Eleven students enrolled from the “Fashion, Clothing & Textiles—New Landscapes for Change” masters program at The Royal Danish Academy presented their graduate collections at CPHFW. It was a strong outing across the board. As undergraduates this class had to contend with the pandemic. Now, noted dean Marcus Aminaka Wilmont, the students are “constantly bombarded with some fairly terrifying news and I think it definitely has an impact on them. I think increasingly they’re turning to what they do as a way of trying to create happiness and life and meaning.”
Few, he added, want to make the jump into luxury as they “are not interested in just feeding into a machine.” It seems that they are determined to try to make the world a better, and more humane place by, for example, exploring ideas of identity and belonging.
The Danish American Andrea Ashworth explored her own transnational identity in her collection. Having created a white cotton/polymer woven material, she worked it into American staples like the polo shirt and varsity jacket. The deliberate distortions of the size and shape of the pieces reflect the warped experience of feeling like an outsider. Sarkis Dersahakian, who immigrated to Denmark from Lebanon, created an exuberant collection meant to take up space. “My work is based at the intersection of queerness, Arabness, and revolution,” he explained after the show. “I noticed that the Arab experience in a Western context is very much stereotyped as very angry and scary, where queer people are not allowed to exist.” His quest is to challenge that not with might but with color, ruffles, and exuberance. Elaborate textiles, rather than garments, were what Raquel Lancheros Garzon displayed to communicate “the sense of longing experienced by Latinos living outside of Latin America.”
Gender was another preoccupation of this class. Perhaps the most poetic expression of that was the collection of Shengnan Huang, who explored how toxic masculinity negatively affects men as well as women, examining the way that plays out in China, where she’s from, as well as in the west. One of the best examples of that was a design in which she elongated the classic mens shirt, remade it in drapey satin, and added frog closures. Tilde Herold, whose voluminous pieces closed the show, set herself the challenge of seeing if she could “redefine power dressing from a female point of view with focus on reclaiming the female body.” The answer she arrived at seems to have something to do with taking up space. Power dynamics were at the heart of Sophie Linneman’s collection, in which she explored the changing expectations of women.
Xiu Zhang’s textural garments paid homage to the variety and vagaries of nature, while Alberte Fisher and Andreas Hermann Bloch found connections between shapes and time. Fischer believes that geometric figures are a kind of “universal form language.” Bloch is preoccupied with “how time can change how the clothes behave on the body.” As if to mimic a time warp, Bloch said that he created “a pattern-making method based on squares. By relocating the sleeves or the arm hole, the clothes will pull by themselves … it’s also kind of a no waste method.”
New perspectives like these widen our understanding of what fashion can be and do. At the same time, Wilmont has observed that many in the class are focused on small footprints. Part of this is linked to creating responsibly, but it goes deeper than that. “They’re so concerned with community and the people that they feel they share something with, and they want to build that value into their clothes. They’re not necessarily concerned with scaling it as much as you possibly can in the shortest amount of time, which I think is a nobler way of looking at design.”
