Daniel Pollock
Creative Director / Co-Founder Michi Girl
Age: 36

I once sold clip-on koalas at Princess Mary’s wedding in Denmark and my favourite labels are Whyred / J. Lindeberg / Bassike

Hayley Hughes is a Melbourne stylist, street style photographer and blogger. Her creative pursuits have seen her travel the world, living and working in Tokyo, Japan. Back home in Melbourne Hayley is focussing on building her styling portfolio, working with local designers, photograhers,  bands and now Swensk. Hayley’s inspiration for the window display was “Interesting people never go out of fashion”.

Choosing one of Sweden’s most influential writer, director and producer of all time, Ingmar Bergman, Hayley Hughes has taken a contemporary approach to one of his greatest pieces of work. Sommaren med Monika (Summer with Monika).

Initially drawn by his renegade attitude to directing and the controversy which surrounded the release of Sommaren med Monika, Hayley was inspired by the film’s take on adventure, love and responsibility.

Working with Melbourne based Swedish fashion photographer Viktor Nilsson, the two have re-created and captured the mood, intensity and love triangle from the 1953 film. Swensk is excited to invite you to visit this window display this Saturday, 12th December.

Bergman’s career as a cinematic artist is unique in its sheer volume. But what is really unique about Bergman and has certainly helped make him world-famous is his ability to use the mass medium of film — by nature as much an industry as an art — as a deeply personal form of expression, equally suited to depicting existential or psychological problems as well as a tangible world of events.

Ingmar Bergman was born in Uppsala on July 14, 1918. Even as a child, Bergman was immersed in the two fields to which he would devote his entire professional life. Around the age of ten, he owned a “laterna magica” or cinematograph. To quote Bergman’s own description, this was a “clattering tin box with a chimney, a kerosene lamp and endless films that went round and round in a strip” — a “magic machine” whose flickering light was projected against his mother’s hung-up sheets. He found it strangely “secretive and provocative.” It is not a coincidence that Bergman named his memoirs Laterna Magica (1987) after this childhood toy. Childhood was also important in a more specific sense. This is especially true of Bergman’s conflictladen relationship with his parents, which — as he has indicated numerous times over the years — has manifested itself in a number of recurring cinematic themes and motifs. Like a child in a strictly controlled family structure, the artist finds himself relegated to the lowest rung in a society’s hierarchical power structure.

The diversity with which Bergman has been able to portray the area he carved out early in his career. From one film to another, from one decade to another, his thematic and stylistic components have undergone constant transformations, bursts of energy and shifts of meaning. In fact, this has occurred to such a degree that Bergman’s works are difficult to organize into any linear growth curve in the traditional sense. Instead, his artistic development is shaped like a kind of spiral that repeats similar movements in cyclical phases, yet each time at a different level.

Faith and doubt

Although his early films lack independence, they show the contours of what in time would comprise archetypically Bergmanian features. One is the religious and broader existential problem complex that has perhaps contributed more to Bergman’s fame than anything else; especially in an international perspective, his fame undoubtedly rests on the fact that he brought to the cinema issues traditionally belonging to the domains of philosophy and religion and which, not long ago, few people thought this art form was capable of. There are reasons why The Seventh Seal is said to be screened an average of twice a day, all year round, somewhere in North America…

The Seventh Seal (1957) naturally occupies a special position among his religiously colored films. With its allegorically simple form and classic high-contrast cinematography, it shows how the Medieval knight Antonius Block (played by Max von Sydow) confronts Death, thereby personifying the existential struggle and religious doubts of modern man. But naturally Bergman’s “trilogy” on the silence of God – Through a Glass Darkly (1961), Winter Light (1963, UK title The Communicants) and The Silence (1963) – represents the culmination of his religious themes. This was when Bergman, in his own words, “cast off” his faith in God, “holy rubbish that blocks one’s view.” These three mutually rather contrasting films describe a religious problem in three stages, or by “reduction,” as Bergman puts it in his foreword to the published screenplay: a movement from “certainty achieved” to “certainty unmasked” and finally God’s silence, “the negative impression.” The title of the final film in the trilogy, The Silence, is thus significant: it portrays people left to each other amidst the emptiness and silence that has descended over a godless world.

Men and women

Another set of cinematic motifs where Bergman is considered an innovator is in his portrayal of marriage and family life. Perhaps especially from an international perspective, his approach was perceived by contemporaries as unusually straightforward and unromantically realistic. A unique and different approach is seen in Bergman’s series of women-oriented films, some of them comedies, which appeared during the first half of the 1950s: Secrets of Women (1952, UK title Waiting Women), A Lesson in Love (1954), Smiles of a Summer Night (1955) and to some extent Dreams (1955, UK title Journey into Autumn).

