Representing the creative future

Deeply personal and relevant: Discover  the 2022 HEAD graduates

Crawling out of their shell, the students show the world what Swiss fashion is

Hidden behind the blue of the lake, in the French-speaking part of Switzerland is a fashion school called HEAD. While the location in Geneva may seem off-the-radar, the school’s seven buildings are filled with talent. “There might not be much of a fashion context,” says designer and tutor Lutz Huelle, “but I think for the time the students have in Geneva, it’s a very healthy environment. It’s not as cutthroat as other big cities.” Geneva can be seen as a playground for fashion – a blank canvas in a town where everything is possible. “It prepares the students for other places in a gentle way. Being here is very calming and positive,” he continues. Yet still, Switzerland in itself is a country drawn by craftsmanship. When you think of Switzerland, you think of Swiss wool, tradition, and hand-made goods. Now, there is a new wave of creatives emerging – the fashion graduates of HEAD, the Haute Ecole d’Art et Design.

HEAD is giving the wings to 34 people, letting them fly out into the world to do their own thing. When it comes to teaching, there is a special emphasis on methodology. “I see the role of theory as instrumental to the students’ practice,” says Aude Fellay, a teacher who is in charge of theory in the MA. In addition to their final collection, they have to write a theory-based essay to ground themselves and be empowered in their practice, she adds. “The conversation between theory and practice is central to our teaching approach.”

“What I loved this year is how the students tied their personal stories into a wider context – before that, it was so focussed on themselves, so they forgot that it had to go out there,” adds Lutz. “The most successful collections this year were deeply personal but equally super relevant to the outside world. After two years in a pandemic, there seems to be a notable shift: students are coming out of their shells, making clothing in a communal atmosphere.

It is almost impossible to convey two courses (BA and MA) into a few sentences, but what stands out is their creativity, their varied inspirations and their appreciation of craftsmanship. HEAD allows the students to be themselves and to create, whether that is on their own or with a creative partner.

Apolline Stangherlin, L’object à default du corps, BA Fashion 

“The seat is taken. We are in the theatre and we leave our seats at the interval to go out for a cigarette. Putting our coats on, the seat is anchored in the social understanding that the seat is occupied: the coat inhabits the seat and becomes an entity in itself. It embodies our presence, even our memory.”

Going from this manifesto, Apolline Stangherlin’s collection L’object à default du corps is based on a conceptual reflection of the garment. “In my work, I question the space of the clothing, independent from the body. It is my interpretation we can have of this object. These reflections are being found within the context of my thesis, which helped me dive deeper into this topic,” the designer says. In her world, the garment is conceptualised as a lively object, because of the human that wears it. “Obviously, the clothes have a material value, but the immaterial value is defined as the memory and trace left by the person who wore it,” she adds. Inspired by this thought, she wanted to materialise the life within clothes, the memories that give them personality, by working with the archetype of the classic wardrobe and its codes. Executed in lively colours, the designer blows bags out of shape, big enough to carry all the memories. The skirts are carefully draped around the waist, having a classic white shirt tucked in. It floats with the body, in a special rhythm, giving it strength by providing versatility. For this collection, she felt particularly inspired by the work of Olivier Saillard and his views on fashion and garments. “In his performance with Tilda Swinton, clothing is transformed into a relic by recalling vivid memories of life and displaying the memory of those who wore it.” Another artwork she was inspired by was “the dressing gown of Balzac”, a sculpture by Auguste Rodin, showing the cloth in which Balzac liked to write. When looking at the artwork, there is a sudden intimacy revealed, says Apolline– the sculptures tell us a story, a story that makes us dream and think. And that is exactly what Apolline’s creations do.

Xavier Weber, Magma, BA Fashion

In the second year of his bachelor’s degree, Xavier Weber experimented a lot. He played around with concepts with the goal to create something around his family and his childhood. Growing up in a diverse community, there were a lot of contrasts, which inspired his final collection, Magma. He grew up in Grenoble, France and gipsy camps, which is quite the opposite, he says. “I was inspired by a lot of natural things,” Xavier says, “From the floors of my childhood home to the Magma stones and the paper of my father. Every reference is from my childhood.” Besides his upbringing, he finds another source of inspiration in French Rap music. He is particularly drawn to La Fève and Booba. It connects him and his father since they listened to it together. Xavier calls this his starting point. “I grew up with it, it tells my story,” he says. “I started listening to it when I was really young. I didn’t understand English back then. French lyricism in rap touches me a lot and there is a large diversity in French rap.” Our native languages have a higher power over us, someone once said, if you speak to someone in a language they learnt, you are speaking to their brain, but if you speak to them in their mother tongue, you are speaking to their heart. Xavier’s collection is a labour of love, as warming as the magma of a volcano. His collection reflects utility combined with enormous wearability. His efforts have been greatly rewarded with the Bongenie prize, which is handed to the most remarkable bachelor collection.

