During the 1900s, quite a few architects and architecture critics pondered about the possibilities offered by the aerial view: in January 1934, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Angiolo Mazzoni and Mino Somenzi, penned the "Manifesto of Aerial Architecture".
Though the document had its faults and preached destruction in favour of an improbable and at times dystopic vision, it made an interesting point - cities are usually built by architects who plan them from the ground and not from the sky. In a nutshell, cities are not built to be admired while in flight: according to the futurist authors of the manifesto, a truly aerial city would have been a linear one with continuous lines that displayed certain parallels to the sky.
A year later, in 1935, Le Corbusier published Aircraft in which he stated he was grateful for the archtectural lesson the aerial view gave him, and used it to call for a mechanical design of cities that implied the total control of their form and design.
Before that, in the early '30s, painters from the aero-futurist movement interpreted specific landscapes experimenting with the aerial point of view in movement.
Themes such as the exploration of everyday life from a bird's eye view and the first experiments of avant-garde architects advocating a unique city made of continuous lines to be admired in flight, came back in Marga Weimans' Spring/Summer 2014 collection.
Conceived as a development of her "Fashion House: The Most Beautiful Dress in the World" installation and entitled "Aerial", the collection includes designs characterised by prints inspired by aerial architecture and interior design.
All these graphic prints - from images of the façade of a skyscraper on a simple dress, of a bird's eye view over a series of identical buildings that may or may not be factories on coats, and pictures of modern chairs on functionally elegant suits - are a way for the Dutch designer to take distance from her own pieces and ponder about the life of the wearer and in particular of all those modern women immersed in a urban environment and living in a complex society.
According to Weimans, if architecture protects us with solid buildings and structures, garments envelop us in cocoons with their shapes, folds and pleats, created with experimental and structured fabrics.
With this collection Weimans continues to explore the possibity of combining fashion with other artistic disciplines: for her "Aerial" designs she collaborated indeed with visual artist Jeroen Koolhaas, architect Barend Koolhaas and interior designer Aura Luz Melis.
What's the story behind your Spring/Summer 2014 collection?
Marga Weimans: The collection is a continuation, a sort of logical progression, of the previous installation - "Fashion House: The Most Beautiful Dress in the World". In that case I had all these different functional spaces connected with the career of a fashion designer. The new collection is instead about making a sort of fictional archive of a fashion house, or about being an established designer and looking back at your career, taking stock of the house you have built. Through this collection I also wanted to ponder a bit about issues of wearability and about women in general and how a designer creates a space for different women out there.
Is this collection also linked with interior design?
Marga Weimans: The previous installation - "Fashion House: The Most Beautiful Dress in the World", the starting point for this collection - was about creating the skeleton of a fashion house, from the basic outlines of a building. With the new collection I'm entering the building, to provide the content to this structure: the apartment gets therefore furnished with fabrics that tell a story turning into personal artefacts. To come up with this collection I mixed two apartments of creative people who fascinate me - Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Coco Chanel's - creating a hyper personal, hyper eccentric apartment and looking through this eccentricity at women in general, trying to understand what fits them or what they would like to wear. I employed different garments to tell different stories, from the tale of a woman with a child to the story of a woman who lives and works in a city. I also referenced multiculturalism in the catwalk show that featured models from different ethnic backgrounds.
Do you feel that multiculturalism is still missing in fashion?
Marga Weimans: I really really love fashion, but there are moments when I feel skeptical about it. Fashion isn't a total multicultural environment yet. I'm usually subtly political, but in this case I thought 'if I have a concept about women in general, and I'm really designing for all women, I can't put on the runway only white models, that would be ridiculous!' I work in a conceptual way and try to be true to my personal ideals and not to the business ideals. While working on the collection and presentation I also had firmly in mind the women who work in my company, realising it would have been ridiculous to refer to just one type of woman on the runway.
Do you feel that things are changing in fashion with designers blurring the boundaries between genders and trying to bring up a new kind of representation of women also on the runway?
Marga Weimans: There is definitely a shift when it comes to gender blurring, especially when we talk about young designers. More designers are putting men in female clothes and viceversa. I think we are living in very poignant times gender-wise - think about homophobic laws in Russia - and I believe that, as designers, we must try and tackle these issues whenever we can. There may be people at home watching a show and masochistically yearning to be someone they are not, like a young and healthy teenage girl hoping to transform herself into a model. You have to start wondering not just what people want to see during a show, but also what's their final perception of that show. As designers, I think we must try and avoid conditioning the general public - the final receivers of the show - in the wrong way.
Fashion fans are quite familiar with the works of architect Rem Koolhaas, but you collaborated on this collection with other members of his family, such as artist and illustrator Jeroen Koolhaas. Can you tell us more about the other side of the Koolhaas family?
