French sociologist Roland Barthes wrote extensively about fashion and, in one of his essays, he applied Ferdinand de Saussure’ semiology to clothes, equating the linguist’s distinction between “langue” and “parole” respectively to dress and to the act of getting dressed.
Undoubtedly, fashion can be described as a language through which we express everyday our personality, mood, taste and identity.
Conceiving fashion as a medium that allows us to send messages to our fellow human beings, artist and designer Thomas Voorn explores in his work the different possibilities offered by the language of fashion.
In the mid-90s, while studying mixed media and fashion design at the AKI Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Enschede, Holland, Voorn began a journey into the world of fabrics. Rather than looking for striking samples of fabric he would search for ugly ones and try to radically transform them into something miraculously beautiful.
Fascinated by the power the fabrics he found could develop, Voorn decided to explore further the relationship between fashion and art and moved to London’s Central Saint Martins to pursue further studies in womenswear. In 2002 Voorn launched, together with fellow student Jeanette Osterried, an organic high fashion label called OsvoMode and focused on it until 2006, when he began developing his art, menswear, styling and photography.
One of his most recent project is a new art genre: using different clothes to spell out words and sentences, Voorn creates “graffiti garments” that he employs to leave messages, conceived as a form of social commentary, in the most bizarre places he finds, such as fields, streets, buildings and walls. Voorn also used his iconic graffiti to create colourful installations for a few stores in London and Rotterdam.
While exploring art in his special graffiti projects, Voorn analyses his passion for prints and colours in his “Coming Home Series”, a collection in which he applies traditionally feminine floral prints to menswear garments, erasing in this way the boundaries between men and womenswear.
The current S/S 09 series was inspired by the “Fashion Herbarium” theme and features white vests, shirts, jackets and swim trunks with delicate foxglove, lily, jasmine, conifer, honeysuckle and chrysanthemum prints.
The most important aspect of the “Coming Home Series” is the concept behind the collection, and therefore also the photographs that accompany it. In the case of the “Fashion Herbarium” series, for example, Voorn’s images of tablecloths, dishes, glasses, curtains, duvet covers, pillowcases and even rubbish bags in prints that match his garments, are instrumental in understanding the artist’s point of view and his desire to transform everyday objects with banal prints into aesthetically pleasing examples of contemporary art.
Voorn hopes he will be able to exhibit the photographs from his “Coming Home Series” in an art gallery one day, in the meantime he is busy developing his graffiti garment installations, while being involved in styling sessions for magazines and advertising companies, working as a consultant for fashion companies and planning a few cinema and theatre projects.
Who knows where Voorn’s next exciting project, led as usual by his “print fetishism” and delving into the language and identity of clothes, will take this fashion designer and artist with a penchant for sociology.
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