Ottolinger – Sublime & Mundane

The Realm Where Opposites Synchronize

Cosima Gadient and Christa Bösch describe their creative partnership as a love story. “We met during our studies at the fashion school in Basel, Switzerland and always liked each other’s aesthetics and work. One day we went out for drinks and didn’t stop talking about our views on fashion and life in general,” they say. Gadient and Bösch are so in sync that they work on everything together and cannot tell where one person’s thought ends and the other’s begins. “When we do something together rather than individually, it instantly gets better,” they say.

The Swiss duo have carved out their signature style with a mix of elegant tailoring contrasted by deconstruction into an art. For them, destruction is a way of understanding the world around them. “We like the feeling of burning and ripping,” Ottolinger says. “There is a moment of nature and things can happen that you can’t predict. Fire moves in its own way, but always in a very beautiful way.” Post-apocalyptic themes are part of their demand for newness in fashion. “After the apocalypse is space for building up something new, to think and find new ways.”