Ode to Possibilities

This project is inspired by the American pop artist Claes Oldenburg and his Manifesto of 1961, expressing his fascination of the ordinary and breaks down the perception of art as something elitist.

He uses whatever materials he has at hand, paying homage to leftovers, the undesirable - the things that didn’t make it. He does not care about correctness and right or wrong and his art is a naive representation of ordinary objects, sloppy resemblances of the originals.

 With this project I copy the practice of Oldenburg into the context of fashion - ignoring convention and ways of doing in terms of making garments. This project is an escape from category and a liberation of the process and what fashion can arise from: things out of the trash bin, a worn out t-shirt, an old bedlinen with washy prints - using whatever comes to me as the most neutral starting point for creativity, refusing the luxury of selection.

The project reflects my fascination of abandoned objects and things as representative of people. I like everything that other people don’t want or consider to be worthless or useless.
It reflects a fascination of photocopying and printing things out on cheap paper to become sloppy resemblances of the original. 

Material and aesthetic considerations for the project has come rather unconsciously from using huge amounts of leftover materials, donations, trash, archive material, previous projects, bits and bobs at my desk, scraps that my classmates were about to discard, creased paper and printed old bed linen. 

This project breaks with fashion and the idea of luxury. Fashion does not have to be expensive silks and meticulous embroidery. It can be wild and fun and intuitive - created in the heat of the moment.  

Very important to mention is the sustainable value of the project. The collection consists of 60-70 % recycled materials, including both paper, abandoned garments, secondhand treasures and things picked up from the floor.