“Do we really need a live orgy to show off the clothes?”

Staples of the Berlin underground since they found their way here seven years ago, Mad Kate (aka Kathryn Fischer) and Juan de Chamié work within and between the worlds of fashion, music and performance art, raising questions about sex, gender and fantasy. Mad Kate’s performances have ranged from singing in the duo Kamikaze Queens to the occasional burlesque appearance to participating in the Bonaparte circus. Coming from a music background, de Chamié has also started creating clothes, costuming his partner with pieces such as a belt with hanging phalluses, “like Josephine Baker, but with penises.” Combining all of their mediums in one, the opening of their EXIT boutique in Kreuzberg will be a fashion show titled The Feast of Pan inspired by a Baroque painting, and featuring a filmed orgy. When did you start collaborating? JdC: Almost immediately, actually. I think that she inspired me and I inspired her, and our romantic relationship also inspired an idea: why can’t we have this world where you and I perform all these different facets of our personality? Even the anchor of our relationship in a way was a performance between the two of us. MK: One of the things I love about you is that you never think in numbers (laughs). Ok, in concrete terms, about eight years ago in San Francisco, because that’s where we met. What is The Feast of Pan going to look like? MK: In most of our fashion shows, Juan is the designer and I’m the choreographer and producer. Juan’s been fascinated lately by this Grecian draping, and so it seemed to fit really well when he said, “I want this painting by Nicolas Poussin here” [points to the painting on the floor of the shop] called The Triumph of Pan. And it really reminded me of Berlin, this hedonistic scene, and the joie de vivre and also the way the clothing is worn: it’s not boxy; it’s really draped and flowing. And the painting will be recreated in the video projection? MK: Originally I wanted everyone to be performing this live, but then I realized that all of my friends, including myself, were going to make a total mess of everything if we did that. JdC: And the clothes. No one would see the clothes – they would only see you guys. MK: It was like, “Do we really need a live orgy to show off the clothes? Probably not.” You both often engage with ideas of gender and sexuality in your various mediums. How do you feel about the label of ‘queer performance’? MK: It’s weird with the term ‘queer’ because it’s been thrown around a lot. On the other hand, I have this really optimistic attitude about it, because I think of it in really ideal terms, beyond just who we have sex with and how we fuck. I think it also has to do with how we think of ourselves in relation to each other and power and how we think of ourselves as a global network of people. For me it’s a really politicized term, if one wants to engage with it in that way, and I think the queer community has a responsibility to that. The traditional catwalk show is in many ways performative, but with this event, you’ve really taken fashion-as-performance to another level. MK: Every time we’ve done a show, it’s always been performative. It just is going to be that way, because that’s where we’re coming from and all the people that we’re involving: We’re not going to go find a modeling agency and hire models. JdC: We make clothes for real people, for all shapes and sizes and all ages, gender, races, religions. Mid-East chic. Bring it! When you think about it, the burqa’s probably the easiest thing to wear. One of the things that’s important is that we like to use people from our community. It’s more about presenting the clothes as something that you can wear; they might look fantastic or they might look out of this world, but they are clothes that you can actually wear. How has the practical side of selling the clothes worked out? JdC: The other thing that I’ve learned is to price the clothes so that I can afford them – a lot of my peers scoff at me for that. They think that I should be more expensive, but I can’t because I realize I don’t have a choice but to make the clothes, and so I don’t want them to just sit here. But they are couture items, so each of them means something for me personally, and it becomes a relationship with the person when they come in here and they invest in something and you can see it. And I and that person, suddenly we have a connection and that’s different than any relationship I have with anybody else, and that’s really special to me. And the more I make the clothes affordable, the more I have those experiences, and I feed off of that.