EDITION FERDINAND KRAMER® 1963

In 1963, Ferdinand Kramer® surprised his wife Lore with a handbag he had specially designed for her. The Frankfurt architect and designer, renowned for his minimalist and Modernist architecture and product designs, created a timeless bag destined to accompany Lore Kramer both during the day and in the evening.

55 years later, TSATSAS is presenting a re-edition of the KRAMER bag. With its timeless feel, functionality and flexibility it very much seems to be a contemporary design and blends seamlessly with the others in the TSATSAS collection.

“OBJECTS THAT ARE TRULY MODERN
REMAIN SO ENDURINGLY.”
Adolf Loos

An Essay by Katharina Pennoyer

The re-edition of this handbag by Ferdinand Kramer® is a rather special event: Not many people know that back in the early 1960s Kramer, whose reputation to date has previously derived from his functional buildings and utility objects, designed two handbags and an evening dress for his young wife Lore. He simply didn’t like what was available on the market at the time.

Fashion, the world between the twin poles of innovation and endurance, that interplay of colors, shapes and materials, was a field that Kramer, son of the owner of the renowned “Hut-Kramer” store in Frankfurt, explored early on. During the 1920s, this interest was fostered most crucially by Kramer’s relationship with the interior and fashion designer Lilly Reich, later the partner of Mies van der Rohe, and her young, talented student Beate Feith, whom Kramer married in 1930. It was Beate for whom he designed a variety of hats, and he sent her fashion sketches from his trip to Paris in 1925, where he sought out Le Corbusier. During his exile in New York too, and later in Frankfurt, he sketched Beate’s designs for publication in magazines such as LOOK.

No less important for Kramer’s oeuvre were his encounters in Vienna and Frankfurt with Adolf Loos, that ingenious architect and member of the “Lebensreform” movement, who was 28 years his senior and whom he revered. Indeed, it was Adolf Loos who, in the year of Ferdinand Kramer®’s birth, 1898, defined in his article “The Gentlemen’s Hats” thus:

“Objects that are truly modern remain so enduringly.”*

The versatile handbag Ferdinand Kramer designed more than five decades ago is one marvelous example of the principle – and which has now been updated by TSATSAS in three different sizes.

*Adolf Loos, Sämtliche Schriften, ed. Franz Glück, Verlag Herold,
Vienna, 1962, p.83

CONSTANT COMPANIONS

“Every day we come into contact with various things. We do not really pay much attention to most of them. They are simply close at hand, we use them, and set them aside again.

However, a small number of these things come to mean more to us, become more closely bound up with our lives. They accompany us day by day, over a long period of time. They become our constant companions, we grow fonder and fonder of them, and eventually they become a firm part of us.

It makes us happy when, time and time again, we meet people who have, over a period of months and years, found a constant companion in a TSATSAS product.

We have asked a number of these people to show us where and how they share their lives with such a product. The result: Snapshots of our bags and accessories, scenes straight from everyday life, captured on camera.“

Esther and Dimitrios Tsatsas

The following protagonists were part of the ”Constant Companions“ project,
released in December 2017

Byron Amanatidis, Berlin, Germany
Michael Anastassiades, London, United Kingdom
Sarah Böttger, Wiesbaden, Germany
Silke Bücker, Cologne, Germany
Garth Condit, New York, USA
Stefan Dotter, Berlin, Germany
Prof. Markus Frenzl, Frankfurt/Main and Munich, Germany
Andreas Friberg Lundgren, Gothenburg, Sweden
Elise Garcia, Paris, France
Vicente Garcia Jimenez, Udine, Italy
Antonia Henschel, Frankfurt/Main, Germany
Oliver Jahn, Munich, Germany
Elizabeth Jeffer, Chappaqua, USA
Gerhardt Kellermann, Munich, Germany
Isabelle Kountoure, London, United Kingdom
Michael Maharam, New York, USA
Claudia Neumann, Cologne, Germany
Sven Prothmann, Offenbach/Main, Germany
Ana Relvão, Munich, Germany
Remo Röntgen, Dannenberg, Germany
Cristina Salvati, Udine, Italy
Artur Tadevosian, Antwerp, Belgium
Robert Volhard, Frankfurt/Main, Germany
Costas Voyatzis, Athens, Greece

Constant Companions Instalation | TSATSAS

WHERE I END AND YOU BEGIN

WHERE DO THINGS END AND WHERE DO THEY BEGIN? CAN AN OBJECT HAVE TWO BEGINNINGS, TWO ENDS? ARE THERE BOUNDARIES WITHIN ONE ENTIRETY?

Bag and accessory label TSATSAS addressed the above mentioned theme in its installation WHERE I END AND YOU BEGIN. Shown for the first time during Berliner Mode Salon 2016, the installation was also on display at the TSATSAS atelier in Frankfurt/Main in January 2017.

In every single one of their designs Esther and Dimitrios Tsatsas explore an object’s boundaries. Their bags and accessories, produced using precise patterns, are made up of countless individual pieces which are assembled using in a complex production process to create a coherent piece.

With WHERE I END AND YOU BEGIN, the colour of the leather becomes a medium for highlighting the transitions within the bags and accessories. Because, to date, all TSATSAS leather designs have been monochrome, this has hidden the fact that the products are made up of different sections.

However, using different colours for the various elements highlights that diversity, rendering the boundaries suddenly visible. Such boundaries are either called for by the design, as with the LUCID tote bag, where different shades of leather come together in the front and back, or are set by the designers on the basis of aesthetic considerations, as with the HAZE clutch bag.