The Adidas Runbase in Berlin. Courtesy Markus Braumann
Nadine Goepfert’s 2013 fashion collection The Garments May Vary, completed upon her graduation from Berlin’s Weißensee Academy of Art, is an exploration of materiality and wearability that defies categorization. One of the pieces, nominally a pullover sweater, makes use of memory foam, its sinuous yet rigid folds almost comically engulfing the wearer. Garments is a seminal work in the designer’s career: It attracted early attention from international designers and agencies, and reflects Goepfert’s long-standing interest in recontextualizing familiar materials and experimenting with the aesthetic extremes of functionality—an opportunity she believes is afforded only in the world of textiles.
The Berlin-based designer has accumulated an impressively wide-ranging and unconventional portfolio, encompassing pure fashion, table linens—what Goepfert calls “everyday textiles”—and more recent forays into interiors. Her design for the Adidas Runbase in Berlin, for example, offered some unorthodox prescriptions: rubber carpets, mesh-upholstered sofas, industrial grays and matte blacks, and muted pops of teal and millennial pink. “The idea was to transfer the sporty material that Adidas usually would use for clothing to an interior design concept,” she says.