THE CLASH HOUSE
Focusing on performative experiences, the participating designers of The Clash House are challenged to actively experiment with forms of presentation and inclusive audience participation. Designers participating in The Clash House entered into a dialogue with performing artists Mami Izumi and Giovanni Brand, with additional support of our long-term partner SESSIBON, to create a unique presentation form for their new collections. During the digital edition of FASHIONCLASH Festival you will be guided through the process of creating the collections and the presentations and see its final result.
Berend Brus
Rotterdam, The Netherlands
Berend Brus is not only a fashion designer. He is a wild hearted explorer that loves to kick against social norms that we are expected to follow. He strives to open up the conversation about unpopular and sensitive conversations subjects in search for connection and igniting social change.
His collection ‘For Dear Life’ is about the dark corners of your consciousness. “Your brain wants to return to these thoughts during moments of mental health weakness. It's about perseverance and starting over after being victorious. To choose life over the paralysis of despondency. Wanting to start with a clean slate but not being able to until the debris laying around is recycled.” With this collection, Berend hopes to further alleviate the stigma around mental health and to give those familiar with this struggle recognition, to make them feel more understood and less lonely. Another goal is to show those who aren’t burdened by these issues what it feels like in a visceral and observable way.
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Photo: Marta Musial
Art Direction: Elise Leeflang
Make-up: Shirodj Bholasingh
Hair: Lisa Heijndijk
Model: André Fedor via FIC Model Management
MAARTEN VAN MULKEN
Amsterdam, The Netherlands
MAARTEN VAN MULKEN is a fashion designer and label based in The Netherlands. With a main focus on creating womenswear collections, Maarten has been working on many side projects variating from menswear, performances and objects. His collections are based on concepts that are meant to disrupt normal life, referring to different fields within art and combining them with social issues nowadays.
‘UNKNOWN ENTRY EVENT’ is a collection that challenges the fashion standards and normativity we experience as individuals. It crosses boundaries between the old couture, the fast-fashion industry, the absurdities we experience in normal live and the questions that come with it. “What is happening? What did already happen? And more important; what will come next? Can we anticipate on this event or will it be out of our hands and we just have to sit back and watch?” The collection is about inner acceptations, a struggle, and empowerment to all these absurdities coming our way and how we deal with them.
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Photo: Cinta Janssen
Model: Yaicke Mackaay
Marlou Breuls Creative Studio
Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Marlou Breuls is a multidisciplinary fashion designer who started her own creative studio in Amsterdam in 2016. She prefers to describe herself as a visual artist rather than a traditional fashion designer. Within her studio she sees the human body as a foundation on which ideas come to life. This results in a sculptural approach in which unconventional use of materials and constructions come together. The will to innovate is always decisive. The studio's handwriting shows avant-garde use of form, craftsmanship, an eye for detail and exaggerated silhouettes. Textiles are one of the means by which they form ideas and fascinations, as sculptors do with stone and clay.
In ‘Objectification of the body’, fashion-related sculptures move in a space where time, textiles and the human body are unnaturally merged, exchanged or duplicated. You walk into a ceremony or ritual, full of human objects that feel like they are transforming. The work plays with the tension between alienation and abjection and is at the same time tactile inviting. The work serves as a guide through a world where the boundaries between fashion, sculpture and the body are completely alienated. A world where there is a tear in the thin tissue that blurs imagination and reality, so that elements of both worlds can merge.
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NEO Design
Belgrade, Serbia
NEO Design was founded by Nevena Ivanović in 2014, as a part of a graduate project. With NEO Design, Nevena strives to bring traditional techniques of making clothing and jewelry to a new age in which functionality will benefit from the simplicity inspired tradition. The brand tries to connect the traditions of many different nations with futuristic ideas and rebuilds these in a new way, with a connection between the past and the future.
The collection ‘JUUNISHINEO - Buddha's farewell dinner’ is inspired by elements from Japanese and East Asian zodiac legends about Buddha's farewell dinner. Zodiacs are very important in the lives of Japanese people - they believe that the zodiac is foretelling a person’s luck and fortune and a lot of people rely on these forecasts in their major decision making varying from where to build their homes, what businesses to establish and even who they can marry. The collection represents a conceptual approach to wedding wear and is semi-recycled out of old, used wedding dresses and tuxedos, where every outfit is corresponding to certain zodiac signs.
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Photo: Alek Živković
Rena Jansen
Ede, The Netherlands
Rena Jansen is a sustainable designer who graduated in 2018 from the HKU University of the Arts in Utrecht. She worked for designer Walter Van Beirendonck in 2019 and started her label right after that. Rena’s style is bold and colorful, drawing inspiration from surrealism, youth rebellion, childhood nostalgia and her experiences growing up as a millennial. She twists fashion archetypes, creating contradictions that question the world as we know it. The fashion she makes is conceptual, but includes wearable pieces that allow the wearers to express themselves through clothing.
Rena’s upcoming collection ‘Lovesick’ is an ode to young love and the confusion arising from new sensations and experiences. “Love often detaches us from reality, making us feel like we’re walking around with our “head in the clouds”. The collection deals with innocence, coming to terms with your feelings as a teenager and inhabiting a space between dreams and reality. Love can be exhilarating or isolating, depending on our connection to others and how they receive such feelings. ‘Lovesick’ operates as a longing for intimacy and human warmth, in times where physical distancing and fear are everyday rules.”
In collaboration with Martin Malibu, the singing sensation from West-Friesland.
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The Nightmare Disorder
Arnhem, The Netherlands
The Nightmare Disorder is a fashion house with a desire to bring back the cinematic storytelling aspect of fashion. By using character building as a big part of the design process, they strive for creepy perfection. Starting graduation year at ArtEZ Fashion Design in Arnhem, Benji Nijenhuis and Nemo Cheminée decided not to collaborate. They wanted to develop themselves as individuals first before they started working together. Now it's time to clash both worlds in to something they call ‘The Nightmare Disorder’.
With the main focus on craftsmanship and the reinvention of a classic fashion house, Benji and Nemo use design, photography and styling as a medium to search for the right balance between beauty and anxiety. They want to scare the audience in the best way possible, using Nemo's love for children's films and dreams and Benji's fascination for danger and 50's couture. They have created a selection of characters they want to present to you at their first official campaign release during ‘The Clash House’.
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Image: Nemo Cheminée
XHOSA & Black Harmony
Amsterdam, The Netherlands
XHOSA is a menswear company established in 2009 by Giorgio Toppin. Based in Amsterdam, the brand is influenced by the different cultures, backgrounds and innovation in the city. Giorgio is inspired by his cultural heritage and the environment where he grew up. With XHOSA he aims to diversify the wardrobe of men and encouraging them to show their individuality through culture, fashion and innovation in tradition. The brand is best known for quality, technique, craftsmanship and cultural story telling when it comes to their product offering.
‘TERI’ is a short fashion film co-created by XHOSA and Black Harmony about the mix between Surinamese rituals, music, dance, the implementation of Surinamese cultural fabrics, contemporary clothing and how all these elements can co-exist in harmony with each other. The film shows the modernization of an existing culture and how a new image is created when placed in a new or different context.
This film is created within the framework of Theatrical Encounters projects initiated by FASHIONCLASH
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All content produced as part of the digital edition of FASHIONCLASH Festival is created in an environment where all applicable COVID-19 measures have been strictly observed