Social Fabric

Social Fabric brings together a group of contemporary fashion designers and artists that explore the cultural fabric of fashion, and its rituals and trepidations. Contemporary fashion designers are spearheading a new critical way of making and consuming fashion. They are exploring complex cultural issues as well as the role of fashion in society.  

Fashion is part of our everyday life, and it speaks volumes of our connections. Even a single item of clothing can link us to communities and networks; and how we consume and produce fashion is tied to complex cultural behaviours, locally and globally. Fashion feeds on collective consumption where we use objects to show social status. In contrast, fashion also connects us in proactive and critical communities where creating is an act of activism that expresses solidarity and resistance.  

The exhibition presents fashion, textile art, sculpture and film. It includes both established and emerging designers and artists from the Nordics and Northern Europe.   

This exhibition is the third instalment of a wider, ongoing Nordic collaboration between ALPHA, Röhsska Museum of Design and Craft, the National Museum of Norway in Oslo, Copenhagen Contemporary and EMMA – Espoo Museum of Modern Art.  

It is curated by Ane Lynge-Jorlén and co-curator Reetta Kalajo.

Jennie Steen

‘I am using my craft to understand the world – with clothes as my medium – and challenge the way we view, use and work with clothes,’ says Jennie Steen. She explores new ways to expand fashion as a practice, the role of the designer and the ways in which garments affect how we engage with the world. Her billowing kinetic textile sculptures simulate how the wind can puff up a cyclist’s garments, turning them into extensions of the body through inflation and deflation.  All the sculptures are made of Tyvek, a material used in costume conservation and building insulation.

Tilde Herold

‘The fashioned body is a very limited concept. Instead, I want to explore another type of body’, says Tilde Herold. Soulmate is Herold's reading of the Ancient Greek myth of 'the missing half', described by Aristophanes. With this sculptural work, Herold seeks to remove the body from fashion to liberate the creative process from preconceived ideas, limitations and understandings generally associated with clothing. The work consists of three sculptures built on an internal mannequin structure that has been re-sculpted by layers of padding and hand-dyed silk taffeta to achieve new modified shapes that evoke hybrid human forms.

Ruusa Vuori

‘My work has developed by experimenting with the sensory aspects of embodied experience’, says Ruusa Vuori. Inspired by her background in dance, her work revolves around the outlines of the body and its sensory properties. Vuori examines how garments feel on the body and how they move. The collection explores surfaces, membranes, openings and holes, and clashing materials are manipulated by hand. A knitted shell shape is attached to branches wrapped in pink Kinesio tape, and an oversized tutu is made from linen that was grown and spun by Vuori’s great-grandmother.

Miriam Scheller

‘My German-Nigerian heritage plays a central role in my work and provides constant new inspiration,’ says Miriam Scheller. Her work explores dissonance between identity, biracial identity and perceived identity by using Ùlì, a Nigerian bodypainting practice in which the body and the painted symbols become one. Her knitted tubes are made from a highly elastic overspun pure wool yarn, used both as an interpretation of Scheller’s heritage and as a sustainable alternative to fossil fuel-based stretch fibres. The different degrees of transparency allow the patterns to change, adapt to and distort the contours of Scheller’s sculptures of varied colours and identities.

Images by Ina Wesenberg
Films by Nina Ribert Olsen