Avant-garde designers are becoming one of the forces driving fashion back to its roots.
From now until October 8, the first exhibition in Asia of the well-known Dutch designer Viktor&Rolf: "MetaFashion" is being held in Shenzhen. The "MetaFashion" here has nothing to do with the popular metaverse, but has nothing to do with fashion's concern for the real world. The title of the exhibition is taken from a review in Artforum magazine back in 1995. French critic Olivier Zahm wrote: "The fashion of Viktor & Rolf, more properly a 'meta-fashion', their work is a deconstruction and reimagining of the concept of fashion."

Vktor Horsting and Rolf Cords

Born in 1969, Vktor Horsting and Rolf Snoeren graduated in 1992 from the Department of Fashion Design at ArtEZ Art Academy in the Netherlands. In 1993, they officially founded their personal fashion brand Viktor&Rolf. As a representative of "conceptual fashion designers", Viktor&Rolf's career started in the 1990s. The 1990s in history was also a period of self-reflection and diversified development of the global fashion industry. Many fashion designers began to challenge traditions as rebels, innovating fashion design, dissemination and consumption patterns, and expanding the boundaries of the industry. Viktor&Rolf hopes to update people's inherent impression of fashion, and begin to use clothing to express ideas, as well as their deeper thinking about social culture. In particular, Viktor & Rolf's haute couture creations from the late 1990s to 2000, including "Russian Dolls", "Bells", etc., added a lot of deep imagination to release intuition and personality.
In this first exhibition in Asia, "Surreal Satin", "Boulevard of Broken Dreams", "Vagabonds" and other series, whether it is the recycling of old materials, or new fabric materials The development shows the sustainable fashion creation concept and practice of Viktor&Rolf in recent years. As curator Pooky Lee understands: "Their works have been creating fashion, commenting and interpreting fashion as a cultural and social phenomenon, and expanding the public's understanding of clothing design, human identity and other issues. Know." Get out of inertia in deconstruction and reorganization. If Viktor & Rolf confronts fashion trends with an independent design attitude and responds to the increasingly commercialized phenomenon of fashion, Chinese independent designer brand Uma Wang offsets the familiar shapes of clothing design in a unique way. The UMA WANG2022 spring and summer ready-to-wear collection is called "Platonic Love", which aims to evoke the concept of clothing as a soul mate and explore the most comfortable state of the relationship between people and clothing. Designers use simple and elegant style and light curves to present Chinese elements. The 2022 Spring/Summer series combines smooth layering, so that the clothing presents natural tones such as forest green and earth brown in the seemingly rough texture; the half-spreaded placket, casual draping, printing and dyeing patterns shaped like mottled tree shadows, and The draped neckline on the voluminous robe...with the breath, the body blends with the garment.
Uma Wang said that the beauty of the human body is fleeting, but the unique personality is forever. She hopes that design will become "your faithful partner, who can make you stronger and make you feel comfortable in any situation." Designers can keep the origin of clothing, express beauty in the relationship between people and clothing, and experience life.