Wendy&Jim designers Helga Schania and Herman Fankhauser have been fashion pioneers for nearly a decade. The two met during their fashion training at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna, famous for attracting the cutting edge in mentors like Helmut Lang, Vivienne Westwood and Jean-Charles de Castelbajac. After graduation in 1999 Helga and Herman entered in the Festival de la Mode in Hyeres together and they have been putting out collections with a strong alternative identity season after season ever since.

As Wendy&Jim they also invented the multidisciplinary "still performance" show and also did countless art projects. The Wendy&Jim label developed and diversified along the way, changing from womens- to menswear by popular demand, collaborating with brands like Comme des Garçons, Nike, Levi's and artists like Peter Kogler, and keeping spirits high with their second "fun"-line, Fanline.

Most recently, however, Helga and Herman embarked on an entirely new hub called the NEW H. Struggling to keep up with high quality delivery, like most labels their age and size, they decided to clean out their complete production system when suddenly, "like a miracle" as Helga puts it, the opportunity presented itself to venture into denim.

"It's been a huge change and rather good news actually," says Helga. "Basically we decided not to do a Wendy&Jim collection this year and really focus on the jeans. We started last fall and the first collection is just about ready. There will be three shapes for women and three shapes for men, bottoms only for this first collection. We already designed tops but we decided to keep those for next season. We have to get the one style really perfect before we do the next. With the denim we want to reach a much wider audience, also people that don't know us yet. We do this together with a business partner who's specialised in denim because it is a completely different market and language. That's why it took so long, we had to learn a lot actually. Denim has always attracted us. Everybody wears jeans, it's a reality that is very sympathetic to us. We love seeing people wearing our clothes but there is also this strange gap because we focus mostly on young people but it's the people with money who buy Wendy&Jim and they are usually not that young. With the denim line we can finally bridge that gap."

"We were just in this phase figuring out how we could keep existing the way we want to be able to exist in this system," says Herman, "and now with the jeans line it's also about putting out this same message. So in a way this denim line is also our survival strategy. With the NEW H we will also work with new selling tools, we will have agents in all countries - jeans are a mass product so you have to act like a mass product. Of course we will show in Paris but that is more like a supplement so people get an image. Only two or three pieces in the line will still be like show pieces, to show what we could do. The price range will be between 150 and 320 Euros (in pounds it will probably be pretty much the same) depending on how the jeans are treated, as well as stitching- and colouring-wise. We want to try and keep the prices as low as possible so people can actually buy them and so we can sell enough in order to finance the Wendy&Jim label. It's really exciting to us because we hope to be much more visible in the street. We can hardly wait. Selling season will start on July first until late august and the first delivery is scheduled on November, so right before Christmas. It's all foolproof and happening and by the end of this year it will be real."