Passion Project

Celebrated Designer Paul Helbers Bares His Very Own Brand.
 

- Joshua Glass

PAUL HELBERS, the former head of Louis Vuitton’s men’s program and protégé of Martin Margiela, was not always consumed by fashion. He remembers that his very first creations, potato-printed T-shirts at the age of 10, were less of an exercise in design and more of an outpour of sentiment; a particular red, shoulder-studded tee with “zutalors” placed across the chest harkens a generous chuckle today. “It means ‘fuck off,’” he smiles politely. Later in life, after leaving the prestigious Royal College of Art in London, half-consigned to the designer path, he still wasn’t entirely sold on industrializing the craft. “It felt very formatted,” he says. “I didn’t fit into the standard of what people thought a fashion designer should be able to do.” Today, as Helbers reveals his new, eponymous brand—a well-curated evolution of sophisticated menswear and untried design—a resolute certainty marks the scene.

“I have a twin brother, so I’ve always had this sort of image of myself,” says the Dutch designer. “We are very different. He was sporty, and I wasn’t.” Fixated by the distant worlds of painting, sculpture, and interior, Helbers was born in Rotterdam and grew up in tiny, village-sized towns throughout Holland. One particularly “ugly town” in the North enabled his then-developing escapist art, allowing its scenery to foil the beautiful inner workings of his young mind. “It was completely bombarded during the Second World War, so the town was all ’50s and ’60s rebuild—very boring,” he recalls. “I was always in my room, which I had actually painted all white—literally everything, the table, the doors—listening to music. A lot of ’80s Japan, David Sylvian.”