Nineteen eighty-two; David Lindwall, birth, 3950 grams, 50cm. Since then the Swedish creative, based in New York has dabbled in a number of disciplines from band booker and denim rep to cutting his teeth as a model in Paris, djing, styling and designing. Since 2009, however, Lindwall's focus has been his label David Lindwall. Reborn. 1982, a heavy existentialist t-shirt line picked up by Dover Street Market that, somehow, even found its way onto David Beckham's back – the pap shots prove it. Our universe, like lightning, is recondite.

Expanding his collection to include outwear, hand knits and jeans for AW12, and his life from Brooklyn to upstate New York, we caught up with Lindwall to talk more.

Dazed Digital: Tell us about the AW12 collection. How has your label expanded?
David Lindwall: This year I decided to do a small collection for winter with the essentials, basically what I would like to wear instead of getting locked into design concepts for the collection. I knew I wanted to make amazing-cut designs in the best possible fabrics I could get my hands on. All made here in New York to support our local businesses. I ended up with a long boiled wool coat, a black leather biker jacket and a bomber jacket in a light boiled wool, working a lot with the details and inside of the jacket, something I hope you notice every time you put them on.

Also new this season is a few knitwear pieces – a hoodie in 100% ecological Alpaca (yarn is spun and knitted in Sweden) and a round neck jumper in 100% ecological wool. They're hand knitted, with no machines involved at all. A project that I’m super happy with the outcome of.

The design of the shirts is a play on the first 100% genetically modified human created in our Reborn. 1982 Laboratories and the general waste of resources in the world today, such as the USELESS (using less since 1982) t-shirt.

DD: What’s the moment your creative journey began? Has it been an incidental trip?

David Lindwall: It all started in my childhood, my father always let me use his tools and I was always making things in wood and welding at 12 years old. Then growing up into a 6’4” teenager my mum got tired of altering my clothes and said, "the sewing machine is there, feel free to find out how it works." I did. After working for some houses in Europe as senior designer (I have no formal fashion education whatsoever) I decided that the only way to do what you believe in is to do it on your own.

I remember the day when the brand actually began for real (more than in my head). I was in Paris doing the shows and I got talking to Adrian Joffe at the Comme offices in Place Vendme. I showed him some prints I’d done for a small t-shirt collection and he said, “these are great, you should make them and we could buy them for Dover Street Market.” That was the birth of David Lindwall. Reborn. 1982. Just like that on a sunny day in France. So to answer your question I guess you could say it was incidental.

DD: What have you learned along the way?
David Lindwall:I think the best thing I’ve learnt is that the fashion industry is a lot of smoke and mirrors. I had a good fashion education from modelling, seeing business that close with fittings and getting a understanding for what you actually need to have and the things that people perceive you to have made a big impact when I set up the structure of my own business. Getting to know the big designers in person and talking to them about their business and creative journeys, ups and downs, seeing shows both backstage and sitting in the crowd has been very helpful. Another thing that has been a big help is working for someone else when you make mistakes. Everything has a learning curve.My highlight is waking up everyday next to my wife and working on something that I truly in my heart of hearts love.

DD: You’ve lived across Europe and both sides of the US coast. Where feels most like home?
David Lindwall:New York, no question about it. Though I do at times miss living in Tokyo, a place I could see myself going back to again for a longer period of time.Our flat here in Brooklyn is really my first home, since I've travelled so much in previous years. About a year ago we bought a old Victorian farmhouse (that needs a lot of work) in upstate New York, on lots of land with a barn separate from the house. That’s where I’m starting to set up the new Reborn 1982 office and I can’t wait to get it all done. Just being up there amongst nature is amazing; fishing, hiking, kayaking, snowboarding, it’s a dream come true.

DD: Do we all have a capacity for rebirth?
David Lindwall:I would like to think so. Some might be closer than others.

DD: What would you like to be reborn as next?
David Lindwall:I’d like to be a shadow.

DD: Tell us something we wouldn’t expect of you...
David Lindwall:My bone marrow is dying and I have holes the size of ping pong balls in both my legs. Add to that some 300 stitches in my stomach and being 5 minutes from instant death on a operating table in my 20s.

DD: What else?
David Lindwall:I’m currently working with the brilliant talented photographer Mr. Brett Lloyd on a new project that will present itself at some point next year. Thoughwe could also talk about how productivity and profit is enslaving mankind and destroying our planet at the same time...

PhotographyBrett Lloyd
AW12 imagescourtesy of David Lindwall

Message by berserk message my inbox fills up with fragments of poems, jpegs of fiery abstract paintings, broken English and Cantonese characters, until I begin to feel stoned. You probably won’t have heard of Ami Hsu (阿米, 1980- ) and, like any self-respecting genius, Ami doesn’t seem to care. From the tone of her emails, neither is she fussed about how I came across this unGoogleable novelist-librettist-painter-poet with no website from Taipei City. At the beginning of our correspondence I sense marked disengagement. No sign-off. No small talk. When an answer doesn’t come to her, she’s disinclined to search herself for one: “(Last question: I don’t know)”.

