Exit
Christian Dior and who joined the
company last year from luxury design house Elie Saab.
Earning credibility in the fashion
world is difficult even without an
association with a sports car brand.
Many luxury auto companies offer apparel as a branding extension
(think: logo-emblazoned Ferrari
hats) but none is taken seriously
as a real fashion player (or particularly able to avoid a “Eurotrash”
connotation). Porsche itself has a
“Driver’s Selection” collection of
branded apparel for its auto enthusiasts, but Porsche Design—founded in 1972 by Ferdinand Alexander
Porsche, designer of the Porsche 911
and grandson of the Porsche founder—is something else entirely.
“What attracted me was the
challenge to take a design brand
with DNA in the automobile industry that then became an industrial
design brand and make it a lifestyle
brand,” Steinbruck told Huffington.
“To start something from scratch,
creating fashion where there is no
history of fashion, injecting the
DNA of the brand into something
completely new.”
And it’s promising. For his first
collection, presented during New
York Fashion Week before some
of the industry’s leading editors,
STYLE
Steinbruck drew from Bauhaus—
the minimalist German design
school emphasizing both form and
function—updated with modern
touches for what he calls “NeoBauhaus.” The architecturallyconstructed collection includes
a shift dress made of RawTec, an
innovative leather fabric; a mens
sports blazer with rubberized zippers more commonly associated
HUFFINGTON
10.21.12
Thomas
Steinbruck,
46, was
recently
installed
as creative
director at
Porsche
Design.