Dutch fashion designer Antoine Peters is known for being always on the lookout for quirky and unusual ideas with a playful twist about them. This is why when he was asked to create a design for the cover of You Are Cordially Invited, a two-dimensional exhibition space for contemporary art, manifesting itself in the form of a glossy magazine, he came up with the "Wooden Floor Dress", a piece suspended between surrealism and interior design in which he injected his optimism.
"Next to having the honor of having Carte Blanche for the cover of this new magazine, it was also very nice to create a dress for which it is logical for the model and the dress not to appear on a runway," Peters explained to Irenebrination. "Normally, fashion in galleries looks quite static, because it's clothes which should move. My Wooden Floor Dress can be filed under the static label."
The dress (it took Peters quite a while to make it - with the ironing being a two day long process) could also be interpreted as a sort of bizarre exercise in camouflage combining fashion and interior design as the model wearing it seems to be swallowed by the floor on which she's standing.
Peters' main idea was indeed to lift the floor off the ground and transform it into a dress. "I did think about the camouflage aspect, but I went for the white parquet and not for a more traditional brownish one, because I wanted the dress and space to really blend together. Now, when you see it, you have to look twice and wonder, 'is it a dress or a floor?' If it were brown, it would be more similar to a floor, but, in this way, it's more subtle, and allows the viewer to dream away," Peters states. "My practice is about inviting people to look at things from a new perspective. In this case there is also a fun element as on one hand it's a sort of camouflage, on the other hand it's the opposite as the whole space is about you."
The "Wooden Floor Dress", photographed by Petra Stavast and Sanne van den Elzen in a shoot that refers to 17th century Dutch paintings, is currently part of the Salon/Kant exhibition at the ViaHenri project space in Amsterdam (until 18th August 2013).
While this remains a sort of arty project, Peters quite bizarrelly tapped into a trend for the Autumn/Winter 2014-15 season: the Igea stand at the latest Pitti Filati featured samples characterised by graphic les fleurs du mal/military/geometric motifs that gave out a sort of camouflage effect.
Will Peters actually come up with more surreal camo-clashes motifs in a proper collection? Time will tell, but you can bet that if he ever does so, they will be charged with his trademark good humour.
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