Raf Simons's maxim "No neoprene no futurism, just cotton and wool" traces Arte Povera,the political art movement of 60s Italy – as in his vote prints. Futhermore, the Italian penisula has been nicknamed "Lo Stivale" –TheBoot. Hence Raf's sweaters withPuss in Bootsdetailing.

Arte Povera rejects technocracy and industrialization, both previously favoured by theFuturistsin Italy. Now in France, the leaders of arte povera are running through mens' collections like water pipes through concrete slab, from Raf to Junya towards Rick.

At Thom Browne, Erwin Wurm raises a Jannis Kounellis scarecrow for Browne's timber amish barn and then shoots two birds with one stone by framing a V for Louis Vuitton.

Not unlike Riccardo Tisci of Givenchy, Arte Povera artists looked to the Big Apple, yet remained "conscious of possessing an inalienable Europen identity that was irreconcilable with any other", in the words of artistGermano Celant.

Still, when Gilberto Zorio and the Japanese Issey Miyake hook up, they look topleats pleaseto be true.

RAF SIMONS I

Luciano Fabro, L'Italia Ipocrita, 1996

RAF SIMONS II

Giovanni Anselmo, Il Panorama Fin Verso Oltramare, 1996

JUNYA WATANABE

Giovanni Anselmo, Grigi Che Si Alleggeriscono Verso Oltramare, 1994

RICK OWENS

Jannis Kounellis, Untitled, 1966

THOM BROWNE

ABOVE Jannis Kounellis BELOW Erwin Wurm, O.T (Cajetan Gril als Mnch), 2001-2003

LOUISVUITTON

Jannis Kounellis, Untitled, 2005

GIVENCHY

Michalengelo Pistoletto, Wollen, La Mera Reintegrata, 2007

ISSEY MIYAKE

Gilberto Zorio, Untitled, 1967

Iris Van Herpen is the first digital couturier, embracing technology and playing with the tension of adding the mechanical, the technological to the ever-so romantic art of high fashion.

In a huge circular salon at the Paris Intercontinental, a stone's throw from the Opra Garnier, the Dutch designer was inspired by her childhood dream to create and control lightning. We were treated to a performance of exactly that by a moving statue on a podium, setting the ambience for the pulsating beat of the show.

Van Herpen, interviewed in the February issue of Dazed, deals with science and biology to create her powerful world. She's the first couturier to employ 3D printing in a collection, with the latest multi-material technology contracting a skirt and cape that's both hard and soft in a single build, drawing on the multidimensionalism that human petit mains offer.

With such fantastic aspiration, Van Herpen is aware of the need to give her work a more tangible context. The clue to that was in the seating and exit music, by Grimes, who is also the face of the designer's new ready-to-wear campaign. In Clare Boucher she's found a pop muse to carry it off.

Read an exclsuive interview with Iris from the February issue

“Every German is obliged to ensure that the Holocaust is not forgotten” a pokerfaced Uwe Boll said, around the same time he was crowned The World’s Worst Filmmaker in the wake of his 2011 film, “Auschwitz”. His own contribution to the collective memory of the Shoah was memorable for all the wrong reasons; an upshot of the fact that Boll had already made a name for himself as the mastermind behind such video game film adaptations as, BloodRayne, House of the Dead (HoTD) and Alone in the Dark.

But subtler minds than Boll have shared his sentiment about speaking the unspeakable through art. This month, on a romp through the European lit scene, I happened upon two.

German writer, Timur Vermes, is a professional ghostwriter who has harnessed his ventriloquistic skills in his first novel to tackle one of the most brutal subjects imaginable –Adolf Hitler. The title– He’s Back – says something about the novel’s jocular tone, and something, too, about how the passing of time loosens tongues on even “unmentionable” topics. It’s 2011, and Hitler’s woken up with a raw headache having spent the night in the bunker with Eva Braun. He stumbles through Berlin, scratching his heavy head over where all the Russian soldiers went, like someone crawling home at 6am who swore they took their denim jacket to the party. Hitler paranoid as hell; he’s sure people are staring and laughing at him. They are, of course, because they think he’s a regular guy doing a Prince Harry – only funny. Hitler turns into a YouTube phenomenon. He’s filmed on a visit to the headquarters of a German fascist party, where he’s appalled by the lack of commitment to the cause that he sees amongst the young neo-Nazis. When they realise Hitler’s won a prestigious journalism award for exposing them, they jump him. Yes, Hitler gets jumped by Neo-Nazis. It’s Ali G meets Heil Honey I'm Home meetsFawlty Towers. (Or, in fact, just Fawlty Towers.)

The other German tackling the subject of Nazi Germany is graphic novelist, Reinhard Kleist. Since the publication of Cash and Castro, Kleist’s been steadily building a name for himself as the fore figure of a new wave of German author-illustrators. He has a studio with three other artists in Prenzlauer Berg. Der Boxer tells the life story of Hertzko Haft, who survives the Holocaust through a combination of physical resilience and devotion his sweetheart, Leah. Having been introduced to boxing for the amusement of the Nazi officers, after he escapes Hertzko decides to fight for a living in America, where he hopes he might also track down his girl. Kleist’s novel is a modern-day Maus in the most obvious sense. Kleist pays deference to the game-changing novel, but also explains his own deviations from Spiegleman’s Pulitzer prize-winner. As he explained over email: “Maus is still a very important book... I am not a fan of his idea to use animals as persons in the story. But this is part of the thinking process he did at that time … dealing with the thought “Can I do this?” Now we are able to deal with the subject more openly, which is not always good. I hate books (or movies) where the victims of the Holocaust are just sad looking puppets. They are human beings and … sometimes they are not good ones. That is something I want to provoke in the reader: Do I still identify with Hertzko after he … knowingly beat people to death?” Kleist cuts to the chase in that his characters are humans –pain is pain in this novel and some of the boxing scenes are beyond graphic; they’re brutal. Offsetting this are the text-less pages where images cross the frontier that language, according to Kleist, can’t. “My favourite scene from Der Boxer is when Hertzko has to work in a factory and comes home. There are no words, nothing much happens, but for him a whole world collapses.”

For me, the text never destroys the impact of Kleist’s drawings; he has a gift as deft as a fine short-story writer for delivering a line like a slap in the face (see, “I have no fear” and you’ll know what I mean). Luckily for the non-German readers, you can still relish the still movie that is Der Boxer. But this graphic novel is crying out for an English translation. For Boll’s sake, at least, somebody translate these silences.

Cover Image: Roger Wollstadt