Götesson dreamed up patchwork patterns with pops of blush, red, black and white for Lekman, Andersson and band members Johan Hjalmarsson, Jesse Bielenberg and Leslie DeShazor, as well as backdrops for the stage.
“It’s very crude, the work I do, especially the textile stuff,” the Gothenburg-based Götesson explains from his studio. “It’s kind of one of the expressions that I’ve been working with for a couple of years.”
The jumpsuit, a blue collar uniform that’s been co-opted by everyone from Brooklyn moms to Glossier store employees, being emblematic of work is a concept Lekman echoes with an anecdote when I ask about what he wears when he’s not touring or recording.
“I did have sort of like a car mechanic overall that I worked in for a while. I think it was because I read about [music producer] Steve Albini. I heard that he was working in a car mechanic overall when he was in a studio. And so that for a while, I was trying to embrace a form of work ethic by wearing a car mechanic overall when I went to work,” he says.
That was only the beginning – Lekman bought a vintage time clock at a flea market and hung it on the wall in his studio to further construct his own working environment.
“I would go there and I would stamp my card and then, you know, make sure that I was working a particular amount of hours in my car mechanic overall. But that overall it got kind of sweaty, it was some sort of polyester mixture. That just didn’t really work in the end. And also, you know, sometimes you want to go out for dinner after you’ve been in the studio for 10 hours, and that just felt weird in, in a car mechanic overall.”
Courtesy of Daniel Götesson.
Away from the studio and timecards, Lekman affirms that wearing Götesson’s designs as he performed across the United States contributed to a tour he calls “enjoyable the whole way through.”
“It really feels like, you know, you are the band and you’re supposed to be on stage. I think for the first two to three shows, I was worried about the initial reaction of coming out on stage wearing these suits. Like, are people gonna think of it as a joke as if it’s funny, are people gonna see the beauty in them?” he says.
“And right away, I just felt like people were loving them and accepting them. People came up to the merch table, asking, like looking at the t-shirts that we were selling and saying ‘these look great, but do you have any jumpsuits? Uh, can I buy one of those suits that they wore on stage?’ So, I feel like you should tell Daniel when you’re talking to him that I got some business ideas for him.”