Multiple fashion exhibitions are currently scattered in museums and institutions all over the world: the choice is extremely wide and goes from retrospectives to events focused on various designers. Yet it is not always guaranteed that the largest and most advertised exhibitions are automatically the best ones.
Last week, the lucky visitors who ventured on the top of luxury department store Bijenkorf in Eindhoven, The Netherlands, were instead welcomed by a real treat – the annual Modebelofte exhibition, an initiative of Ellen Albers, owner of You Are Here, and supporter of new talents.
The theme for this edition – "Adaptive Travelers" – was particularly intriguing and allowed the organisers to take visitors on a journey through various sub-themes, such as mobility, living dynamic adventures or embarking in fictional explorations and adapting to a world and a society in flux, constantly changing via migration.
Some of us may travel to another country to go on holiday or to visit their families and friends, but others find themselves pushed out of their countries by matters of necessities, from wars and religious, ethnic or political persecutions, to the hope of finding better jobs.
The designers (around 30) included in the event – all freshly graduated from the very best BA and MA courses in international fashion schools (curators Harm Rensink and Niek Pulles, founder of Studio Heyniek, checked the local academies in The Netherlands, but also travelled to London, Antwerp and Taipei in search of emerging talent) – looked therefore at a series of different themes, from preserving one's identity and independence, to providing modern nomadic travelers with functional and usefully practical wardrobes.
If Yu-Jou Chung combined a TPU (Thermoplastic polyurethane) material with cotton to create a new practical material, Wendy Andreu developed a prototype for a waterproof fabric called Regen (Dutch for "rain").
This fabric is double-sided and reversible, with water-repellent latex on one side and cotton rope on the other. This textile is produced without requiring any further assemblage like sewing, but Andreu used laser cut steel moulds over which she coiled the cotton rope that is held in shape by covering it in latex. In some parts, the dark latex seeps through the rope creating shades and textures, giving it a particular aesthetic quality. This material can be used for garments, but also for other applications including architecture and interior design.
Collections linked with climate changes also produced interesting experiments: Chun-Hsiang Tang wondered if we can avoid environmental disasters with a collection for climate refugees; Vika Mozhaeva was inspired by a hypothetical post-human future where we will be completely integrated with technology, while Sarah Lauwaert's designs were covered in activist slogans and were designed to protect the body from environmental catastrophes. Her jackets and trousers are indeed ready for a flooding emergency since they can be worn inflated or deflated.
Real adventures and fictional explorations led to complex ideas: inspired by the crash of an aviation expedition in the Great Basin Desert, Tzu-Hsiang Hung created protective clothing and equipment made with the plane's aluminum shell that also integrated bits and pieces of aircraft seatbelts and leather chairs.
Ralph W Dennis tackled extreme survival via the life of Charles Swithinbank, a famous glaciologist and arctic explorer from the '50s, and through an in-depth research into the archives of the Scott Polar Research Institute in Cambridge, ending up developing his own jacquards depicting Antarctic landscapes.
Johanna Bas Backer based her menswear collection on a fictional narrative of a man living in a hut isolated from the world, mixing the survival theme with social issues such as seclusion caused by the geography of a place or by living in the liminal periphery of a community.
Marianna Ladreyt interpreted instead the theme of the "flâneur", as a modern contemplating wanderer and adventurer clad in a toga inspired design, while Marie Maisonneuve looked at travelers' expeditions, migrants and modern nomadic citizens without boundaries via multipurpose pieces.
Hybridic was the keyword behind some of the garments included: Max Luo, a graduate from Central Saint Martins, presented his designs for very fashionable gynoids inspired by flappers and from the metallic skins of Hajime Sorayama's Sexy Robots, while, moving from manufacturing practices in the automotive industry, Timothy Bouyez-Forge built garments suspended between the human body and the machine and Pip Paz-Howlett combined the '70s with the late '80s/early '90s rave movement.
