Salon/2 presents: Marga Weimans - 'Knot Dress' - Geelvinck

picture by Marij Rynja

The “ Knot and bow dress” selected for Salon/2 is part of the Wonderland Collection. The Wonderland collection tells the story of Weimans’ escape from the everyday urban ugliness of her work environment, located in the poorest area of Rotterdam, into a world of hallucinatory beauty. Dresses where printed with the facades of the gloomy flat building located opposite of Weimans studio. These dresses morph into fairy tale dresses seemingly made out of bright coloured candies.

The reason why this particular dress was selected for Salon/2 is because it contains all the disciplines Weimans applies in her designs. The dress shows where the surreal, the decay and ugliness meet. Its depicts the rough steel wire construction of a flat building, with blotches of concrete, dipped in soft foam and worn out silver. The story ends when hard wire morphes into into a silver bow; the symbol of the pretty girliness of an Alice in Wonderland, fallen through the rabbit hole. The drama of the materials and shapes gets extra meaning against the overwhelming baroque background of Museum Geelvinck.


About Marga Weimans:

After switching careers from business management to fashion, fashion designer Marga Weimans (b.1970) graduated from the Antwerp Academy of Fine Arts in 2005. Weimans won the i-D magazine Award for her graduation collection “The Power of my dreams”. The prize was work experience at the London i-D magazine headquarters. Weimans returned to the Netherlands and founded her namesake couture label. Weimans work, while highly biographical, experiments with materials and pushes the boundaries of art, architecture and design. Weimans showed her collection ”Debut” of, “2” and “Wonderland” off schedule during Haute Couture week in Paris and was featured in a number of exhibitions. The Groninger Museum is a regular collector of the work and momentarily exhibits pieces of the whimsical Wonderland collection in the group exhibit “Material world” with a.o. Iris van Herpen, Joris Laarman en Pieke Bergmans. "The Green Landscape dress" made out of coated foam, served as an icon for the exhibition and was printed on everything from the museums façade, to cakes and to nation wide distributed poster campagne.

Salon/2 presents: Mustafa Ozen - MODE/FASHION/FILM/ - Geelvinck

Mustafa Özen is a film historian/curator and currently working for the EYE Film Institute Netherlands. He received his PhD from the University Utrecht and published numerous articles about early cinema in various academic journals. Nowadays he is very much interested in the current development of the so-called 'fashion film'. His film 'MODE/FASHION/FILM' is a compilation of historical fashion films from the collection of the EYE Film Institute and contemporary work of a group of young generation Dutch fashion filmmakers/designers/artists. The aim of the compilation is to give an understanding of the notion of the 'fashion film' from the very beginnings to now, and at the same time to reflect the historical and contemporary material on each other.  

Salon/2 presents: Oda Pausma - '29.10.2010' - Droog

'29.10.2010' - a collection that started with an end: a vanished love...  

"Long black and white silhouettes create a moderate and elegant parade. Many contrasts are combined; stiff leather versus fluid silks, black versus white, vulnerability versus strong and solid, introvert versus extrovert. The use of many contrasts reflect the melancholic character of the collection. It are all-in-one pieces, coats of leather and endless fluid silk trousers tell the story of '29.10.2010'." This is how Oda Pausma explains her unique pieces she shows on the first floor of Droog. Her style is sculptural, mathematic, and maybe even typical Dutch if placed in the context of what we called Dutch Modernism. Or is Oda presenting us the Dutch Meta-Modernism of fashion design with her unique aesthetics and feeling for material and fabrication? Oda Pausma graduated last year at the Fashion Masters at ArtEZ Arnhem with the collection 'Hobohemian Heaven', based on the Chelsey Hotel in New York where extravagant artists, writers and actors came in the 60s and 70s. Oda loves poetry and literature what is often an inspiration for her to create the concept for a new collection. Also, for '29.10.2010' she used prose as a starting point: 

The day black turned more black, gravity got more strength and sober gained an extra layer.  

'29.10.2010'

Day of an end

Day of disbelieve

Day of a past

Day of melancholic love

Day of contrasts

Day of a new future, and the day HOPE got more value...

Oda Pausma together with
Mascha van Zijverden
Course Director of Fashion Masters ArtEZ
(picture Marij Rynja)

More about Oda Pausma: 

Oda Pausma (b.1985) was born in The Netherlands. Graduated ‘Cum Laude’ with her collection: ‘Traces of a shadow’, in 2008 at the Amsterdam Fashion Institute (AMFI) for her BA degree.  In the same year she was one of the selected participants of ‘Lichting 2008’ a show at the Amsterdam International Fashion Week.  September 2008 she started her Master Course in Fashion Design at the Fashion Institute Arnhem (FIA, ArtEZ).  Within this course she designed a shoe: ‘The Untitled Shoe’.  Made a maximum statement collection: ‘Pure Awkward’, and graduated ‘excellent’ with her collection: ‘Hobohemian Heaven’.  This collection was exposed at the GEN.11 exhibition during Fashion Week Paris in the heart of Paris, ‘Le Marais’.  In July 2010 she presented her first individual fashion show at the Amsterdam International Fashion Week.  May 2011 Pausma was one of the ten participants of the well known fashion competition Festival Hyères, where she showed her collection ‘29.10.2010’ inspired on a vanished love. Oda Pausma lives and works in Amsterdam.