The "Fashion & Architecture" exhibition, a project launched by ARCAM, Ontfront (Liza Koifman & Tomas Overtoom) and V2A architectuur & stedebouw (Wouter Valkenier) and involving four duos, each comprising a fashion designer and an architect collaborating together, officially opens on Saturday at Amsterdam's ARCAM (you can follow the opening live streaming here - the exhibition is open until 11th September 2010).
I will definitely focus on it in another post that will explore the results of this very interesting project between Mattijs van Bergen (MATTIJS) & Anouk Vogel (Anouk Vogel landscape architecture), Farida Sedoc (Hosselaer) & Nicole and Marc Maurer (Maurer United Architects), Kentroy Yearwood (Intoxica) & Jeroen Bergsma (2012Architecten) and Iris van Herpen & Jan Benthem and Mels Crouwel (Benthem Crouwel Architekten).
For today. though. I’d like to briefly focus on this collaboration and in particular on Iris van Herpen’s Spring/Summer 2011 collection that, together with Spijkers and Spijkers’s, opened yesterday Amsterdam International Fashion Week (AIFW).
Entitled “Crystallisation”, the collection moved from an exploration of the effects that water can give in its liquid or frozen form, translated into fashion in the tensions and clashes between soft and fluid Vs hard and rigid materials.
This idea based on contrasts came from the collaboration with the Benthem Crouwel architectural firm.
A while back Jan Benthem and Mels Crouwel presented a project for the renovation of the Stedelijk Museum, originally designed by A.W. Weissman, that includes a sort of bathtub-shaped extension (check it out here).
The design that Iris van Herpen developed for the ARCAM project (not included in this post, though you can see the work in progress behind it in the first image in this post) and that opened the catwalk show (see also the photo/video section on the AIFW site) is directly connected with this bathtub-shaped alien spaceship.
Rather than moving from the bathtub, van Herpen played indeed with the water it may have contained and on the effects it may have created if a woman's body had entered it.
The Plexiglass-like synthetic material used for the main design and for the structures that decorated one dress as if they were the liquid wings of an angel or gave the illusion the models had been hit by the contents of one or two buckets of water (matched with impeccable hairstyles also imitating the effects of frozen water), perfectly helped the designer creating the impression of a moment frozen in time and space.
Apart from being based on the liquid/frozen dichotomy, van Herpen's Spring/Summer 2011 collection also played on construction and technique.
Quite a few outfits included in this collection were made out of intricate strips of leather, somehow referencing her current collection, while history appeared in the form of rigid Elizabethan cartwheel ruffs creating architecturally decorative structures around the shoulder area (imagine a less extreme version of some of the designs included in Givenchy’s S/S 2008 Haute Couture collection).
One of the best and most astonishing pieces remains a sculptural bare back top inspired by the works of Daniel Widrig.
The architect and designer, you may remember, provided interesting inspirations for Stéphane Rolland’s Spring/Summer 2010 Haute Couture collection.
While the top displayed echoes of Widrig's Cloud Like (2009) and Soft Fold (2009), the shapes it formed on the body of the model recalled Widrig's recent private commission entitled Roundish, a polyamide structure that looks a bit like a crossover between a human spine and a shell.
The most striking thing about this top is the fact that it features a rather elaborate 3D print developed on the computer.
I guess this is the sort of beautiful avant-garde design that may inspire in future very interesting experiments, both in fashion and
architecture, based on complex geometries, digital and analogue modelling and manufacturing techniques.
Image credits:
First image: Onstaat, Buro-ID19, photograph by: Marnix Postma
Iris van Herpen S/S 2011 collection: Team Peter Stigter
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