The high point in this series of films was Smiles of a Summer Night, inspired by Bergman’s own theatrical production of “The Merry Widow” and widely regarded as a masterpiece of “well-crafted cinematic drama.” (Sure enough, this was the film that won Bergman his first major international award at the Cannes Film Festival.) Here, too, women control the battle of the sexes, while men often end up with the short end of the stick. Thus, early in the film, the foolish military macho man played by Jarl Kulle declares in a pompous upper-class accent that he will gladly “tolerate my wife’s infidelity, but if anyone touches my mistress, I become a tiger!” Toward the end of the film, the intellectual and strategic mathematics which are characteristic of farce make him say the same thing — but the other way around: “I can tolerate someone dallying with my mistress, but if anyone touches my wife, I become a tiger.”

Artists and jesters

A final, significant set of Bergman motifs revolve around art and the artist. If not otherwise, this is clear from the fact that so many of his films take place in artistic milieus: the film studio in The Devil’s Wanton, the Royal Opera Ballet in Illicit Interlude, the circus in The Naked Night (UK title Sawdust and Tinsel), the medieval farce in The Seventh Seal, the “magnetic health theater” in The Magician and of course the “real” theater in such mutually contrasting films as Persona, The Ritual (UK title The Rite) and Fanny and Alexander.

The theme of the artist would reach its culmination in Persona and Bergman’s three subsequent films: Hour of the Wolf (1968), Shame (1968, UK title The Shame) and The Passion of Anna (1969). These have sometimes been called Bergman’s “second trilogy,” because in one way or another, all of them portray the artist’s increasingly insignificant role in modern society. If not otherwise, this is reflected in the progressive marginalization of the artist figure in each film.

Late in his career, through his memoirs, stage plays and screenplays in novel form, Ingmar Bergman returned to pure writing. And thereby to the original source of his artistic activity: after all, he began his career as a playwright and prose author. On that note, let us end with Ingmar Bergman’s own words,

“Everything can happen; everything is possible and likely. Time and space do not exist; on an insignificant basis of reality the imagination spins and weaves new patterns.”

Ingmar Bergman will never go out of fashion.

Text from sweden.se

The work of Melbourne-based Swedish photographer Viktor Nilsson is both ambitious and expansive, covering a variety of genres from fashion to sport, portraiture to corporate photography. Regardless of variations in his subject and audience, Nilsson’s photographs can

be recognised by their commitment to composition and simplicity. Having studied and exhibited in both Sweden and Melbourne, his work demonstrates a comprehensive understanding of photography’s technical side, but with a keen awareness of its commercial and artistic potential.

Nilsson’s belief in the importance of enjoying the photographic process – and the necessity to translate this into his images – results in a body of work that is at once sophisticated and alluring.

Most recently, Nilsson’s credits include photographing the Australian Open and Nordic Windsurfing championships for commercial publication. Following a group exhibition he will be participating in later this year, Nilsson plans to expand his career in New York and Europe in 2010.

While you are waiting, get inspired by 581c vol. I.

581c – Vol. 1 by Thobias Fäldt, buy it on shop.swensk.com

“Swedish fashion label WHYRED is launching an art project, an exhibition with with Jonas Nobel. The current world recession is his focus for the Whyred collaboration. As Nobel explains, with a doom & gloom message that slaps you right on the cheek! “The economy is crashing, the climate collapsing, the end is near. Our collective conscience is obsessed by ideas of the coming apocalypse”. Jonas Nobel is a multifaceted artistry uses a variety of styles to express his viewpoint. Common to all bodies of work and to the limited edition collection for Whyred, is his political undertone. Through a juxtaposition of materials and techniques and the usage of subliminal humor and a play on words, Nobel expresses his anger or frustration with a particular topic. Nobel’s collection for Whyred is founded upon a fictive character consumed by the doomsday, representing our shared sub conscience.” – Style Canteen

Whyred Art Projects

Torbjörn “Ebbot” Lundberg is the lead singer of the Swedish rock band The Soundtrack of Our Lives. His nickname “Ebbot” comes from the Swedish nickname for Torbjörn -- “Tobbe” -- spelled backwards. Ebbot claims that the name was made up during a party where everybody suddenly decided to speak backwards. They all thought “Ebbot” sounded kind of good and decided to stick to it. Communion, new album with TSOOL out now.

If you have passed our store you have probably seen our bike standing outside. There is of course a reason for that. First of all, Mr Tony John who is a great person. Second of all because it is Swedish. But maybe the best part is the third. I had one like this in when I served time in the Swedish army, Like my dad. And his dad. So if you thinking of using a bike for transport rather then sports, Kronan is for you.