A Soft Touch

I can attest to the magical properties of Adrian Schachter’s work because I wear it on my body. Under the name Adrian Cashmere, the artist creates sartorial selections unlike anything ever experienced in the medium of soft wool. My affinity grew before I knew of Schachter’s success as a gallery artist, or his family’s art world centrality. He had me at cashmere, but his art practice is expansive, and his work is known to sell out overnight due to a legion of luminary collectors.
Kristin Farr: Describe some of the reference images for your paintings.
Adrian Schachter: My source material comes from all over the internet: various social media, online collections, films, and forums. I also use generative AI. The images and concepts come from different places, but they’re always found through screens.
Do you use specific search terms?
There are not many recurring terms. Sometimes I’ll pepper searches with words like unusual, unique, rare, recently discovered, etc., trying to find non-fictional imagery that seems fantastical.
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Is it fair to say you have a tendency toward amalgamation?
That is true. It was born out of indecision, wanting to go left and right at the same time. For me, amalgamating images feels natural: It’s a reflection of my experience, like a desktop with multiple tabs open at the same time. I’m going for visual combinations that are jarring, unpredictable but are not in opposition to each other.
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Tell me about your show at NYC’s Gratin last year.
The show was focused on two large paintings, both about the dancing mania of Strasbourg in 1518. I was thinking about faith, madness, conformity, and how one’s reality can be challenged. One painting was transposed with a fictional highway and the other with “The Library of Babel,” a short story by Jorge Luis Borges, as illustrated by Erik Desmazieres. I felt that these overlays highlighted the value of communication and the human network, as well as the effect they have on our belief systems.
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Do you collect anything?
I love plants, but I have a hard time keeping them alive. I love to collect rocks, fossils and crystals because they’re nourishing to live with in the same way plants are, and they never die.
I’m drawn to ammonites because they remind me of my brother Kai, who’s no longer here. I love taxidermy. Specifically, Scottish Mizpahs, which are brooches made of grouse feet that you can gift as a good luck charm. I collect vintage clothing that I can reference to varying degrees. And I have a big screenshot collection that I’m always adding to.
How did your cashmere line come about?
I started making clothing for the same reason I’m drawn to ceramics: they are inherently functional objects. I love painting but am aware that it doesn’t have the same approachability. I want to also make objects that can be handled more readily. The more soft or texturally bizarre an object is, the more you're invited to touch it. It’s friendly and unpretentious. I was looking at a lot of knitwear, and I saw some empty space where I could exist in that ecosystem. More often than not, I saw knitwear graphics being treated preciously, whereas imagery sat much more casually on T-shirts.
I was named after my grandmother, so I named Adrian Cashmere after her and myself to encourage consumers to see the clothing as unisex.
You’re a pioneer of printing on cashmere. How does it work?
Similarly to starting a painting, my design process starts with research. However, it's a more visually driven process. I will collect images, sometimes looking for other garments I can reference and modify. The first printed knits I made were meant to emulate worn-out vintage T- shirts. I referenced shirts printed with graphics of American cities and states. Because the end result had to be faithful to the originals, printing was the only way the images could exist. I reversed the images and printed them inside-out on semitransparent fabric so they would look extra faded. This fabric is so comfortable and holds images so well that we continue to use it. It also encourages layering because it reveals but mutes whatever you wear underneath really nicely.
Many of my clothes relate to general narratives or rabbit holes: a quarter-zip, short-sleeve sweater had a zipper-pull shaped like the alien-like angels described in the book of Ezekiel. The shape was directly referencing a 19th-century fresco in St. John the Baptist Church in North Macedonia. Printed on the back is a medieval drawing of a four-leaf clover—Celtic good luck charms—and a simplified drawing of an ancient Egyptian figurine of a frog. I was merging spiritually ambiguous imagery from ancient cultures all over the world to hint at a mystical end point. Maybe this garment can be a talismanic good luck charm when you wear it.
These sources are not spelled out but they are recognized here and there, which lends the clothing an arcane element that can end up being so obscure it’s playful.
Does the balance between art and apparel feel seamless, like one big practice?
It does feel like one big art practice. Maybe different departments? Designing clothing after long periods of painting feels like when you’re in school and ready for the objectivity of a Math class after English.
You also make denim pieces where the button is a tiny head I’ve always wondered about...
The head came from a sculpture I made around the same time I started the brand. It was inspired by a German artist called Thomas Schutte. With the tongue falling out of its mouth, it looks kind of incapacitated, but it’s colored in enamel, like a little skittle. I...