Lucie Lascaux & Simon Valabrègue, I Love my D…, BA Fashion

During the lockdown, Lucie Lascaux and Simon Valabrègue had an intuitive idea. “We wanted to have a fox, a stuffed animal, running down the runway. We had exactly this image in mind. That’s where we started from,” they say. The design duo found each other by intuition, it was an impulse that told them to create together. They worked together in their first and second year, and then they realised how well they clicked. They complement each other – from pattern making to sewing. For this collection, they found particular inspiration in taxidermized animals. “We thought it was a very interesting object, which shines a light on our relationship with nature’s environment or on our relationship with deaths and objects in general.” To them, the broadness of the topics seemed like a very good starting point for a collection. From then on, they wanted to create silhouettes with intention. Semantically, the idea was rooted in the expression of our relationship to objects through fashion with a sarcastic tone. The references of their collection are mostly rooted in death, they say. “For example, there was a period of craftsmanship in Paris in the 19th century, where accessories were made from a dead person’s teeth,” they add. Moreover, they were drawn to grungey images they found on the internet, prints of dead bodies on matrasses. The narrative of their collection was about this idea of birth and death and a potential rebirth. What is certain, is that the collection is a bridge between the living and the death – the joy we have and the things we fear.

Elise du Couédic, Journey to the East, BA Fashion 

Journey to the East is Elise du Coudélic’s final BA collection, exploring Chinese fashion. Inspired by a trip to China, the designer wanted to re-interpret Chinese fashion in her own way. “I really liked the fact that the traditional garments have a long train. It looks like a long road, which I find very pretty. I really wanted to incorporate that into my collection,” she says. Her garments are hybrid creations, uniting western and Chinese patterns. One of them features hand-written Chinese calligraphy. She merges a variety of materials, silk with cotton and rainproof fabric. Even though Elise’s experience had been disrupted by the pandemic, she still had a wonderful experience studying at HEAD. For now, she is on her journey to find an internship.

Alaa Alaradi, Collateral, BA Fashion

“During my process, I wanted to go with my intention, so I called it collateral,” says Alaa Alardi about her collection.  Whenever something beautiful happens within the process or some accident, it is collateral in a way. What is beautiful and special about her work is that she embraces flaws, she uses them in an intentional way. “I like to leave a grey area within my work. As soon as I see flaws or even if something does not add up, I use it to make it intentional. For example, I worked a lot with ceramics and leather. I would mould my leather before cutting or assembling it. When it didn’t exactly go as I imagined it, I just went with it,” she says. Embracing flaws is an essential quality to let the process flow. Way too often are people more concerned about perfection rather than the beauty that can come out of the process. “It all came together, in a sense where I can truly look at my work and appreciate the beauty of accidents in a very collateral way,” she says. Inspired by the Spanish painter Antoni Tàpies, Alaa admired his use of mixed materials. “Throughout his art, he used a lot of different materials, different canvasses, different techniques. It has the same atmosphere to it. His hand does it all, you can see it is coming from him.” The more you use your hands in your work, the more you can see that, and that is a beautiful thing. “I love recognising that,” she says. For her, the use of ants is a common thread throughout her work. She is the sculptor of leather and knit, she moulds, making everything imperfect into a piece of art.

 

Léanne Claude, Septembre, fin de l’été, BA Fashion

“I mostly work with Swiss Wool,” opens Léanne Claude the conversation about her Bachelor collection Septembre, fin de l’été. “I wanted to work with sustainable wool. So, I was interested about what is happening here, in Switzerland,” she adds. For most, Switzerland might not exactly be a country associated with fashion, but with traditional craftsmanship. People who work in Switzerland with the Swiss wool know everything about it, it’s really beautiful, she says. That’s how it started – the wish to make knitwear more sustainable. “My work is a bit isometric in a spontaneous way. I wanted to work on the sustainable process too, for example, I wanted to use some secondhand clothing to start the process. I used some deadstock fabric. I wanted something really minimalist. Less is more, like my vision of sustainability.” Inspired by the photographer Lina Scheynius, the designer was drawn to how the image maker captures intimacy. “It was really something I wanted to do in my work. I wanted to capture emotional intimacy within my threads.”

