REWRITING STORIES

What it is about

By...
...that I mean the material from which I make my products. Much of it – air mattresses, old duffel bags, parachute parts, tension belts, truck tarpaulins, sails, etc. has already experienced a lot in its life, so “a story”. By reusing these materials, I continue to write their story – and when you buy and wear such a product, you also let the fabrics live on.

Me, that is Philipp Märtens. I learned the very archaic basics of sewing from a fine artist at the age of 16 and after a wild time of brightly colored pants, I dedicated myself professionally to other areas.

Now it happened that I could fall back on exactly those experiences in those areas – as a soldier – and I started to produce functional and specialized clothing and equipment – of course again from recycled material, e.g. used uniforms.
After...
...working in emergency services, this is now behind me and in December 2017 the next opportunity arose to reactivate the sewing machine. A friendly gallery asked me for two shoulder bags from air mattresses and so a new exciting field of activity was found.

I now freely jump from olive canvas, camouflage fabric, woven jaquard fabrics to colorful air mattresse and back again. In doing so, I can fully embrace both my love of recycling and my experience with camouflage patterns, parachutes and the like.

I stand by my bags and they are intentionally designed to be repairable with minimal effort. Consequently, I offer a lifetime of free repair – if a bag ever breaks.

#YouCantCamouflageTruth

When sewing my latest large batch of Veshmeshoks I was facing a conundrum: Quite a few of them would be made in rare, interesting and…Russian patterns. While that seemed to have little implications when I cut them three years ago, the Russian invasion of Ukraine changed that perception quite a bit.

One immediate step to represent the Ukrainian side as well was to get hold of some fabric in their MM-14 camouflage pattern and come up with Veshmeshoks in that pattern as well – an effort I teamed up for with @streakingdelilah. He’s tirelessly scrounging Syrian, Russian and worldwide pages and social networks for interesting intelligence and sharing it on Instagram.

To really support a cause rather than just sporting different camouflage patterns and stay in the OSINT theme, we came up with #youcantcamouflagetruth.

Remembering a German public radio segment about the Truth Hounds. I decided to support them. They are a Georgia based NGO investigating and documenting war crimes, namely by matter of Open-Source INTelligence and supporting the prosecution of perpetrators. Thus,
a certain amount from the sale of some of my products will be given directly to the Truth Hounds. The start will be made by my Veshmeshoks in Ukrainian as well as Russian patterns. 20€ of each standard and 10€ of each in the slim version will be donated. The eligible items will be marked in their respective descriptions in my web shop and you’ll find an overview on Instagram as well.