The Gerrit Rietveld Academie Fashion Show is the annual presentation of the Fashion department of the Gerrit Rietveld Academie. The show features graduation projects as well as a selection of works by first year Fashion students.
When is fashion public?
A fashion show often takes place behind closed doors: hundreds of people work endless shifts on very demanding productions, and visitors travel from afar to attend. But who stays backstage and who gets to see it? If a show is proposing immersive experiences of world-making through bodies activating materials, shapes and scores, then who gets to watch and even stream it? Can, instead, the show be a snippet of life and be embedded in it?
From the streets to the screens and back
The Rietveld Fashion Show experiments beyond the established conventions and hierarchies around the fashion system. For a second year in a row, the show takes place at De Hallen Studio’s, where makers meet and exchange throughout the year. Surrounding the venue, busy streets and markets with multiple and yet intertwined economies: small businesses striving to stay afloat in an ever-shifting neoliberal rush.
This year’s fashion show, attempts to make the walls that separate the “show” from the “everyday” a little bit thinner, by asking: what distinguishes an audience from a passerby? Does fashion end up on the streets, or does it emerge from them?
The show gradually grows out of a yearlong curriculum, marked by the students’ collaborative and multivocal process of creating and composing. In a context-sensitive approach, these fashion graduates' proposals inhabit the space by fusing it with the streets in impromptu encounters: from the stage's extension to the outside passage to its live streaming in the nearby shops and eateries in Kinkerstraat.
Inside, audiences are free to navigate and roam their bodies into the space, marking a stream of movement that shifts perspective, similar to that of a concert. The performative activations /collections propose future building that escapes dominant heteronormative and eurocentric cultures, reapproaching the body beyond its inherited suppressive restrictions and looking at materialities that stem from expanded ecosystems, friendly to touch and fragile to carry, reflecting a wish for the world itself. Next to the graduating students, Year 1 students think through the relationship of the body with moving images. What if a screen becomes part of the body, rather than an extension to it?
Graduates:
Feliz Aaliyah Sánchez Buitrago
Evelina Nanny Eliasson
Johanne Fage-Larsen
Joris Janssen
Estefania Escalona Millano
Mikołaj Szwaja
Simone Winder
First year students:
Michelangelo Arena
Isabella Blom
Kim Claessens
Willemijn Eman
Zoé Monteiro George
Timber ter Kuile
Bontu-Juliette Maison
Darre Sil Macrander
Antoinette Mousseigne
Milly Näs
Beatriz França Neto
Arina Sergeecheva
Lui Tóth-Balassa
Download and read the full Shownotes here
Gerrit Rietveld Academie Fashion Show is sponsored by Keep an Eye Foundation, Meester Koetsier Foundation, Stichting van Stigt-ing and De Hallen Studio's.
Campaign by Graphic Design graduates Matija Stojanovic, Miro Jakob, Loren Xu and Juliette Collins
The Rietveld Fashion department
At the Rietveld Fashion department, students are invited to explore the different cultural and social meanings of clothes and fashion with a critical and open attitude. They are supported and encouraged to challenge and question the established commerce-driven fashion system and work towards more social, inclusive, multidisciplinary, sustainable and multivocal forms of fashion. Through a combination of theory and practice as well as material/technical experimentation, they are supported in developing their own way of working while engaging with and supporting the community.