Carmen Soto, J’ai os ollos pleins de lágrimas, BA Fashion

Clothing carries memories. Deep down in the seams, you can still smell the coffee you spilled on your white dress, or the sweat you felt at your final exam. The idea for Carmen Soto’s collection J’ai os ollos pleins de lágrimas started from a conversation with her mother: “She told me that she could still remember the clothes that she and I were wearing when we came to Switzerland. My dress had been made by my grandmother with fabric scraps from a dress she made for my aunt. My mother still keeps this dress as an object on which she can gaze and travel back in time for 30 years,” Carmen says. It is a beautiful symbol of uprooting and the hope that comes with starting a new life. The beauty of a blank page, the ray of sun that feels warmer than ever, when a new chapter is about to start. “It is very much the materialisation of migration,” she adds. “What stroke me was this perpetual reuse and transformation of a piece of memory and a piece of fabric that clashed. This is why I decided to only use existing pieces of clothes which I transform.” Carmen’s collection patchworks materials together like the brain collages memories. Pink silk meets delicate tulle, stretchy red jersey meets fragile white lace. She wanted to experiment with the fabrics, see what they can be once she preserves them with sugar. Her preservation worked as the passage between generations, made through saudade. “Saudade could be described as a feeling of nostalgia for places, people or even moments which, in the case of children and migrants, we have only known through stories told by our parents. It is to feel the past through the memories of others,” she says. In her collection, the nostalgia she feels is symbolised by tears. Carmen wanted to visualise this by tears that are crystallized into a solid state, materialized by sugar, which could disappear again- just like the tears and their sadness. “My five looks represent five different moments in the life of a displaced person. These looks are the illustration of a reflection that ran in my mind throughout the whole semester. It is the conceptualization of another body measured on mine.”

Norma Morel, Don’t be scared be yourselt,  BA Fashion 

As the collection title suggests, Norma Morel’s graduate collection, Don’t be scared, be yourselt, is inspired by Celtic historical references. “I wanted to tackle a subject that is close to my heart, which is the Celtic universe that inspired my whole aesthetic. It is not only ancestral motifs but also the religious aesthetics and the appearance of warriors,” she says. The centrepiece of her collection is the tartan, which has been first used by the Celts through the kilt. It helped her find her way through her collection like a red thread. “I wanted to deepen my roots in Celtic culture, which is a part of me by creating my own tartan. I had it woven in Scotland,” she adds. Another part that inspired her collection is punk. Inspired by the queen of punk, Vivienne Westwood, Norma pays homage to the icon who inspired her from day one. The disruption of the system, and the bravery to be different and to speak up. Mixing it with contemporary references, which is executed in her choice of colour, material, shape, detail or even her model casting, she is reinventing the subculture in itself. She wanted to reflect the spirit of androgyny, which was very present during the punk movement. “My pieces were guided by classical garments, such as the shirt, the trench, the kilt or the jeans. Through the construction details, I have developed the cuts and design of my pieces, keeping the punk aesthetic in mind as well as the more artisanal work I found in Celtic culture.” Metal is also an important part of her work- she chose to work with it where it floats with the rhythm of the body, easily moulded into it. It allows her to reinterpret the armour by making it dangerous and fragile at the same time.

Sophie Raynard, Oeil Moteur, BA Fashion

Everything progresses constantly. Phones get optimized, apps get more efficient and televisions get bigger. Scientific progress is an integral part of our daily lives. “I am fascinated by all the spectacular advances that our society can make today. However, I am both concerned and disappointed by the way in which all this progress is used,” says the designer Sophie Raynard. Her graduate collection Oeil moteur, is a collection that is mocking the scientific progress and advances in our society. “It highlights the absurdity of useless progress in which billions are invested, such as space tourism. The idea of space tourism was launched by Elon Musk, who did everything he could to make it feasible,” she adds. Following that period, experiments were conducted for that one trip to space that was meant to last for about 9 months. All those experiments were conducted in a space similar to a classical greenhouse. “The experiment was supposed to last at least two months, but they realised after a few weeks that the culture did not take the space conditions into consideration.” According to Sophie, this is a serious and societal issue, but the collection treats the subject with humour to make it easier to deal with. “Motor Eye represents a team of five super girls who set out to conquer space. Dressed in futuristic clothes, animated by mechanisms with absurd functions,” she says.

