During the three days that we spent at the 11th edition of FASHIONCLASH in Maastricht, more than 100 emerging designers and (performing) artists from around the world showed their work from fashion shows, dance performances, presentations, talks to exhibitions. FASHIONCLASH Festival is all about discovering, stimulating and shaping current developments in fashion and unlocking these developments to a wide audience. These were the five designers featuring menswear that caught our editors’ eyes.
Bugman, Dutch
Title: The Flower Doctor
This collection took on several environmental issues, such as global warming and the extinction of our beloved honey bee imagined in the story intended as a satirical approach to today’s environmental insensitivity. “Save the beezzz”, says the old man, “Get off my lawn!” shouts the old man. Addressing the issue of waste within the industry, the collection is produced of 100% upcycled materials
Chiara Scocco, Italian
Title: Subway
The collection proposes us to imagine millions of different identities that converge for a common purpose: to move locked in a box. The Tokyo subway carries the most people a year: 3.1 billion people. Photographer Michael Wolf took photos of the “almost dead of Tokyo metropolitan”. People can’t breathe, crushed by the train doors, are the protagonists of this work “Tokyo Compression” which the designer took inspiration.
Fabio Bigondi, Italian
Title: The Sons of Guns
This collection expresses the role that weapons have taken over time and especially what they have at this time. He compares different cultures that have this point in common. From Yemen to the USA, to the Congolese tribe “Pende Minganji”. Color is the common thread, the first items are dark and angular, but continuing the tones change and become more and more lively and iridescent, to show the transition from reality to total illusion.
Garcia Bello, Argentinian
Title: _CAMPO
This collection conjures up the sensations during a trip to Tierra del Fuego, spending a day in the open and survive the Patagonian winter. The garments in this collection are constructed from discarded raw material donated by fishermen, hunters, and adventurers from the area. For this collection, Bello won the Fashion Makes Sense AWARD 2019 from the jury made up of John de Greef, Emy Demkes, Marlo Saalmink, and Sjaak Hullekes.
Tom Van der Borght, Belgian
Title: 7 WAYS TO BE TVDB / I’M NOT A MONSTER
Our technology-based society is built on likes, and sharing “our happy life”. We deal with negative things in solitude. In such moments we crave for connection and community as an antidote for loneliness and exclusion. TVDB developed a series of 7 rituals in search for new ways of collectively, based on 7 stages of his own life. For this collection, TVDB won the Public award and the FASHIONCLASH Festival Talent Award 2019 from the jury made up of Alberto Caselli Manzini (editor-in-chief Collezioni Sports & Street Magazine), Martien Mellema (creative director / founder Vogue Netherlands), Phillippe Pourhashemi (ASVOF, Fucking Young Magazine, Behind the Blinds), Martyn Roberts (creative director at Fashion Scout), and Marcel Schlutt (editor-in-chief Kaltblut Magazine).
New Fashion Narratives at Bureau Europa. But there was much more for everyone.
