HARDY BLECHMAN Act on instinct

The name Hardy Blechman is intrinsically tied to the world of camouflage but those who expect his world to be a covered and concealed place will be disappointed at this point.
The universe of Mr. Maharishi is multi-faceted, colourful, complex, confusing, structured, unstructured, positive, playful - it’s a universe in which every little toy on a shelf, every book, every painting on the wall, even every piece of furniture has a deeper meaning. Hardy Blechman is an obsessed collector and in his own world all the little bits and pieces unite to a complexe work, start making sense, follow a scheme. Well, yes, there is a lot of camouflage in it and in a variety you would never had dreamt of. And it’s not really surprising that after having spend only half a day in this surrounding of visual and information overload one’s eyes start flickering…
The Maharishi headquarter is located in the heart of Soho and perfectly reflects everything the brand and its founder stand for. Already in the narrow stairwells of this ‘very Londonish’-house, Hardy’s affinity to modern art and – of course – camouflage is shown: eight Andy Warhol screenprints from his ’86 series on the special pattern hang there, a Tibetan Tiger Rug that Maharishi produced in collaboration with the Rug Company showing the house’s tigerstripe pattern, Futura’s painting “Bright Light” and “Technical Detail #1” are displayed along with work by Sharp and A-List.
On the three upper floors of the 4600 square meters space, situated next to several workplaces, you then find four showrooms for the main female and male Maharishi lines and the more limited, graphic-inspired, younger MHI lines, the kidswear range and lots of collaborational stuff. Again, camouflage patterns cover chairs, couches, walls...

The groundfloor and basement holds the more public part of Hardy’s world, the dpmhi concept store. Whilst the Maharishi flagship store on Floral Street carrying the main line shows a very serious and elaborated concept, the dmphi-store is a playground, everchanging experiment field and place of pilgrimage for all “streetart-backslash-camouflage-backslash-toys- backslash-whatever-is-related-with-thatculture-addicts”. Like the rest of the building the store was designed by French star architect Francois Scali and serves as an archive, exhibition space and projection screen for the company; starting with its mosaic floor that features the ‘Bonsai Forest’ house camouflage pattern, to an uncountable amount of little details as the composition of the window display or the lovingly arranged toys in numerous vitrines. It gives home to an impressive collection of books on camouflage, DVDs, artwork by Futura, Jest, Assault and photos by Henry Chalfant.
After an exhibition by Neck Face, the Mark Gonzales “Megga America Priests” exhibition in 2006 was one of the highlights in the history of the shop and currently a whole wall decoration still displays an armada of the unique Priest toys. Speaking of toys: in a tiny room in the basement Hardy recently started to present all his Mahatoys from the 20th Century Artists Series in cooperation with Medicoms: amongst them several Warhols, Jean Michel Basquiat figures and not to forget his favorite, the Gandhi toy, which he had designed for the "40-40" Exhibition to celebrate 40 years of the "Action Man" toy.
In another shrine, the so far probably most complete piece in Hardy’s long list of produced items is presented and offered for sale: the “DPM-Disruptive Pattern Material”-
book. In this magnum opus his passion for camouflages reaches its peak. He spent seven years researching for this 944 pages encyclopadic art book that offers a broad coverage of the subject, from its roots in nature all the way to its adoption by the military and on to its usage in modern civilian culture, showing for example it’s influence on the work of fashion designers, painters, sculptors, graphics, architects and even musicians.
One could continue describing these thousands of pieces composed in Great Pulteney Street 2, from the Kubrick figures Hardy dressed in his camouflages, to the pop arty Andy Warhol factory pack, the endless number of MHI-touched skate board decks and recycled and customized uniforms. To really understand the meaning and importance
of every single piece, your name probably has to be Hardy Blechman. While in the past he liked to present himself in a slightly esoteric, mysterious way, not seldomly doing Yoga-poses on his PR pictures, Hardy appeared on the morning of our interview as one of these very nice, positive, open-minded, always welltempered guys. Well, he obviously had the best reason to be in high spirits as less than 48 hours before our meeting, his wife had given birth to his first son – also reason enough to stay out and party till 7 in the morning, which explains why Mr. Maharishi was a bit tired, but yet very “shanti” on this first nice and warm Spring day of this year.

Why don’t we start with a harmless general warm up-question... So, how did this passion for military clothes and especially camouflage start?
I went to travel around Asia for a year and a half when I was 19 and fell in love with it. So I basically wanted to do something that allows me to work in Asia. Most of the travelers were teaching English or were modeling or smuggeling. I wasn’t up for that. Originally I would have done whatever was going to let me go to Bali and all these places. But I met someone who made clothes in Indonesia and so I started working with him. That was my introduction. After a while I made the decision that I wanted to start my own company and set up my own production. I started trading with old military samplers as I thought it has a great quality and it was such a waste of resources. As the clothes are financed with defense budgets there is such a massive overproduction. Soldiers get a fresh uniform when they enter the army, use it for a couple of month and have to give it back afterwards. Instead of using it again, the
military sells it very cheap. So I bought, customized and resold it and that was pretty much the starting point for Maharishi.
Uniforms more and more fascinated me and so I looked for more unusual things, traveled a lot and by the way ended up collecting army pieces.

How many do you own by now?
No idea! But I’ve got collecting problems in general. My dad is an antique dealer and he introduced me into this world. I started collecting stamps, postcards, medals and coins at an early age and when I was 7 I already had some pro-collections. The whole camouflage collecting thing had a really ridiculous dimension for a long time. I probably own around 1000 uniforms, 300 are hanging in a storage room close to my studio, the rest is in boxes. I also have storages out of town, have different levels of storage. Just my toy collection contains 700 boxes now. It’s stupid, it has become ridiculous. Having all these military stuff is a passion and a hobby and I can excuse it with the fact that I use it for my work.

What is so fascinating about army clothing?
First of all it’s cheap and practical. In addition I think people get drawn to it as the colours are reminding them of nature on a subconcious level. And the uniform has always been one of the things the militaries used to recruit. For example an old US recruitment posters that I have, says: ‘We offer you a good salary and a fine uniform!”
Back in the days there always was this romantic connotation of sexy men in uniform.
Now there really is a confusion about camouflage clothing as they’re no longer a clear symbol identifiying military. By selling off so much samplers they kicked themself in the chin. Now especially the Americans are desperately trying to develop a new generation of digital patterns. It’s a bit bizarre, but they want to invent patterns that can’t be copied to make them recognizable again, using them as their very own, special flag. If you think about it: it really is absurd to see Osama bin Laden on TV wearing the uniform of the enemy. And that’s interesting! Most of the time when you see a clothing item from another country in a war area it usually came in a package with weapons. So you can tell who supplied who.

Did you ever do military service?
No fucking way!!! We don’t have military service in England. If we did have to go I would try to do one of these things to get around it: saying I’m gay or something. I think even my father ran away from his service.

How many camouflage patterns did you invent yourself? And which one do you like best?
I’m guessing, hmmm, maybe 50? Bonsai Forest, our house pattern, is still my favorite as it obviously combines all these elements of nature: the clouds, the trees! It’s representative for my idea of camouflage as something that is more connected with its roots, which are in nature. I’d rather see it like this than with the military association that it has now.

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