Claudia Hill grew up in Germany, where she learned to sew from her mother, a master tailor from Prague. During her teens, she became interested in set design and apprenticed at the Nuremberg State Theater and Opera. There her attention shifted to dance and she began studying modern and contemporary dance. In 1993, moved to New York to take classes at the Merce Cunningham Studio.
But clothing design continued to capture her imagination. She applied to Parson’s School of Design and the Fashion Institute of Technology and ended up studying at both. Soon she found herself designing costumes for theater and film, including a Broadway production of Arthur Miller’s All My Sons and a co-design of the original and Broadway productions of RENT, of which one of her costumes was acquired by the Smithsonian Institute for its permanent collection.
In 1997, a chance meeting with the Spanish designer Miguel Adrover resulted in a commission for some pieces to be sold in Adrover’s New York store, Horn. The same year, Hill was the subject of a documentary on Japanese state television, NHK, profiling four New York avant-garde creators. Overnight, she was not only selling at Horn, but taking orders from stores in Japan, represented by the Japanese distributor Look. Her design sensibility, which had developed in the context of dance and theater, was deeply informed by the dancer’s awareness of movement, dramatic space, and the expressive impulse and architecture of the body, to which clothing must be responsive. She wanted to design clothing that would convey her own aesthetic imagination and feelings, but more important, she wanted it to stimulate, sensitize and animate the wearer’s own imagination and feeling. She wanted her clothing to enhance the wearer’s receptivity to space and expand one’s pleasure in occupying a physical world in an emotional body, and an emotional world in a physical body.
In 1998, Hill started her own clothing design company, in order to sell her two lines, including her signature Claudia Hill collection, first at Barney’s New York and then to boutiques around the world. But she demurred to a strictly “runway fashion” career. With her history in dance and theater, she had always considered clothing in the context of art, as art and fashion, and over the next few years, she began to attract international attention in the fertile nexus between the two worlds. She began to collaborate with other artists on multi-media events during the New York Fashion Week. She worked on installations, conceptual performances, videos and presentations with artists as diverse as the firm Asymptote Architecture, artist Daisuke Nakayama, and with musician Skuli Sverrisson. These collaborations led her to create individual pieces “over the course of time, in their own rhythm, allowing them to evolve at their own speed”, which she preferred to the breathless manufacturing production of commercial fashion.
In 2002, the choreographer William Forsythe asked Hill to design the costumes for his new production, Decreation. Her work with Forsythe signaled a return to designing for dance and theater. A few years later, her costumes for the Wooster Group’s Hamlet were seen in New York, Berlin, and the Centre Pompidou in Paris, to critical acclaim. In 2004, Hill opened her store on Auguststraße in Berlin. An extension of her own fashion/art duality, the store was designed not solely as a retail platform for her collection, but also as a link between artists and their audiences. During this time she was approached by the Israeli installation and video artist, Nelly Agassi, with whom she enjoys an ongoing collaboration. In the same year, she was chosen by the Goethe Institute to represent German fashion during ASEM in Hanoi, Vietnam. Hill has most recently designed costumes for the Look, Stranger directed by Arielle Javich, who has modeled for Hill on numerous occasions and was also the second person ever to buy a limited-edition piece from her. The film will premiere at this year's Toronto International Film Festival on September 2010.
Hill has frequently made her own textiles, deconstructing and refabricating new and old materials; experimented with making her own lace; sewn scented herbs or small stones into tiny pouches incorporated into a garment in order to influence not only the look or smell of the garment, but the experience of the wearer. Once, in an act worthy of Raymond Roussel, she shredded a man’s suit, then knitted it into a woman’s cocktail dress, preserving an analogical relationship between the two garments even as one was being destroyed to create the other. These are typical examples of Hill’s playful iconoclasm and love of experimentation. But this spirited approach is never unbridled or unconsidered. It is balanced by a deep scrupulousness and clarity of purpose. Every detail must have a reason, a function; the whole must have dignity, integrity and intelligence. Hill has built a distinctive body of work in costume, fashion, and “clothing art”. She continues to work and develop her ideas in each of these areas, which are, to her, a rich and challenging whole.
//Leora Barish