Marga Weimans: I had been reading about Rem Koolhaas for a while and I checked Jeroen's work on the Internet after stumbling upon his name. I became a fan of his work for Prada, but also of his "Favela Painting" project that involved him going to the favelas and painting for and with the local people. I liked it since it had a sort of punk or hip hop attitude about it, so I started following his work. We then bumped into each others since he also lives in Rotterdam. We collaborated together for the first time when he did a black and white panorama for last year's installation and the graphic material for the invitation cards. He is a very intense and critical person, so the collaboration went really well.
In which ways has this collaboration changed the way you work or influenced it?
Marga Weimans: Conceptually my ideas never change while I'm working on something. What changed with Jeroen was learning how to communicate the concept and how to put the concept into shape or print. He works with the images I send him and when we collaborated for the first time I sent him a lot of material - hundreds of images - and he had to go through all of them. The second time I started to think and work in a more efficient way. Jeroen is a painter, so we also worked on prints trying to understand what he could do with flat surfaces. At the time I was also tired of excessive ornaments on dresses and wanted to strip off some designs, so we worked along the idea of raw images and collages. I guess we influenced each other a lot bouncing ideas off each other, but I never felt threatened by the fact that he also does work for Prada - in fact I wasn't interested in his designs because he collaborates with them, but because of his raw and free design aesthetic. Through him I also got to work on the textile prints with Barend Koolhaas and Aura Luz Melis. It was great to collaborate with a very hard working - but at the same time relaxed and unpretentious - team.
Quite a few garments in the collection feature prints, but the last dress on the runway - a sculpturally draped creation - came in stark white, which fabric did you employ on that one?
Marga Weimans: It's just hand-painted white cotton, but there was actually a long process of preparation behind that one dress. The piece looks as if it featured a lot of pleats, but it is actually composed of a lot of seams. It was actually a kind of moulage of pieces of spray foam, an attempt at rendering 2D into 3D.
Are you planning to take your collections to any big fashion capital?
Marga Weimans: Fashion is international and I would love to make the next step and go to London or Paris, but I need to prepare for such move really well. Production in these cases is very different from the way I work and you have to find investors. On the other hand I'm happy with the place I am and the way I am at the moment. I may sound like I'm hesitating, but I'm setting this up at the moment.
What do you like about Amsterdam Fashion Week, the fact that it's smaller and experimental?
Marga Weimans: The fact that you can have zero production, but still showcase your work! I do have a market, but my market is completely different from the market you may find abroad. I have two or three major buyers, but I also make one-offs, and work on different projects, so I have a different modus operandi. Amsterdam Fashion Week offers me a platform to show regularly and the organisers are also open to every kind of presentation. For the latest collection I had three shows in one night - one was an installation, the second a regular catwalk show and the third one was for people to look at the clothes more closely. They were perfectly fine with this format and as designers we also worked well with sponsors such as Samsung or Vodaphone. I would say that the best thing about Amsterdam Fashion Week is the fact that it's kind of local, but it's still a big platform. For example, my latest collection worked really well in The Netherlands and got a lot of coverage. I was in Milan in January and then June for both the women's and men's shows and that's a completely different context, Milan is more commercial but with not much happening when it comes to young designers.
Would you like to expand also in the accessory market?
Marga Weimans: The whole idea of a fashion house - its complexity of operations and different fields and skills it involves - fascinates me. You have a beautiful idea and translate it into something beautiful, but then you have to market and sell it. As I pointed out also with my fashion house installation all these aspects genuinely fascinate me, so one day I would love to carry on with the project and move also onto accessories.
What are you working on at the moment?
Marga Weimans: In September I took part in Vogues's Night Out in Amsterdam with an installation in a hotel suite, and curated the art direction of a five star hotel. My S/S 14 collection was then part of "XS Architecture", an Amsterdam-based exhibition that mixed artists and architects and showcased products made with the architectural practice in mind. In my case we focused on the print collaboration with Jeroen Koolhaas, Barend Koolhaas and Aura Luz Melis. At the moment I'm working on a retrospective, a book and a documentary about my designs and the way I work, maybe I'll be doing a project with fabric company Vlisco and with Woolmark, the latter may focus on using felts.
What will your next collection be about?
Marga Weimans: I will keep on exploring the fashion house spaces, focusing this time on the designer's studio or workspace, and the store. My collections look very different one from the other, but one of the most intriguing things about fashion is that it allows you to tell a longer story, a tale you can develop over time and that makes you feel a bit like a writer or an architect, because you get the chance of choosing your own degree of complexity and your own language to tell it.
First image in this post: aerial view of Le Corbusier's Plan Voisin (Paris, 1925); all other images in this post: Marga Weimans' "Aerial" (S/S 2014), courtesy Marga Weimans.
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