Woody's-Gravenmade's collection mixed Western European clothes with traditional Middle Eastern garments, combining visions of Dutch-Moroccan youths in their traditional djellabas, with shiny puffa jackets and high fashion Italian brands, and adding a touch of DIY courtesy of accessories made with repurposed woven laundry bags.
One of the most convincing hybrid-theme designs was provided by Leonie van Balen who mixed tribal Ikat fabric techniques learnt on the Sumba Island in Indonesia with knitwear techniques, coming up with "Ikat-knits".
In some cases the hybrid theme was also combined with uniforms: Caoimhe Savage visited London's Imperial War Museum, collecting elements from uniforms of different cultures, but then ended up creating her own experimental designs in bright colours and materials; Eline Groendijk paid homage to a boys's uniform by working on the volumes and proportions of sport pieces or men's formal jackets as worn by boys aged 7 to 10.
Other projects and garments may have been filed under the art or conceptual category: Katherine Mavridis conceived clothes as objects and created new and experimental silhouettes through sculptural tubes; hoarders inspired Nadie Borggreve's garments symbolising in their shapes the will to break from the disorder, but the impossibility of doing so.
Edwin Mohney's Free Tape collection featured instead a series of pieces made by the designer applying tape on his body and on the body of his friends in a symbolic gesture to reference modern culture, bad taste and the process of shedding one's own fears.
The act of dressing and the possibility of expressing a message while interacting with clothes influenced Timo Zündorf's graduation collection, while Joseph Standish searched for a wider idea of beauty, building his narrative around beer drinking men wearing low-key materials such as a shredded denim patchwork with DIY-like patches and bold techniques like papier-mâché.
In the same way Sunna Örlygsdóttir tried to go beyond the boundaries of commercial fashion, wondering what happens when you don't dress for anybody else but yourself and eventually came up with a wardrobe incorporating tape, nails, plastic burlap, nylon straps and an oilskin tarp.
In some cases recycled materials led to interesting experimental designs or to conceptual pieces: Helen Kirkum built new shoes by disassembling old sneakers collected from recycling centres, commenting in this way about consumption, social identity and memories, while showing how hand-making processes can alter mass produced accessories; Liam O'Sullivan integrated in his designs found materials such as coffee stirrers making in this way layered textiles.
Liya Liu eliminated waste by transforming materials such as trash bags, daily scraps of paper and laundry tags, offering in this way to the wearer an arty way to merge into the urban landscape while elevating leftovers and waste to fashionable elements as important as appliqued embroidered motifs.
Luke Stevens moved from the word "cabbages", a manufacturing term used to describe garments made from surplus material left in factories. By studying these materials Stevens tried to unlock their potential, finding new stories and narratives in the context from which they are pulled.
The most interesting pieces were the ones by Johannes Offerhaus since they integrated an invention: Offerhaus designed his graduation collection around the main principle of cancelling out gravity with centrifugal force. Gravity gives us rules and restrictions when designing a fashion pieces, but Offerhaus designed a turning belt system with which a full skirt made with a light fabric is linked with rope constructions that allow it to be suspended in mid-air. This gave him a new force field and new rules and restrictions to work with and gave a rotating Dervish quality to his design.
Architecturally-wise the design of the exhibition was also very interesting: for previous editions Modebelofte reinvented a disco space and turned the Philips Stadion into a futuristic fashion arena, but for this edition it collaborated with department store de Bijenkorf, radically transforming it.
The exhibition occupied indeed the shop windows and accompanied visitors through the first and third floor, leading them to the roof with objects, images and videos inspired by an aircraft runway.
The only negative thing about this exhibition? Since it was organised to coincide with the Dutch Design Week, it was up for just a few days (until 30th October) and, for the time being, it won't be touring any other city. Who knows, maybe its success will convince Modebelofte to reorganise its "Adaptive Travelers" into a fashionable expediction adventuring also to other countries, cities and department stores.
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