Philipp Rupp

Philipp Rupp (born in Germany) is a Berlin-based fashion and textile designer who is interested in appropriating and integrating urban imagery, such as logos of sausage stands or shop signs, into his designs reflecting on notions of class, fashion history, and the mechanisms of the fashion industry itself. Especially the phenomenon of cross-class-dressing, which happened amongst others with the Mods in England in the 1960s, who as working-class kids wore the clothes of higher social classes, is one of Rupp’s main research fields. An analogy today, though vice versa, are middle-class kids who appropriate a working-class chav aesthetic, a vestimentary strategy that fashion journalist Aleks Error calls “class tourism.”

After a career in the fashion industry in Antwerp, New York, and Berlin, as well as several teaching positions at the Art Academy Berlin (UdK) and weissensee academy of art Berlin (khw) Rupp now teaches Fashion Design at the University of Applied Sciences in Bielefeld/Germany.