Nabila Mdaghri, Ce n’est pas parce que la vie n’est pas élégante qu’il faut se conduire comme elle, BA Fashion

Nabila Mdaghi’s final BA collection is menswear only. Before she started this course, she worked for a brand, which got her into menswear. “There, I got really interested in menswear – how they are dressed, because not every man looks the same. There is tailoring, so many details and so many small things that are very important,” she says. In her collection, she wanted to incorporate her love for tailoring and merge the thought of traditional menswear with more feminine aspects. “For me, I think it’s sad when all men dress the same way. That’s why I wanted to expand the world of menswear a bit.” Inspired by the people she sees outside, she says that the act of observing is her biggest source of creativity. “I get inspired by what is around me. I get inspired when I work with my friends, seeing how they are dressed. I also get inspired by my own wardrobe. Nabila merges traditional tailoring shapes with bright colours and a touch of gender fluidity, for the modern man who vows to expression over conformity.

Tanguy Mélinand, 10/03/2014, BA Fashion

“On Monday, the 10th of March 2014, a fire occurred in my childhood home,” says Tanguy Mélinand. Naming his final collection after this event, he wanted to transcended and re-transcribe the emotions it evoked. “This collection is a story whose development is based on the chronology of a series of photos taken by my father, who reported the disaster to our insurance,” he says. Going through the images, Tanguy drew reference to each photo in an individual look. “Each look in this collection depicts a specific fragment of this event. The clothes unfold this disaster, one after the other, as it happened factually, showing the different stages of personal understanding of this trauma.” His clothes, partly made out of seaweed, show the progressive evolution of the fire that took over the house. Looking at it further, it represents the distance that gradually settles between the event and the memory, Tanguy says. “The changes in the state of mind are this collection’s main object of study. I am passionate about experimenting with materials, ingenious manipulations, collaborations and textile innovations. Those techniques have allowed me to approach this concept more closely,” he adds. Concerned about the state of the world and the desire to make things more sustainable, Tanguy gravitates towards upcycling to turn his dreams into reality. For his collection, he also collaborated with the ceramic artist Nathalie Louarn, which led both of them to the recycling of enamel, which turned the jewellery and accessories into surprising colours. To develop his collection, he wanted to develop a material himself. Expressing his spirit, Tanguy developed a durable material containing marine algae. “Having grown up in contact with them, seaweed has always fascinated me and seemed to have immense potential as a raw material. Creating this innovation has allowed me to include a part of my personal history in the creation of a collection that is just as personal.”

Léonie Dubois, “Raconte-moi comment c’était avant”, BA Fashion

Translated to Tell me how it was before in English, Raconte-moi comment c’était avant is an invitation to remember, says the designer Léonie Dubois. “This collection is a way to perpetuate a heritage of memory by reinterpreting them today. It’s a poetic parenthesis to the unstoppable time, a moment of appeasement,” she says. In true sustainable fashion, each piece is a momentum, meant to be kept as a treasured item, intended to be passed down to the next generation. “Inspired by my mother and my childhood, this project aims to enhance fashion through nostalgia, emotion and playfulness brought by the use of artistic techniques of childhood, spontaneous activities like hobbies and manual work,” says Léonie. Her process strikes with strong research and experimentation. Her creations aim to bring a depth into fashion design by creating clothes that arouse an emotion so there is more attachment and value to the final piece– because, by the end of the day, what attaches us to clothing, is emotion. To realise this approach, Léonie did a deep-dive into her mother’s wardrobe, which is packed with precious items of the 1980s and 1990s: “Ulitimately, my creative approach in this project is to find that tension between something visually vintage that evokes a sense of timelessness, which subsequently allows the object to retain its value over time,” she says. Léonie drew a lot of inspiration from the act of creating manually – adding buttons, patchworking, and the magic of creating at the moment. For the designer, the essence of creation lies in the moment: the unexpected visuals that cross our minds or the forgotten things that randomly resurface our minds. “In our world of throwaway stuff, there is something essential about keeping hold of nice things that belong to someone you love. They touch your skin, the smell of them, the idea they use to wear and live in it. The memory of the garment. The memory of love, a wearable memory,” she says. Because in the end, what ties us to clothing is not the fabric code, it is the memories we made in it, good and bad.

