HAUTE COUTURE

Press Text

HAUTE COUTURE
18 July 2021 to 31 October 2021

Draiflessen Collection
Georgstraße 16 | 49497 Mettingen
info@draiflessen.com | www.draiflessen.com

The Draiflessen Collection’s fashion collection includes creations by famous designers such as Madeleine Vionnet, Christian Dior, Madame Grès, and Cristóbal Balenciaga. Inspired by their dresses and ensembles, students will theoretically and practically explore the four designers' personalities, their working methods and their Œuvre, and use this as a basis for designing their own models. They present the results in a presentation in DAS Forum. The project is being developed as a seminar paper in cooperation with the Department of Textile Design of the Faculty of Cultural and Social Sciences at the University of Osnabrück.

Inspiration and own creation
15 students each dedicate their work to one of the four fashion designers. They research what makes him/her so special to this day and let themselves be inspired by techniques to create their own models and try out craftsmanship finesses. They will be accompanied in their work by Dr. Maria Spitz, curator of fashion and textiles at the Draiflessen Collection, and Christine Löbbers, lecturer at the University of Osnabrück. In addition to the four dresses and ensembles selected from the Draiflessen Collection, the student creations will be shown along with their development process.

Four masters of fashion
Madeleine Vionnet (1876−1975) is known as the inventor of the bias cut, and many consider her to be the greatest “cut artist” of all time; Christian Dior (1905–1957) celebrated a resoundingly successful debut with his “New Look” in 1947 and dictated the lines of women’s fashion in the years that followed; Madame Grès (actually Germaine Krebs, 1903−1993) drew inspiration from garments of classical antiquity and created costumes of timeless elegance; and Cristóbal Balenciaga (1895−1972) is hailed as the “King of Fashion” to this day. All four were members of the Chambre Syndicale de la Haute Couture, the Parisian trade association that only admits fashion boutiques producing tailor-made creations based on models that are elaborately handcrafted and made of luxurious materials.