Transdisciplinary studio Bless, also known as Bless Service, founded in 1995 by Desiree Heiss and Ines Kaag, emerges during the 1990s as a fringe, anti-market response to the industry’s peak era, when brands began to permeate and define popular culture at an unprecedented rate. The self-dubbed “situation designers” started out by making garments and quickly expanded into incorporating all things related to shelter, working on the edges of fashion, product design and conceptual gestures.

Bless is often characterised as a person and the products she makes and wears are at once practical and surreal, she doesn’t do shows, she doesn’t do exhibitions, her collections resist time and place, whilst embodying and embracing reality: the home, the office, the city, the museum.

In 1998 following an invitation to participate in the Berlin Biennale, Bless made his first video in collaboration with director Nicolas Trembley.

Simulating CCTV footage, the video shows passers-by on Alexanderplatz wearing the label’s accessories from different collections, identifiable only by instant markers appearing on the screen, the first instance in which Bless historicized itself.

Through design, Bless asks questions: on the nature of the customer-brand relationship, on what luxury is and means, on the nature of objects. These questions are at once practical, conceptual and anthropological, and inadvertently contribute to discourses beyond their own discipline.

The work is featured in 25 Years of Always Stress with BLESS, the first institutional show in Italy dedicated to BLESS’ work, on show in the ARRHYTHMICS section until 12 May 2024.