David Coelho Faria, “L’écorché vif”, BA Fashion 

Out of all the things that can happen to a human soul, grief is probably the most complex one. Grief is riding the wave, grief is drowning, grief is breathing. Sadness usually leaves the body but grief stays. Sometimes it leaves us with question marks, sometimes with answers. But as someone once said, after the pouring rain comes the sunshine. “My graduate collection is a message of hope, looking into the future,” says David Coelho. Born out of the grief he had for his late father, he describes the grieving process as super intense. “The message is about my personal experiences and what I want to tell others that even if everything is going very badly, there is still love and hope. We just need to keep going,” he adds. His references for the collection emerged out of his father and the links between the two. “Another theme were the 80s and a hospital theme – my father was ill and I remember him a lot in a hospital context. I wanted something with the same spirit of the 80’s. Fun, shiny and hopeful for the future,” he adds. The most personal piece of the collection was a leather jacket, symbolising the leather jacket David’s father used to wear. The 80s reference is visualised in a cropped top and a mini short, and the hospital is represented in a hospital-like gown. “I put all the knowledge and handcrafting, that I have leant into this collection. Leather work, knitting, tailoring and more,” he says proudly. Usually, the unbearable act of losing someone and the following grief is portrayed with the colour black in modern culture. It stands for the unfillable hole a person leaves once they transcended. Yet still, David managed to showcase a different side of grief: His collection is drawn by colour and the sentiment that even though terrible things happen, what potentially keeps us alive, is hope at the very end of the day.

Sophie Rousset, “Swart”, BA Fashion

Sophie Rousset’s graduate collection is called Swart. “Swart is the old name of black in the old English language (middle-English). There were two denominations to saw one colour: swart= matte black, and blaek= bright black,” she says. Swart is a collection meant to be worn by women and men. It marries two aspects of fashion that rarely meet in real life: intimate lingerie and classical menswear. “It gathers strictness attitude, minimalism and tailoring discipline. That is merged with the graphic aesthetic, texture and the transparency of the lingerie,” she adds. The collection is meant to create a connection between the opposite gender stereotypes and their wardrobes. To visualise that, the designer found the one thing those two had in common: the colour black. “I was interested in mixing these wardrobe universes because of the gender stereotypes and what they represent. I wanted to showcase the sewing techniques, related to each of the individual wardrobes,” she says. The technical and conceptual aspects guided her design choices, finding a particular source of inspiration in 1930s lingerie. She patchworked knitwear and different fabrics together, forming a single surface in the end. The different materials float into one another like deep water. For her future, Sophie Rousset wants to specialise in a juxtaposition of knitwear, lingerie and made to measure garments for men.

Chloë Fournier, Dollection, BA Fashion

Chloê Fournier’s collection, Dollection, is based on collecting. Whatever it is, people love collecting: clothing, post stamps or shoes. But for some people, collecting is a compulsion, as important as breathing. “It revolves around collecting and accumulating, and all the principles implied by it – compulsive accumulation, the Diogenes syndrome, but also the fact of restoring, classifying and archiving,” she says. Chloë wants us to reverse a systematic mentality of constantly buying new with a habit of caring about what we have. We keep throwing things away, instead of restoring them. The collection explores the act of collecting as a way of questioning our deeply ingrained habit of overconsuming by changing our relationship to the object. “Collecting is presented as an opportunity to keep an archive of a disappearing world in order to keep a testimony of the world as it will no longer be for the next generations,” says Chloë. She wanted to bring maximalism to the forefront of her collection, showing that it isn’t necessarily a contradiction with sustainability. “It is our way of using the object that may evolve overconsumption more than the object in itself. So, I worked and developed techniques inspired by my own habits and concerns to create textiles made from scraps of fabric. I kept fabric scraps from all my projects, so they all went into this. I revalued them through a work printing, re-assembly, patchwork, quilting and topstitching into certain pieces of the collection.” Inspired by her personal collection of porcelain dolls, the Gyanru’s style reflects the idea of a group and individuals, but also addresses the notion of taste. Moreover, the designer felt intrigued by the way we design the interior of our houses. The way we treat space, and the way we fill it. It is a place we create and shape, almost like a nest, she says.

Michelle Castillo, What is BIG?, BA Fashion 

It all started with a vision of a ghost. The designer Michelle Castillo got fascinated with its shape. “It’s like a translation of a picture, I saw that they had an image of me as a child, wearing a jacket. When I was older, I was wearing the same jacket, and I realised that some things never change,” she says. She went on to draw the shape of the ghost and got very interested in deforming or melting shapes. “This made me think about what we want to show and what we want to hide about our body. It took me a while to realise and find my voice to say that this subject touches me as a woman. Our bodies are always subject to perfection,” she adds. There is so much pressure to be yourself when secretly, the world wants you to be perfect. Her collection is called What is BIG? – to create this, she searched for girls that were curvy. “None of them are models. The first step of the project was to look for these people, to speak to them and see how complex they feel about their bodies. I wondered why everybody is like oh, fat people, they aren’t healthy when that is not true. Also, there is the fact that they can never find any clothes in their size. I talked to each of them about their experiences and took notes,” she says. What started as interviews ended in a beautiful friendship. The collective experience of being a woman and dealing with certain insecurities glued them together. “They told me that they are all keen to participate because it was the first time they saw somebody including a different body in a collection.” It’s all custom-made, each garment is made for the model and the colours are matched to their skin tones. Michelle made sure to highlight the features they love about themselves the most. Not only has Michelle’s collection an important political message, but also a way of showing us that not everything is what it seems. A body type can be the subject of a health condition or genetics – we need to stop blaming women for not fitting into toxic beauty standards.

