“I’m so grumpy again,” adds Albrecht Ollendiek after he has unleashed one of his tirades against bad style. He says grumpy, not grumpy or grumpy. There is something playful about the English expression. It puts things into perspective, sounds more charming and simply suits the Frankfurt couturier, who comes along in colorful sneakers with Burlington socks, but never wears a tie. With casual chinos and rolled-up shirt sleeves, he boldly tucks the tie halfway down his shirt. Something that is frowned upon in tie etiquette and similar guidebooks. Here, too, Ollendiek’s desire to play and his own style is evident. “On the plane, I’m usually the only one with a tie,” says the man in his late fifties, who despite his elegantly trimmed full beard and wavy gray hair has something mischievously boyish about him.
He doesn’t like fashion conformity, he can get really worked up when he talks about it. About the young girls on Frankfurt’s Zeil, for example, “bare midriffs, long hair, parting in the middle – all the same, terrible, almost like porn stars”. Ollendiek would like style education to be included in school lessons. And he has no intention of giving fashion lessons to children and young people. He would like a class in which aesthetics is studied in museums. And that in all schools, but especially in those for prospective bespoke tailors.
Already designed bags and fashion as a student
The sense of aesthetics is crucial for him, along with craftsmanship. He acquired it himself as an autodidact. The doctor’s son, born in Offenburg in 1963, who came to the Rhine-Main area at the age of six, says that he designed bags and fashion while he was still at school and even supplied “the best fur shop in Munich”. Contact with a New York fashion agency then paved the way to the American metropolis. After graduating from high school, he worked there for a few years and studied museums and galleries before returning.
He opened his first studio in Bad Homburg, later he moved to Frankfurt in the Schillerpassage, today he sells his fashion through his showroom in the Saalgasse at the back of the Schirn Kunsthalle. “The perfect place and in a building designed by the wonderful Christoph Mäckler.” The resident of Frankfurt also worked for the Düsseldorf designer Toni Lirsch and was chief designer of his fashion brand Toni Gard for one season. She, it is said, stands for a fashion philosophy that focuses on personality and always deals with trends in an anti-cyclical manner.
Works by Albrecht Ollendiek
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fashion in pictures
A characterization that could also stand for Ollendiek, who is not guided by fashions but by discoveries from the world of art. Ollendiek describes his customers as self-confident women who know what they want. “I don’t make fashion for bridge club wives,” he says with his typical sharp tongue. His customers have their own taste, exciting jobs, they collect art and appreciate the value of creative work. And they are therefore prepared to dig deep into their pockets – sometimes the models cost four to five-digit sums.
Not just for skinny models
He and his two employees produce around 200 such exclusive pieces a year. Every fabric, every piece of leather has its story. Sometimes it is heavy brocades, tapestries based on the models of old masters or prints of large works of art on the finest silk satins, sometimes he uses borders from a cooperative in Peru, which he discovered on a trip and which now set accents on jackets and skirts.
“My customers are from 19 to 90 and by no means have all model measurements.” That’s why he doesn’t understand when someone whispers after his fashion shows that his short skirts can only be worn by skinny models. For him, a fashion show is a staging. He refuses to mention the names of his customers or to place celebrities in the front row. “Only those who don’t have their own taste decide what celebrities wear,” he says. Style icons are Queen Elizabeth II, former US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and ECB President Christine Lagarde. “They combine a self-confident appearance with their own style and elegance.” In Germany he sees little of it. Only Foreign Minister Annalena Bearbock is in his eyes, as proof that intellect and style-conscious appearance are not a contradiction in terms, which apparently many in this country believed.
“Outdoor jacket” as a synonym for Frankfurt
If he had to find a fashionable synonym for Germany and Frankfurt in particular, that would be the “outdoor jacket” – for which the best adjective would be “reasonable”. He can’t understand it: “A house for three million, a car for 500,000 and ready-made clothes.” Nevertheless, Ollendiek does not give up hope that Frankfurt will develop further in terms of fashion, which is why he takes part in the Frankfurt Fashion Week and shows his fashion in the Carmelite Monastery in June. A place where fashion and culture meet, as was the case recently with his show in the Alte Oper. There is nothing to complain about there, unless you discover functional escape route signs next to fantastic frescoes. “Who allows something like that,” he asks, and begins – “Oh no, too grumpy”.