The exhibition presents 16 emerging designers who have come through ALPHA since 2017. Their graduate collections are produced outside the demands of the fashion industry, and instead their creators experiment freely and express new visions of a future fashion system. Their collections address contemporary themes such as identity, sustainability, and the relationship between fashion and art.
Exhibition Prize 2021
The 2021 Exhibition Prize is awarded to four newly graduated designers: Kristian David, Idaliina Friman, Ines Kalliala and Elina Äärelä. Their works form a prism through which current themes of new materiality, cultural hybridity, identity and sustainability materialise. While they express wide-ranging approaches to aesthetics and design methodologies, the four designers are united by their focus on the personal experience and awareness of culture and society.
Identity
Fashion fills a double function. It expresses our individuality while at the same time placing us in a larger social and societal context. Designers Marie Sloth Rousing, Ali Akbari, Elnaz Gargari use fashion to make social and cultural norms and values visible that otherwise would have been taken for granted and open the way for critical conversations on matters such as gender, sexuality, ethnicity and identity.
Sustainability
As a way to bring about sustainable change, designers are developing new design methods, using garments and textiles that have already been manufactured. Reuse, circularity, recycling and upcycling are ways that designers push for a greener fashion industry, giving existing textiles and garments a new look and new worth. Ellen Hodakova Larsson, Lili Pham, Milka Seppänen, Kristine Sehested-Blad present a new aesthetic language for sustainable fashion.
Absent Bodies
The conceptual field of fashion has taken a further step towards blurring the lines between design and art, by focusing less on function and more on the artistic expression of the garments. If the body no longer is the starting point for fashion, what then separates a garment from a textile sculpture? Ishara Jayathilake, Courtney Makins, Oliver Oppermann, Amina Saada and Fredrik Stålhandske jointly received the Designers’ Nest Exhibition Prize 2020. Based on their graduation works, they were commissioned to create new works. The works were originally commissioned for the exhibition Absent Bodies, curated by Pernille Stockmarr and Ane Lynge-Jorlén, created site-specifically for Designmuseum Danmark.
Images by Lars Edelholm