Claire Thébault, Un instant de printemps, BA Fashion

Spring is when the flowers start blooming and the never-ending tristesse from the winter starts to fade in the wind. Clair Thébault’s final collection, Un instant de printemps, is dedicated to the good atmosphere in the spring. “I got inspired by a movie called The Secret Garden. It’s a space where you go and hide far away from the world. You are protected there. I was inspired by that – a green house, a botanical space,” she says. To her though, the secret garden is more separated from the world. It is like a glass cube, where everyone is able to see what you are doing. To her, it is a protected space. “I like the contrast,” the designer says. “I really love doing things with my hands, that’s why it was inspired by craftsmanship. When I create something with my hands, I am doing only that I am out of this world. It’s my escapism,” she adds. Craftsmanship and handicrafts come from a long tradition, especially in Switzerland. “I love all the knowledge and the culture that is behind it. I wanted to put all those things together and create a collection that is translated into this special atmosphere to make you feel comfortable.”

Victoria Davies, Je suis une voiture, MA Fashion

“Since the end of my Bachelor, I have been working around the subject of the car. To do this, I went to a car dump. I discovered a universe that I immediately liked and felt inspired by,” says Victoria Davies. Her unusual car dump experience led her to dedicate her final MA collection to the vehicle, by naming the collection Je suis une voiture, which means I am a car in English. “I spent days researching cars, taking materials at the end of their life, photographing objects and textures that appealed to me”. She questioned herself a lot about why she chose this subject, what her relationship to the car is and why a car is so gendered towards a male-identifying person. “What are the stereotypes linked to women and how can I break them? What makes a powerful woman?”, she wonders. With her grandfather being a car dealer, her passion for cars has been passed down for generations. Growing up in the universe of cars, Victoria has always been intrigued by the duality between the exterior and the interior of the car. “On one hand, there is the power, the aerodynamics, the violence and the strong forms. On the other hand, there is the cocoon, the vulnerability, the refuge,” she says. Victoria has a point – most people see the car only for its exterior and practicality but leave out the intimate moments that happened inside the car. The times we escaped a situation, the nights we camped in there, the tears we cried in there. Inspired by this thought, Victoria wrote her thesis on personal stories about the relationship with the car. One personal example in her thesis made her want to make this collection: it was when she realised the art of driving does not exist in women. “By creating this collection, the car becomes a medium to go to my father as a woman who loves her car, but for different reasons,” she says hinting at her father’s traditional view on cars. “It’s the only object that unites us in a father-daughter relationship, but not from the same point of view. This made me want to create a collection that breaks the stereotype where women conquer and merge with this universe.”

Niels Raonison, Chosen Family, MA Fashion 

In your twenties, your friends become your family. You live in each other’s pockets, you laugh and cry together. It is an extraordinary period in life, right before everyone finds their own pathway in life. “For my collection, I was inspired by my friends and the memories that link me to them. Over time, I wondered what the reality of those stories is, since memories constantly change,” says Niels Raonison. He materialised this idea by going through his own wardrobe, taking out the pieces he wears the most – the white shirt, a hoodie, a jeans and a windbreaker. “I played with the codes that define them to transform the image we have of a certain piece,” he adds. From a design point of view, he was inspired by the master of deconstruction Martin Margiela and Kiko Kostadinov. “The main source of inspiration was Carol Lewis book Alice in Wonderland with its nonsense characters and childlike logic that can be found in my work,” Niels says. Having done his whole schooling at HEAD, he recalls some obstacles that disrupted his studies. “I was called in by the Swiss army to help with COVID in the year of my Bachelor and Master collection,” he says. Luckily, his tutors helped him during this time to achieve his best results, nevertheless. For the future, he aims to creative a Swiss creative collective to develop collections and putting forward different local design talents.

