Our Mission
RAW Looks is dedicated to avant-garde fashion: cutting-edge Avant-Garde Fashion brands/designers whose work pushes the boundaries of contemporary fashion and the best and most exciting fashion stores worldwide stocking those designers. Our platform centers around unconventional fashion design, artisanal craftsmanship, cultural inquiry, and thoughtful curation.
At its core, RAW Looks was founded out of a simple yet persistent question that was a need of ourselves:
Where can we reliably discover the most compelling highend artisanal avant-garde fashion-designer pieces in different cities worldwide?
The question as well as the answer formed slowly through perpetual traveling and endless curiosity, through encounters with brands and designers, ateliers and specialty retailers, through garments that revealed the presence of the hand behind the work. RAW Looks emerged from this continuous search, shaped by a commitment to the values that define artisanal and avant-garde fashion.
Origins & Perspective
RAW Looks began from continuous traveling to explore the world, culture and ultimately finding our own identity also in fashion and style – we came across designers and boutiques across different cities worldwide, slowly leading to a growing desire to continuously discover the rare spaces where craftsmanship and creative independence are treated with deep respect. Unlike mainstream luxury retail, the boutiques we highlight are rooted in unique store concepts, a deep knowledge and understanding for avant-garde fashion, careful curation, and long-term relationships with designers that produce high-end, sustainable and in traditional craftsmanship type of ways.
The platform developed as a way to give structure to a global network of stores and designers who operate outside the logic of mass production. RAW Looks continues this mission today by offering online tools to discover avant-garde fashion brands and stores in a holistic approach.
Our Approach
Our work centers on avantgarde fashion designers and stores whose practices emphasize artisanal making and deep material research, experimentation and ultimately mastery, conceptual and experimental design language, responsible production and long-term vision, the preservation of traditional craftsmanship.
Continuously keeping an eye out for new designers, RAW Looks seeks to curate those for a wider audience. We aim to illuminate the ideas, processes, and cultural conditions that shape avant-garde fashion.
How We Curate
The listed avant-garde fashion brands are incorporating outstanding unconventional fashion concepts, true craftsmanship, integrity of materials & sustainability, depth of design philosophy, consistency in creative vision, as well as relevance within the avant-garde and artisanal landscape. The listed avant-garde fashion stores are exclusive boutiques with extraordinary store concepts that stock those designers and present them in the best possible way.
To apply to get listed as an avant-garde fashion brand or store, as well as for collaboration opportunities, reach out to [email protected]
Cultural & Artistic Context
Avant-garde fashion exists at the intersection of art, craft, and cultural expression in an unconventional way. Instead of bold logos / trying to create pieces as status symbols, avant-garde fashion pieces convince by highend material, extraordinary silhouettes, attention to detail. The brands manufacturing such pieces are working with traditional – often labor-intense – techniques, have a strong relationship to experimentation, material inquiry and creative risk. Many of the brands we feature operate within fragile ecosystems: Small studios, limited runs, hand-finished garments, unconventional production cycles, as well as local production at fair wages.
Our writing and curation centers around contemporary craft, the evolution of material-based design, the role of independent creators in a fast-fashion world, the aesthetics of dark, monochrome, and deconstructed clothing, as well as the philosophical roots of avant-garde garment-making.
The Importance Of Local Stores
Independent boutiques remain essential custodians of avant-garde and artisanal fashion. While the world shifts more and more towards digital / online, stationary stores struggle to survive as a result. We believe that stores and visiting them is the ultimate experience that can not be replaced online or digitally.
These spaces offer something irreplaceable: a way of experiencing clothing through conversation, texture, atmosphere, and proximity to the maker’s vision.
RAW Looks exists to give visibility to these stores: to map them, support them, and celebrate the communities that form around them and the designers they represent.
A Platform for Discovery & Access
While we believe the on-site store-visit experience represents the most meaningful way to engage with avant-garde fashion, we also recognize the limitations of geography. RAW Looks therefore offers a global directory of the world’s leading highend avant-garde fashion boutiques, research-based artisanal avant-garde fashion brand listings, editorial explorations of collections, materials, aesthetics, and processes, an aggregated, yet curated selection of current-season pieces of avant-garde fashion brands to shop online, for those unable to visit these boutiques in person.
Our goal is to fuse the offline and online avant-garde fashion sphere: on site store experiences, as well as the best and broadest worldwide accessibility of rare pieces from highend artisanal avant-garde fashion brands online.
Values & Vision
RAW Looks is guided by an ethics of:
- slowness: choosing depth over immediacy
- artisanal craftsmanship: honoring the makers and labor-intense processes behind each piece
- integrity: resisting homogenization and disposability
- education: elevating knowledge around design and materials
- community: connecting Avant-Garde Fashion enthusiasts, stores, and brands
We believe fashion should be approached with intention.
We believe garments deserve context.
We believe independent creators and expression without boundaries matter.
Our Future Direction
RAW Looks will continue to build a platform that supports independent artisanal fashion through expanded avant-garde fashion designers + their practices documentation, deep material research, global store mapping, editorials that highlight the craft-driven, conceptual, and experimental edges of fashion.
Our ambition is to contribute to a more informed fashion culture that values thought, integrity, sustainability and long-term creative work.
The Founder
RAW Looks was created by Tim Köck, who started designing and programming websites by the age of fourteen, instead of doing his homework for school. Over the following years, Tim developed a multidisciplinary skill set across media, IT, business, photography, design, and online strategy, which led him to establish a creative agency in Munich while studying media, IT and business.
Long before remote work was mainstream, Tim started to embrace a location-independent lifestyle, choosing a path defined by autonomy, flexibility, and exploration. This freedom shaped his worldview and sharpened his sensitivity to craftsmanship, (design) culture, and the unique character of independent artisanal fashion brands and stores encountered throughout his travels.
Tim’s interest in avant-garde fashion emerged from a lifestyle that is as unconventional just as much as avant-garde fashion is, from discovering small ateliers, studying artisanal production, and observing how certain designers work outside the logic of mass-produced fashion. RAW Looks is the result of this long-term engagement: a platform that brings together his digital expertise, eye for aesthetic detail, and appreciation for the cultural and craft-driven aspects of contemporary fashion.