Ami’s becoming well-known in Taiwan thanks to Yen Hung-ya (閻鴻亞), pen name Hung Hung (鴻鴻), a Taipei City-based translator, publisher, filmmaker and theatre director, poet and editor who charged himself with reviving poetry as a medium to “recover and conquer the land that all [the] propaganda and official language occupy.” Hung Hung chose Ami as one of his poets for Off the Roll, Poetry +, a group who “use the written word to…make very simple but powerful statements about life or about what is human.”

Previously untranslated and still without a UK publisher, Ami was a tip-off from the Templer Collection award-winning poet and translator, Matt Bryden, who, as well as waxing lyrical about her poems and paintings, had also warned me, “I only actually met Ami once. I was teaching in a language school in Bath about seven years ago and I made her cry. She ran out of the classroom. At the break I told my principal, and he said, Ah, so you've met the poet then.” I’d also read hazy things about on-going depression and an “episode” of mental illness in London, but now that I was in contact with her, Ami was unnervingly composed.

“I was a psycho in the UK, it’s my fate: a gift to my creation and also a curse to my spirit. I was missing about ten days in the London street [sic] till my sister picked me up… I wrote the days into my novel and poems. The illusion occupied me, a mad world becomes so real. The experience is beautiful, wonderful, and scary.” Her “split mind” clearly drives her –the first collection of poems, To Sing, To Dance, To Be A Wolf, full-length novel – “poetic, chaotic and disordered” –and exhibition of paintings were all inspired by this ten-day-long schizophrenic episode on the streets of London when she was studying away from Taipei City.

Early on in our interview Ami describes herself as having been “broken to a poem”, and throughout the course of our exchange, it’s clear this isn’t an affectation. When I ask her whether she thinks mental illness can facilitate strong art her response is beautifully disorienting. If she begins an answer in prose, more often than not it runs into verse: “Yes. It’s strong but short like a firework display. You can’t always depend on illness to create or you’ll die for it very soon. I have a poem about this:

All summer

Meteors crossed the sky

Polished my back, haunches, rump…

And finally the silver horn on my forehead

But everything reverted to darkness …”

Perhaps it’s got something to do with her stilted English, or perhaps they are little flashes of genius (a diamond in the rough), but I start to read poems in everything she writes. I ask her about love and pain, and why they always appear inextricably in her poems and paintings: “Blink, and love becomes pain. See it poetically. Blink, becomes love again.

I return to the flotsam and jetsam Ami left in my inbox and spot a typo I hadn’t noticed before –“Hi Sophie, Please find attacked.” From the streets of London to Taipei, through love and pain (“Loving you/Made me the best comic actress”), she makes madness real - and so palpable it’s unsettling. It is little surprise that when I ask Ami if all her work is confessional, she answers, “Yes. I like the word “confessional”. I like Sylvia Plath.” There’s a type of precarious brilliance that, in the western world, critics and readers of poetry often associate with Plath, herself “broken to a poem”, and it’s a Plath line that sums up Ami’s rough talent best: “Perfection is terrible”.

The pamphlet, The Desire to Sing after Sunset (trans. Ingrid Fan and Matt Bryden) is a hybrid collection of paintings and poems from 2009 to 2012 and which will be self published early next year. Take a look at the paintings in the gallery below and read two longer poems underneath

讓一切腐朽

蘋果變黃

老黃狗貪睡

蠟燭燒到了世界的盡頭

•

花朵隨著四季輪迴

祖母的肉身化成土壤

老舊的屋舍和社區老樹在政客的舌尖消失

唯有不經意與你路過婚紗街的午后

仍然是一半斜陽，一半天真

Let them all rot

An apple browns

An old dog drowses

A candle burns till the end of the world

Flowers reincarnate through the seasons

Grandmother’s flesh becomes dirt

Clapped-out houses and old trees disappear through politicians’ tongues

Only this afternoon, we passed through a street of wedding dress shops,

a little light still to the day, half innocent

命運一下子把我吹進荒廢花園

每一朵花都有各自的苦果

每一幅肖像都熱淚盈眶

飽受折磨的人，逐漸長成蒸好的熱饅頭

•

那種溫柔與勇敢

比方說，理髮師的手指

比方說，作他的妻子

比方說，在日子裡，失去一些詩

說真的，我去去就回來

每一個荒廢的日子，都值得記憶

Fate swept me into a disused garden

Each flower had its own bitter fruit

Each portrait’s eyes welled

Through suffering we gradually mature

Tenderness and courage –

For example, a barber’s fingers

For example, being his wife

For example, losing poetry in daily life

I’ll be back soon,

Each disused day is worth remembering