In the company of Westwood

Four former and present Kolding students share the company of world-famous designers like Vivienne Westwood, Alexander McQueen, Maison Martin Margiela, Comme des Garçons and Hussein Chalayan at HEART – Herning Museum of Contemporary Art. The exhibition ’Clash - Counterculture in Fashion’ presents epoch design creations by various fashion creators and focuses on four areas: Body, new masculinity, activism and the faceless.

Selected students
The two exhibition curators have visited the Danish design schools and selected four students. From Design School Kolding we have projects by Liselotte Pedersen and Rikke Frausing, Fashion & Textile students, together with former students Svetlana Aksjonova and Theresa Kanz. Rikke Frausig's contribution is a dress which she spent 200 hours weaving, using materials like mink and copper thread, and then burried in the ground to make the different materials start a process of decomposition.

Art and poetry with textiles
The exhibition has received a great deal of publicity, including on the shows 'Kultursøndag' on Danish radio (P1) and 'Smagsdommerne' on Danish television (DR2), which refers to Rikke Frausig's project as "deeply fascinating". "It is incredibly beautiful and almost looks like a prehistoric find", says Lilian Munk Rösig, Literature Critic and Associate Professor at Copenhagen University. She adds: "I of course get the message of the reference to sweatshop producing, underpaid labour. Yet this is more than a political statement; this is poetry, this piece of textile. There is the same level of reflection that you see in a work of art."

’Clash – Counterculture in Fashion’ is showing at HEART in Herning until 1 February 2015.