Issue 21 – In Conversation with .. 10!

There are a number of themes that we
find important and that we see a lot in the
community, such as gender diversity, body
positivity, queerness, equality, decoloniality,
social design and of course sustainability.
This year we will pay extra attention to
queerness and queer narratives. We have
a number of activities planned to contribute to
this.
How are emerging technologies shaping the
experiences you are planning for the next
festival?
As mentioned before, but more than in the past,
almost the entire program is co-created with the
participants.
We have co-curatorship residencies, we
commission new work, we set up collaborations
between designers and organize many
participatory workshops.
Our New Fashion Narratives Trajectory is
a good example of that.
We are sometimes told that our message is 'too
difficult' for readers or not commercial enough
because our designers are not concerned with
selling products and are therefore not potential
customers in the future.
There are fewer and fewer independent and critical
fashion media and voices. And we need more of
these!
Fortunately, there are still media such as KALTBLUT,
Fucking Young, Arts Thread 1Granary who support
emerging talent, but also people such as Sara
Maino, Philippe Pourhashemi and Diane Pernet
who, with a lot of intrinsic passion, are committed to
young talent and reflect critically on developments.
As a creative force, how do you select the themes
for each festival, and can you give us a hint of the
theme for 2024?
In the past we have worked more with an
overarching theme, but we have now let go of that.
We create themes from the bottom up through what
the participants themselves put on the agenda with
their projects. We are more concerned with creating
formats in which there is a clash between ethics and
aesthetics.
Discussing sustainability, what steps are you
taking for the 2024 FASHIONCLASH Festival to
promote environmental consciousness?
Almost everything we do is somehow related
to environmental consciousness. For us,
sustainability is not a theme but a standard, we
only show designers who are also working on
this and organize activities to contribute
to awareness of issues that affect this.
We even made a theater performance ‘Who
cares what you wear?’ is for young people and
schools about fashion and sustainability.
This play will be developed further also in
Austria later this year. We also regularly
organize workshops such as upcycling and
mending, and only work with existing and
discarded materials.
We work together with initiatives that are
also committed to this.And we approach our
entire working method holistically, looking at
a sustainable and healthy interaction between
program, content and organization.
In the Netherlands we are co-initiator of Culture.
Fashion.nl, a value-driven fashion network.
And in collaboration with State of Fashion, we
are the Dutch representation at the recently
established European Fashion Alliance.
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