Wolfgang Joop once became famous with fashion. But how?

One would be forgiven for assuming that Wolfgang Joop works full-time as an oracle. Because he is constantly being questioned by the media: about the German state elections, about the American style and now about his 80th birthday on November 18th. He often gives answers, and they are often exciting. Less biting and quotable than Karl Lagerfeld’s, and less reserved than Jil Sander’s. Which brings us to fashion. Because that’s how Joop became famous, not with bon mots. But how exactly?

Wolfgang Joop, born in Potsdam in 1944, first danced around fashion before devoting himself entirely to it. As a boy, he wore his grandfather’s clothes at boarding school because he said he didn’t have the money for new ones. He began two courses of study before winning a design competition with his then wife Karin Bernatzki in 1970 and moving to Hamburg. As an illustrator and fashion editor for magazines such as “Schweizer Illustrierte”, he visited the fashion shows in Paris, wrote about them and drew them. He was a dreamer “who had a thousand longings instead of one career dream,” he said in a recent interview with the “Süddeutsche Zeitung” about this period of his life: “Only when I was drawing was I sure of myself.”

Fashion as a textile contemporary witness

But he could also dress well. For example, on a trip to Rome in 1971 in a trendy military jacket. This is how he is mentioned for the first time in the “New York Times”. Fashion could make the war ridiculous, he told the American journalist who described him as an author at the time about his military-looking outfit. Later he would describe the influence of fashion in a similar way: as a textile witness to the times and as a vehicle for bringing the familiar into a new, sometimes disturbing context.

It wasn’t until 1982 that Wolfgang Joop, after a period as a freelance designer, launched his first complete women’s collection with a show in Düsseldorf. It was produced in Hamburg. On television he presents a look from Thomas Gottschalk, as they did back then, long before Instagram and Co. existed. He shows the broad shoulders and narrow waist of the time, carefully and somewhat dramatically cut in “hand-woven Irish tweed,” as he proudly says. “Anyone can wear that,” says Gottschalk, somewhat clumsily but positively.

He should be right. Soon, thanks to perfumes and jeans and later home textiles, Joop’s name – in capital letters and with exclamation points – became a popular brand with countless licenses that spilled over into the USA. The face for this is often Joop himself, elegant and somehow level-headed.

Strange as sauerkraut

This is probably why the New York Times regularly reported on his shows when he showed his collections at New York Fashion Week in the 1990s. He’s a guy. The fashion critic at the time, Amy Spindler, praised him for his courage to be kitsch and described his fashion as “funny and strange and completely un-American.” His sometimes muted, sometimes electric colors, his velvet three-piece suits, his floral prints and his python boots are out of line with the stylistic restraint of the time.

Spindler further analyzes: His aesthetic tastes as foreign as sauerkraut on the palate. Wolfgang Joop still quotes this sentence today. But the fact that he apparently mistranslates the word “palate”, i.e. palate, as “Palatschinken”, i.e. pancakes, makes the whole thing even weirder. Either way: Spindler’s culinary reference is of course an allusion to his origins, although he always described himself as Prussian instead of just German.

But above all it has to do with his eclectic taste. He keeps it after Joop! sold and left as a designer around the turn of the millennium. At his successor label Wunderkind, whose collections he shows at Paris Fashion Week, he quotes from artists like Tamara de Lempicka and relies on a colorful but balanced mix of colors, patterns and fabrics. Wunderkind is solid and also receives recognition, but designers like Dries Van Noten can often do it a bit better, more contemporary. In 2017 Joop shows his last collection for Wunderkind.

Today he works sporadically with labels like Hessnatur and answers questions like: “Which fashion era has had the most influence on you?” via video on the Instagram account of his younger, more affordable brand Looks. Answer: the time of disco, Studio 54, Antonio Lopez and Karl Lagerfeld. “Fashion was pop,” he says, “and pop was fashion.”

Sculptor, art collector, reality judge

Because Wolfgang Joop is by no means one-track. In the last quarter of a century he tried his hand at authoring a novel and an autobiography, worked as a furniture designer and sculptor, collected art and sold it again, renovated his parents’ house in Potsdam and a finca in Ibiza and, from 2014, judged “Germany’s Next Top Model” alongside Heidi Klum . The latter in particular was a surprise success. Joop, now in his 70s, became an audience favorite in two seasons of the reality series. He was gentle and loving and a bit odd. Ten years later, he is still celebrated on TikTok as “wool”.

Wolfgang Joop himself prefers to emphasize his last name, which he calls Joop! Although he sold a bit, he also kept it thanks to his fascination with his personality. As in everything, he sees images in it. The two o’s in Joop, they are optional: a pair of glasses, two golden eggs, an infinity symbol.