Graduating students from the Swedish School of Textiles (located in Borås, four hours away from Stockholm) have the choice to show in Copenhagen or in Amsterdam; 11 BA students and five MA students opted to head to Denmark with their graduate collections that can be grouped into six main themes.
The ’70s were known as the “Me Decade,” and fifty years on we are in what might be called the Selfie Generation, which doesn’t refer only to a style of photograph but to a preoccupation with identity. Opening the show dramatically with inflatable plastic garments, was Sonja Sandin (BA) who looked at body and gender dysmorphia from her own transfeminine perspective and then thought about how other transgender people are “treated, consumed, and communicated by society through pornography.” With her Sculpting the Outdoors project MA Adrianne Möri aimed to move outdoor clothing beyond gender. Möri’s soft garments are in sharp contrast to the graphic precision of those by Abbas Mandegar (BA) who incorporated sewing implements, such as scissors, snaps, and pins into his designs. This was not just for fun: the collection, called Made in Pakistan, was based on Mandegar’s own, painful experience in the garment industry and through it, he wrote, “I express these intense emotions and share a part of my journey from a child laborer to a designer.”
Imagination, less than lived experience, was the driving force behind the graduate collections of Luiza Bachofer (BA) who mixed references to malls and things medieval; (BA) Ellen Kowka channeled her recollections of fantastical dreams involving balloons and flowers into her work; and BA Hilma Wittmoss developed prints based on “childhood media.” Physicality was a defining factor of the space-filling line-ups of a trio of students. BA Yeruul Ariunsansar made “wearable knitted sculptures,” presenting work that considered the idea of designing spatially without a human body as a reference, by sculpting with a knitted artwork in the space inside of scaffolding. Placing the space and the body as poles, MA Alicja Kamaj proposed the garment as “a way through” both. She used filament-like wires to construct cob-webby “bridges.” Sofie Kruse Demitz-Helin (BA) chose airy lace for designs that demonstrated “how one’s surrounding space can become tangible as wearable constructions.” Thuy Hong Bui (BA) used long-exposure photography to track a dancer in motion and then used this information to create her dimensional designs.
Transformation was another of the students’ preoccupations. Thinking about the “urban nomad,” BA Pia Erdt created packable, portable, customizable garments. Multiple ways of wearing pieces was also an interest of Alice Andrade (MA) who used cutting techniques to play with functionality and shape. Fellow MA Liesl De Ridder used her savoir faire to create “dynamic textures through floats.” She translated a kind of skip-over stitch aesthetic into wovens with a laser cutter, and applying it to upcycled menswear clothes. The peek-a-boo aspect of De Ridder’s work is vastly different from the (female) body-revealing work of Sylwia Macheta (BA) who “explored opacity as a core property of 1x1 rib,” through layering.
“Simple but conflicted” is the way MA Hugo Ehret writes about his incredible accordion pleated menswear. Knitted from paper yarn, pleated by hand, and draped into almost classical (as in sculpture) silhouettes, the kinetic pleats brought them to life in unpredictable ways as the models walked. A certain skepticism also defined the outstanding collection of Albin Södeberg (BA). He created garments, or the appearance of garments, using temporary tattoos; computers held up against a bare torso “dressed” that body. Photorealistic prints came with instructions on how to rip and manipulate the image of a garment on fabric into a garment to marvelous, and meta, effect. “You know, in the name of deconstruction or the shirt or whatever, I felt a little bit ambivalent about that,” he explained.
