Interview with Yasar Ceviker, Co-Founder of Munich Menswear Brand A Kind of Guise
Here we present an interview with Yasar Ceviker, co-founder and designer of A Kind of Guise , this time offering a different twist to our normal feature format. It’s a showcase of the new Fall/Winter 2012 collection named ‘The Carpathian Season’, heavily inspired by the way of life and the attitudes of the people that they meet in different environments and countries on their travels. You can definitely see this in the fabric and textile combinations, something that seems to play a big part in each AKOG collection.
Hopefully you will enjoy this piece that we put together, view all of the full outfit shots by heading towards the bottom of the page, more lookbook orientated shots are to the right in the slideshow.
“We think it´s very important to be transparent like this, we don´t want to hide anything, everyone can come by and have a look at how we work.”
Could you explain a little bit about yourself and what you do?
My name is Yasar, 27, founder of Munich based brand AKOG (A Kind of Guise).
How did you and your girlfriend get started with A Kind of Guise and what were your backgrounds before this?
It started off as a small student project, we purchased left over vintage leather from an old medicine ball factory and created a limited collection of bags. Now the team consists of 5 people, coming from different backgrounds such as design, music and art. A few of us are still going to school and we try to make AKOG open to everybody who shares our interests and lifestyle.
You all seem to have a lot of fun with the creative aspects of the brand, particularly the visual elements like the photography and films. With these in mind, where do you pull influences from and who inspires you to keep being creative in this way?
Most of the time we get inspired by our daily influences, we try to translate these into our products and other creative aspects. We always think of what could be good for our friends and us. And of course good music and films are a great inspiration to us.
It’s great to be able to share your behind the scenes imagery, the readers seem to love it and this adds a bit of personality to the brand. How important is it to be transparent like this and to showcase the lifestyle behind the products?
We think it´s very important to be transparent like this, we don´t want to hide anything, everyone can come by and have a look at how we work. Our environment has to reflect our attitude, this is very important to us.
It’s nice to see European products being made closer to home, how much of a challenge is it to keep production this way and why should a European customer support it?
It´s not always easy to produce everything in Europe, or in our case Germany, there are only a few manufacturers who gave us the opportunity to keep the production as local as possible.