Creativity beyond the “commercial fashion machine”

“When we truly listen, something beautiful can arise,” was the opening sentence of the seventeenth edition of FashionClash in Maastricht. Hundreds of participants contributed to the fashion and arts festival in Limburg. This year the festival spanned 14 locations and offered a platform to seven types of creatives who applied through various open calls: Writer, Performer, Filmmaker, Soundscaper, Designer, Poet and Print Designer.

Archetypes in AI

The idea of ​​archetypes emerged from the diverse reactions to the “open calls for proposals”. The campaign’s creator, designer and former participant Ülkühan Akgül, called them archetypes. “These creative types don’t always fit into the big commercial fashion machine, but they find their place at FashionClash,” says festival founder Branko Popovic.

Akgül studied the participants and developed prompts to generate images using AI. Every year a selected talent develops such a multimedia concept. “We never work with a given topic,” says Popovic. Akgül was also given a free hand. “With a campaign you give a festival like this a face and can also sell the story of the participants to visitors who have little to do with fashion.”

Creative without a budget

This edition saw the organization running low on cash. Popovic: “As a cultural funding institution, you can apply for big funds every four years. That won’t be the case again until 2028. So from this year on we have to make do with half of the budget.” For Popovic and co-initiator Els Petit, this means a lot of additional work in raising funds and therefore less time for program design.

That’s not fair. “Most of the money for culture always goes to the metropolitan regions and not to regional communities like Maastricht, which already receives the maximum possible: 30,000 euros. We wouldn’t be able to do it without the many volunteers.”

Empowerment

The part of the program that is structurally supported consists of four parts: performance art, exhibition, youth participation and film. Coaching programs and residencies have been established for each part. There the participants learn to question their own practice. This process is the heart of FashionClash, says Popovic. “If someone is not happy with their work and doesn’t want to show it, that’s completely fine as long as there is clear agreement about the process. The festival is not the end, but the means to promote creativity and talent.”

Despite this attitude, the duo observes that the participants are putting themselves under increasing pressure. This is a sign of our times. “They feel very responsible, also because of the great concerns about the security of their existence in the creative sector. They have no money, little prospect of a job and ask themselves: How do I find my place in this world? What will my working environment look like in the future? Through the focus on talent development – with fewer participants and therefore more individual attention in recent years – we hope that they will continue their work strengthened after the festival.”

“I don’t want to sell my soul”

One of these participants is Arva Bustin, who has just completed her fashion design studies at ArtEZ. At the festival, she presented bodysuits inspired by workwear and medieval costumes made of robust, upcycled material with iron buckles that tightly constrict the wearers. They are life jackets for the apocalypse. She presented this with a performance on a specially designated evening in an old cement factory on the ENCI site. The visitors came by boat.

The dance and staging of the performance “ULTRA-ORA” (The Last Hour) was intended to invite you to look behind the clothes and look for the story. In this case: “How violence can flow through people in times of need, what we sometimes do to each other, and how blame is then shifted.”

Bustin also wanted to tell an anti-capitalist story. “I’m still very much searching for my design language – alongside my full-time job in healthcare. Fashion should be something free that I can do on my own time without having to make a living from it. I don’t want to sell my soul by having to filter my work to be ‘saleable’.”

Through FashionClash’s program, she knows that she wants to design smaller collections of three pieces maximum, “so I can really hone my craft.” She will look for higher quality materials and more comfortable shapes. Bustin is not aiming for a major career as a designer. She would rather do something for her community: the queer community of Arnhem. This community also made the screen-printed fabric for the doublets in a Bustin workshop funded by FashionClash. “I think I make a bigger contribution to fashion by doing projects like this.”

The theme of rebellion against the prevailing fashion system ran like a common thread through the festival’s contributions. With their work, the creatives emphasized that we cannot close our eyes to social problems. These include violence, the risks of hyperdigitalization, right-wing extremism, climate change, the mental health of Generation Z and what it means to be queer. FashionClash showed that fashion can contribute to the solution if it wants to be more than just a commercial product.

These themes also resonated with the broader audience the festival aims to appeal to. This was evident in the applause after performances, such as that of the Lithuanian design duo Povis about depression. It was based on the existing collection “I hid from depression and corporate capitalism and made a collection about cats”.

The diversity of relevant topics that concern young creatives was perhaps best demonstrated in the film selection, says Popovic. He is happy with this part of the program as there is only one fashion film course in Europe. “The participants made these films not to promote fashion collections, but to tell stories using fashion as a guide.” The makers of “Hangman & Co” found out that all of their parents were workers. The film celebrates the hard work they’ve done with their hands throughout their lives, with workwear playing a special supporting role.

Where do I come from?

The creatives at FashionClash also dealt with their own identity. For Esra Çöpür, who graduated from HKU in 2019, her own search for her roots was the inspiration for a small collection related to Turkish artifacts. “My father is from Turkey, but in the Netherlands I never felt such a strong connection to this culture. That changed when I moved to Amsterdam-West and was fascinated by the clothing of the Dutch-Turkish community. I saw little difference from the photos I had taken in my father’s home village.”

At her assigned exhibition location, the brand new art space SAC, she presented the source material she had collected over the years. Again, fashion takes a back seat: a white tuxedo blouse with flounces inspired by Turkish tulips and a headpiece with braids, “which also occur in Ottoman culture.” Next to it, an upcycled denim dress with 1,600 chunky buttons attached by five pairs of hands – a contemporary interpretation of Igne Oyasi, Turkish lace.

Next to the dress were wooden panels printed with ink that showed a woman in the modern dress – a self-portrait. It is called “Everything I Touched Turns Into Me” because the preoccupation that began with herself developed as if by itself. “Everything you touch, what you take with you and the parts of yourself ensure that your hands can create things intuitively. You start a work without a clear plan – only later it turns out that it is a continuation of something you have been working on for years.”

Complex like textiles

The participants in the 17th edition of FashionClash recognized the complexity of life in all its facets. They demonstrated the flexibility required of young people through the dimensions of material. Fabric is a material that can stretch and rebound, that provides security, but can also suffocate.

Fabric served as a trampoline, a cradle, something stable to hold on to, or something to unbalance under pressure. Fabric to pull over your head and cover yourself completely, or to wear together – each at one end. Material that is so strong that you can jump on it or that throws you off balance.

It’s not the label on clothing that makes fashion relevant, but rather the many shapes that material can take on the body. The new generation of designers seems to be very aware of this.