In 2008 I have made one of the most important decisions of my life – I decided to take part in Erasmus programme and go to Iceland. When I was deciding where to go, I was thinking about what kind of experience would I like to have in order to grow as an artist. I didn’t want to go some place familiar where I would simply confirm my creativity, I wanted for it to be challenged in every way imaginable. I had no other ambitions but to widen my horizon, face with my own limitations, travel to an exotic place (exotic as in different, not warm) and be paid by government to do so. Iceland seemed to be the perfect place for that. Little did I know that by visiting it I would embark on a voyage that would take me four years to accomplish and leave its mark for life.
At a time I have already started flirting with conceptual approach to design. I fell in love with science, listened to minimalist classical music and began to perceive fashion design as purely mathematical form of expression. That love still persists in my work. Being accused of dramatizing life, mathematics offers me a safe haven where exploring form had no emotional context and no other content but function. I don’t want to be personal in my work - I want to be essential. I shed the shell of decoration and form-for-form-ism. I let go of my personal motivation that is time-based, which makes it temporary. I begun to search for the timeless and trendless instead.
I was in my fourth year of textile and fashion design at a time, but on Iceland I was put into the second year of a three-year study. That was a regular procedure. Second year students had their own fashion show at the end of the year and I was expected to participate, thus making this collection my official graduate collection.
The starting concept of the collection was built on femininity that I derived from Modigliani’s paintings. I always found his models to be carefully drawn in thoughtful composition that emanated femininity. I chose the composition to be the main inspiration for form. Placement of their body parts and the relation between them served as a matrix on which I built my vision. That concept soon became something different.
The starting concept of the collection was built on femininity that I derived from Modigliani’s paintings. I always found his models to be carefully drawn in thoughtful composition that emanated femininity. I chose the composition to be the main inspiration for form. Placement of their body parts and the relation between them served as a matrix on which I built my vision. That concept soon became something different.
You see, I do not treat money with much care and fear. I live in the moment and money to me is simply a means of making that moment more pleasurable. One can easily say I am irresponsible, but I call it “being alive”. So I led a carefree/less life on Iceland, which has much higher standard than Slovenia, making everything three to eight times more expensive. Thankfully (for me) I was there precisely at the moment when the last financial crisis happened, which made Krona lose its value, which in return stretched my finances a little further into the future than it would have, had the crisis never happened. However, I was still having way more fun that I could afford, so in the middle of the process of making my collection, I ran out of money. I had two options then. Either to use the material I had bought for a small collection or try to find a way to make it happen nevertheless. I chose the latter. What I did was, instead of frantically trying to make my collection happen the way I imagined, I embraced my current poverty and decided to show a potential collection. I bought the cheapest material I could get. We call it toile. That is just plainly weaved raw cotton material, which we normally use in designing process to make test models, before we cut them out of original material. To add a “twist” I labelled each toile garment with stencil printed information of how it was supposed to look. There it was, my first conceptual collection.
My teacher on Iceland academy was not too fond of the idea that I would stencil print information on clothes. She said a concept was never supposed to overbalance the collection. But in my opinion, that information was no longer just a thing that happened, it became a story around which the collection was built. So I did it anyways. I have learned then to work with what is present. I learnt that design is a continuous process that never ends and I was shown that embracing what is makes enough of a content to give the collection a substance. I still included no emotion; there was no preaching of any kind involved. My collection told a story that lives on its own, giving it content even if no connection to a person creating it is made. Since then I am looking for simplicity. No more layers to the things I do. Instead I treat them as objects that create space for personal interpretation – precisely the way I think contemporary art is made. It can be person based, but it is supposed to transcend that in the end.
Here you can see a short video of that collection. It is only 4 silhouettes, but I let it running longer for models to return, so that backs are also visible.
And there's that!