Sidonie Teikiteetini, Ouvrez les yeux…, MA Fashion 

The world is obsessed with plastic. It is in the fibre of our clothing, in the soles of our sneakers. What seems so fantastic is polluting the planet and the ocean. Sidionie Teikiteetini’s collection, Ouvrez les yeux…, is dedicated to this issue. “My collection is about the rejection of plastics, it tells the story via symbolising the waste it has become with little bag creatures,” she says. Their appearance is inspired by natural and urban landscapes. “They have transformed themselves by assimilating the colours and shapes of the place where they were abandoned. Those creatures have decided to live on to seduce us again. Instinctively, they have become a fashion accessory very close to the body, in order to become indispensable.” In her collection, the creatures are attractive, they even have some bits of nature hanging on their skin. The bags are made of silk velvet, wood veneer, stone lead and other textiles, she adds. What connects them together like a guiding red thread, is the plastic they contain, which creates new materials and textures. “I love fantasy worlds, and I am very close to nature. That is how the story was born. I also liked that my bags stand alone, as if they were alive,” she says. As she was researching materials, she discovered a material based on plastic. At the moment the industry is in a binary state of demand – animal leather or vegan leather, cruel or not. She loved making bags made out of non-leather, but at the same time, it made it clear how much we reject plastic in itself. “My message goes further than that, it’s also about the waste that humans create and discard around the world. It was so playful to make the jewellery and the bags.”

Eugenia Petersen, dancing therapy, MA Fashion

When Eugenia Petersen’s models step out of the dark, the music sets in. The fabrics float around, and the beat moves through their bodies. They embody the name of the collection, dancing therapy. “Dance is the carefree spirit that drives us,” she says. “The touch, feeling confident and comforted in a garment that communicates the best of ourselves. A suspicion of saudade and a desire for efflorescence – mixed feelings, from reverie to embodiment,” she adds. When starting the MA, Eugenia reflected a lot about what excites her in life. The three words that came to her in record speed were tailoring, archives and dancing. She began to look at her own outfits that she usually wore when she went partying. Normally she wears everyday clothing, she noticed. But looking closer into the evolution of dressing up in archives, from legendary balls to rave culture, she noticed that the idea of “dressing up” for an occasion is beautiful but yet dying out. “I decided to compile all these notions to create this collection; a little bit with what I am and what I would like to be, a fantasy of the evening dressing,” she says. The name of the collection came around because she wanted to transmit the idea of the dance floor as a healing space. “A safe space where you can be yourself or be someone else, where you can be alone or share. A place filled with different energies; and most importantly the one that you feel after a night out, which is usually the best.”

Camille Boutet, Wave of Feels, MA Fashion

With everything that is happening around us in the world, the climate crisis, the financial crisis and everything else, there is a huge responsibility to be young in the current climate. Everyone expects the youngest to save us and that feels like being in front of a huge wave, says the designer Camille Boutet. “I have the impression that we are permanently in front of a big wave, regarding the world we are living in. And I keep asking myself how a garment could be an answer to all of this,” she says. To Camille, a garment is a very subjective and introspective view of her psychology, and the relationship she establishes between clothing and emotions is equally personal. “How can the garment be both, an emotional and physical projection? This collection reflects a spectrum of emotions that I feel on a daily basis and the clothes reflect specific states of mind. A spectrum that ranges from anxiety to overwhelm, to courage and acceptance,” she adds. The metaphor of the wave reflects our vulnerabilities, our differences facing an inescapable catastrophe and our different and personal ways of being, reacting and living. “In my creative process, I started by identifying emotions and associating them with materials and fabrics. I chose natural, noble and warm materials that evoke softness, comfort and security visually and sensually.” To create this effect, the designer used textures, from mohair to silk. She chose those with care, only taking the ones she associates with comfort and emotional protection. “This is also the reason I chose to use feathers to fill the down jackets, and a lot of quilting to have this feeling of wearing a cloud and being wrapped up in something very light and dense. In these natural materials, I also saw a form of fragility and vulnerability, which I wanted to re-transcribe with the development of a knitted fabric which mixes mohair, paper and silk,” she adds. Her clothes act like as an armour to survive in today’s world, whilst equally serving as a comforting security blanket around our bodies.

Nadine Sterren, Bewegtes Sein, BA Fashion

In her graduate collection, Bewegtes Sein the designer Nadine Sterren pays homage to her origins. Growing up in the picturesque mountains of Switzerland, she has a special bond with nature. Even though many people reconnected with nature during the pandemic, they mostly went back to their old ways. “I want the wearer to feel comfortable in my garments. I want to communicate the feeling of nature,” she says. But how does nature feel? In a wide exploration of techniques and textures, she brought in a variety of dimensions. Those stand for the mountains, she says. “I work a lot with knitwear too. By creating new patterns, I tried to emulate the glaciers,” she adds. To even it out, she worked with prints to let it flow. Floating like water, mirroring the sky. It’s about the balance. The mountains have many sides to them. They appear as powerful, but there are beautiful, hidden glaciers in them – mixing together all her skills, Nadine turned them into a garment. For the imagery, she worked with dancers. Movement is important to her. “Way too often garments are being presented in a static way, but for me, it was very important to visualise the float of the glaciers,” she says. Ferdinand Holder, a painter who depicted a lot of landscapes in his work was an important reference to her. Moreover, she has been inspired by mountain-approved sportswear. But at the end of the day, her most prominent reference was her Zuhause, a German word describing the meaning of home in an intimate way.

