The first time that I ran across the design work of threeASFOUR was in 2022 during the first month of recording episodes of The Manic Metallic Podcast. threeASFOUR had released its latest show, titled KUNDALINI – dividing the collection between the seven spiritual chakras – at New York Fashion Week’s Spring/Summer 2022 shows, and I was on the lookout for topics to talk about for my “Three Things Exciting Manic Metallic in Fashion” episode. When I found the KUNDALINI collection, I knew that the chance to talk about their creativity, ability to push technological bounds, and devotion to staying rooted in the natural world & spiritual sphere was one that I didn’t want to pass up. I included their work in Episode 009 of the podcast.
Sean Ono Lennon, in making his feature directorial debut with “threeASFOUR: FULL CIRCLE”, was as taken with the collective’s work as I initially was. Co-directed with Brian C. González, the documentary follows the New York-based trio of Gabi Asfour, Angela Donhauser, and Adi Gil over a five-year span as they seek to continue making their way in the fashion industry in spite of fashion’s relentless devotion to commerciality.
There was a point in the documentary where Gabi remarks, ”In fashion, where the money counts more than the creativity, we are in danger.” This is a sentiment that anyone working in the fashion world has felt acutely if they’re not the beneficiary of family money to float them. To that point, the team didn’t struggle as much when Kai Kühne was with them under the AsFour moniker (1998-2005); he had family money to contribute. Funding became difficult in the years following Kühne’s exit and threeASFOUR decided to start injecting more commercially palatable works into their collections.
When threeASFOUR began creating works designed to sell (while still attempting to keep their design ethos intact), you could feel the air seeping out of the balloon. You could see them watering down their aesthetic for the sake of making more sales, and it’s tough to watch. Manic Metallic was initially founded on the belief that fashion is an art, a discipline, and a force for societal change. It is all of those things, but the industry has proven time and again – especially during the current gutless era that we inhabit – that it is willing to sell out its artists for the sake of profit. As a result, artists are sometimes forced to sell themselves out if they want to survive financially.
I’m pleased to admit that threeASFOUR ultimately didn’t sell themselves out, but their 25+ years in the fashion industry have not been made easier by this fact. The collective is well-regarded by both industry peers and those in adjacent creative industries. They were the recipients of the 2015 Cooper Hewitt/Smithsonian Museum National Design Award. Their work has been featured in countless museum exhibitions, and they have pieces permanently placed in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute in New York and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. They’ve collaborated with artists, musicians, and brands such as Björk, Yoko Ono, Kate Spade, and GAP.
But visibility and praise do not necessarily translate to financial success, and that is a tough lesson for creatives to have to learn. Director Sean Ono Lennon was sympathetic to that conflict between art and commerce, saying in the director’s statement for the documentary that “I began filming because I wanted to understand how artists like them survive—how they protect a vision grounded in principle in a system that often rewards the opposite. Like many artists, I know what it means to navigate the pressures of a commercial industry while trying to remain faithful to a vision that does not necessarily align with the mainstream.” I find this an interesting assertion, given that Lennon has had the benefit of being the son of one of music history’s most famous couples: John Lennon and Yoko Ono. One wonders how he feels that he can relate to threeASFOUR.
Ultimately, the public association with Lennon will help them. It will also give the public a wider awareness of who threeASFOUR is. It is interesting how they have not gotten the same level of attention as, say, Iris van Herpen, whose work draws from the same lineage of technological innovation and willingness to embrace nature. Here we have three designers who are immigrants originating from places all too familiar with conflict — Gabi was born in Lebanon, Adi was born in Israel, and Angela was born in the USSR — making a go of it in the United States, but van Herpen was born in The Netherlands and shows in Paris. Maybe if the members of threeASFOUR were all born and raised in Europe and decided to show in Paris instead, the American public would acknowledge their talents more.
Lennon spoke of his admiration of work by the Maysles brothers, helping him to see documentary as an act of empathy and saying that “Albert Maysles once told me that the key to documentary filmmaking was to look through the camera without judgment—to approach one’s subjects with openness and respect, and to trust the audience to draw their own conclusions.” I’d say that he, Co-Director Brian C. González, Editor Jenny Golden, and Producer Beth Levison all collaborated to execute this approach successfully on screen. They didn’t try to gesture at a solution to this friction between the artistic and the commercial; they simply let it hang for viewers to decide. The audience is taken through the peaks and troughs of the experience that the threeASFOUR team has in navigating the New York fashion industry and having to hold on as tightly as they possibly can. You know that what you’re seeing is the reality of what it means to fight the forces of capital in order to protect your art in one of the world’s wealthiest cities. Not all artists are able to withstand the pressure. threeASFOUR manages to hang on.
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