history, entomology and karate.He began designing clothing entirely by accident. One day, his wife was preparing to knit herself a new dress. She was looking at a German knitting magazine called Verena. Alexander looked at the illustrations and suddenly realized that all of the images were familiar to him, "I had been turning over the pages of a huge book dedicated to the history of photography all over the world. One picture among others was one of the first color photos, showing an Alps resort around 1912. There were so many happy, rosy-faced skiers (of both sexes), standing under snowy spruces, dressed in sweaters much like those I saw at Verena's pages. Men were decorated with manly crosses, rhomboid shapes, snow-flakes, with reindeers galloping from right shoulder to left. Women shamelessly tried to tempt men with flowers (of species unknown even to inveterate botanists), satin-stitched on their shoulders and breasts." He realized that while everything else has evolved the world of knitwear design was very conservative. He describes being "literally seized" with the aspiration of fighting against this conservatism.
His philosophy of design is to give a "wee bit of a shock" but he does not consider himself particularly avant-garde. His engineering background helped him to design a novel fastener which you can see integrated into his designs.