Mathilde Fenoll, MIASMES, MA Fashion 

MIASMES consists of 12 characters. “They are creatures to me,” says the designer, Mathilde Fenoll. She created them to showcase her jewellery and accessory collection on bodies. She wanted them to be worn by different bodies. “Everything is inspired by the different elements of the natural. Sometimes, I was inspired by the minerals, or the other plants or animals, I gave them different names and at the end, I tried to express something sensible,” she adds. In her opinion, the collection focusses on strange forms of creativity. It’s all unique pieces, all made by hand. “I called it Miasmes, because there is something disgusting and disturbing. It brings the idea of perfection and transformation. To me, the world is always in transformation and that is ephemeral,” she adds. Inspired by the furniture designer Jean Michel Frank, Mathilde was stung on how he used leather to cover furniture. He used leather as a kind of second skin that makes an object very comfortable. Mathilde’s collection submerges fantasy with reality, it is ephemeral. Watching her creations on a runway erases all societal restrictions around clothing and fabric. She created a world of her own.

Eléonore Cochonner, Here is my Testament, MA Fashion

“This is a collection that I would like to wear on the day of my funeral,” Eléonore Cochonner says about her graduate collection Here is my Testament. The collection symbolises 10 looks the designer would like to wear in the 10-day procession before the burial. “This collection is an assembly of my own wardrobe and the wardrobe I could never wear,” she adds. She used dramatic draping to symbolise this. “Unfortunately, you can’t wear long sleeved dresses, sequins or symbols in everyday life unless you are being invited to the Met Gala,” she says. This was merged with references to the aesthetics of the funeral itself, like flowers or funeral ribbons. Inspired by the film Fedora, directed by Billy Wilder, the designer felt drawn to the first episode in particular. “They staged advertisements for morticians in the first episode. In the second episode, the storyline gets more dramatic. I wanted to recreate this tension for this collection.” She wanted to merge the fun, the drama, and the emotional side of this. “In this collection, there is this image of fashion in constant interaction with the past, the present and the future. The resurgence of past fashions is a breeding ground for the fashions of the present, the environment and the current event pushing for other forms of creation and what we imagine future fashion to be,” she says. Trying to predict what she would wear in the days after she dies, she is creating it in her own pace, influenced by her current surroundings. The collection is informed by what has shaped her aesthetics in the past and what she dreamt of wearing as a child. Draped like a Greek statue, the fabrics are shaped with a sense of movement. They hug the body and interact with it on a new level. The clothes are holding her.

Louana Aladjem, De la gémellité à la dualité de n’être que soi, MA Fashion

A twin herself, Louana Aladjem wanted to make her collection about something she could relate to. Deeply personal, her collection was naturally about being a twin. The title, De la gémellité à la dualité de n’être que soi, translates to from twinness to the duality of only being oneself in English. “As I am getting older, I and my twin are getting to know each other. I wanted to explore this. My brother looks like me, but not that much. I wanted to show that it is an evolution,” she says. Unlike the last Gucci show, Louana says that being a twin goes beyond the similarities in looks. As twins, Louana and her brother are moving together. “Sometimes, we are doing the same things in life, sometimes you are trying to do something slightly different.” Reflecting on her fashion education, she realised that this was only the beginning. “It is also about becoming individuals not always being told that we are the same,” she adds. In Louana’s case, since her brother and she don’t have the same gender, it was mostly easy to see the difference, she says. “That’s why I am doing an evolution throughout the collection. It starts with two similar looks. It is evolving, the twins are finding their way. I am playing with different patterns, reading and words. This is referring to doing reviews, analogies and all that.” When she started creating the collection, she started a deep dive into her family history. She talked a lot with her family and wanted to know how they perceived her and her brother. To create a strong image, she kept turning to her twin, asking what they thought about certain things. Looking at Louana’s creations, you can feel the poetry. You can see the individuality in it. She shows that sometimes you need to look closely, but everyone is unique – even if two people look alike.