bonne life “beyond looks”
dir. Bear Damen
-
“With Bonne Suits, we keep everything close to home and I want to make everything as personal as possible. That is why we present every collection on the stoop in front of my house on the Oudeschans. Bear and I decided to make a slightly autobiographical film about my childhood in that house and the neighborhood where I grew up. It hasn’t always been easy for me, my mother died when I was eight, and I wandered around for a long time until I went to live alone in my mother’s house on the Oudeschans at seventeen.
Bear also lives on the Oudeschans and understands the environment I grew up in. I always find his work multidimensional. It’s never really tied to time. It is a visual interpretation of everyday life without relying on reality. That seemed like a very nice approach to visually interpret my youth. Namely that I have always felt like an outcast and have not always felt happy in my childhood. Music and fashion have always been my main outlet. It is my way of fantasizing.
In what ways has fashion been an outlet for you?
Fashion is a way for me to understand the complexities of life. It exposes part of human interaction. Identity can derive from how someone dresses. Fashion tends to categorize people. That can be both liberating and very vulnerable. My answer to this paradox has been Bonne Suits. I want everyone to wear the same but still let their personality speak. A generic canvas that both the wearer and the beholder can freely interpret. It’s a metaphor for my ideal in fashion.
When I inherited my mothers’ house on de Oudeschans, I started renting out rooms to friends that were comic drawers, musicians, graphic designers, and artists, so it quickly became a melting pot and platform for multiple projects. I had a gallery called Galerie de Schans in my living room numerous weekends a year, there was a music studio where rap collective SMIB recorded, and we hosted multiple other events in the house. It is also the place where I started showing and selling my suits. Like a real fashion house haha. The suits and all the other things we did there brought people together. My house is being renovated now so everybody had to move out, but our new space on the Warmoesstraat took over many of the things we used to do at my house on the Oudeschans. We run Galerie de Schans there as a permanent gallery, a music studio is being built in the basement, and in the attic, @ease is situated on Tuesdays. People can come by to talk about their mental health with professionals and volunteers. Creating a place for people to come together and feel secure is important to me and my brand. It is the foundation of all the things I do.
How does this idea translate into the film?
To me, it’s a romanticization of what fashion or maybe even a Bonne Suit can do to you. The girl in the video is not feeling well, struggling at home and school, but the Bonne Suit harnesses her against the world. In the film, she loses her identity by putting on Bonne Suits and actually rises above society by donning the suit. It shows the paradox I talked about earlier that I’m eager to embrace with my suits.”
-Bonne Reijn
excerpt from numéro magazine nl - https://www.numeromag.nl/bonne-suits-partners-with-bear-damen-on-a-short-film/