The spectacular fashions on display in the NGV International exhibition Viktor & Rolf: Fashion Artists provide critical insight into contemporary discourse in design practice.
The design duo—Viktor Horsting and Rolf Snoeren, have engaged with cerebral approaches to art and fashion through their haute couture and ready-to-wear collections since the 1990s. Their approach to design practice is as much about the performance of fashion on the catwalk as it is concerned with the laborious hours of craftsmanship that are involved in garment construction. This idea is perhaps most clearly represented in the exhibition through the display of the Russian Doll collection. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=boccaN98V90
Here a series of eight exquisitely sewn garments highlight the work of the atelier, where delicate beading, hand painted lace, and elaborate embroidery is contrasted with the rough hewn fabrics of wool, hessian and burlap. These garments formed part of an impressive catwalk production in 1999, where Viktor & Rolf proceeded to dress their model in progressively more elaborate (and heavy) garments throughout the duration of the show. The result was a Russian Doll clad in 70kg of haute couture where the final layer revealed only the models head. Underlying this collection is a set of ideas that have continued to be explored throughout the designers’ careers, that is the rapid change inherent to the fashion system, and the way in which fashion makes women in particular subservient to a consumer system dictated by designers. As such these works underscore the central concern for institutional critique that has repeatedly appeared in Viktor & Rolf’s collections where the settings, agendas and frameworks that are central to haute couture and the fashion system in general are called into question.
This is particularly true of the designers’ collection ‘Credit Crunch Couture’ (2010). On display in the exhibition are two of the original chopped and sliced tulle garments along with a fashion doll dressed in one of their more spectacular gravity defying creations. At the time Viktor & Rolf were responding to the global financial crisis quipping that ‘with the credit crunch and everybody cutting back, we decided to cut into tulle ball gowns.’[1] In fact these garments can be understood more critically within the context of deconstruction design. As described by design historian Ellen Lupton, deconstruction in design emerged in the mid-eighties derived from Jacques Derrida’s post-structuralist concern for exposing how representation is constructed through institutional systems and ideologies. In design this was conveyed through a range of forms that sought to expose the inner structures of process and form; for example exposing the layering and cut-and-paste processes of graphic design.[2] In fashion deconstruction came to be represented through the dismantling of clothing, exposing hems and seams, cutting and destroying fabric.
Image 1: Viktor & Rolf Credit Crunch Couture (2010), exhibited at NGV International, Viktor & Rolf: Fashion Artists, 21Oct-26 Feb 2017.
Throughout their collections Viktor & Rolf draw on a heritage of deconstruction in fashion from punk, to the garments of Martin Margiela and Rei Kawakubu that conveyed anti-fashion stances by creating distressed clothing. By cutting away the tulle of their ball gowns and punching holes in their skirts like pieces of Swiss cheese, Viktor & Rolf engage with the process of design deconstruction to expose not only the inner workings and structure of their garments but also metaphorically convey ideas about the position of haute couture within a failed economic system. In jokingly suggesting that due to the global financial crisis of 2009 people might only be able to afford half a dress, Victor& Rolf deconstruct the fashion system by highlighting the high costs of haute couture and its associated labour as well as drawing attention to ideas of value and satirising the idea of the bankrupt nature of haute couture. These conceptual ideas are revisited throughout the exhibition and replayed in a number of contexts from Hyeres 1993 to the Wearable Art collection A/W 2015 and the Vagabonds collection A/W 2016. As such these garments underpin a key philosophy in deconstruction design which involves not only using techniques, forms and processes to expose the inner structures of the design object or image itself but also to expose the institutional systems and ideologies within which design practice operates.
[1] Rolf Snoreren in Nicole Phelps, ‘Spring 2010 Ready-to-Wear Viktor & Rolf’, Vogue, Retrieved 20 February 2017, http://www.vogue.com/fashion-shows/spring-2010-ready-to-wear/viktor-rolf
[2] Ellen Lupton, “Deconstruction in Graphic Design” in Ellen Lupton and J. Abbott Miller,Design /Writing/Research: Writing on Graphic Design (New York: Kiosk, 1996).
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