Published by

Looking (back) at my own work

Currently my time is been spent on lots of things other than my creative endeavours (of which my personal blog/website is one). My camera has only joined me on the larger trips, my sewing machine and film-scanner have been boxed up and stored away, even my small bag of embroidery tools has been floating around without being used much.
  Life can sometimes get in the way of creativity. When the only time you have for these endeavours is spare time outside of your day-to-day work and lives obligations. This is particularly true when you’re trying to buy a house, build a home and start a family. Sometimes creativity has to be put on the back-burner to progress in life so that your living environment can grow bigger, which in turn will provide you with more space to grow creatively as well. But that’d assume that life admin, settling or a day-job couldn’t or wouldn’t be a creative outlet for me. To some extend this is true, as my hobbies are my most challenging creative pursuits and exercises. On the other hand; my work at de Belastingdienst challenges me in completely new and unfamiliar ways (professionally and creatively) and finding/renovating a home has made me thinking and working more in three-dimensional space.

De Verdieping

Serendipitously I had been asked to participate in an exhibition right at this time when I was going through a re-start of sorts. De Verdieping is an exhibition by current graphic design students of the University of the Arts Utrecht. They were asked to approach an alumnus of the same course. They would exhibit a work of mine together with a work made in response to that by one of the students (Floor van den Bergh in my case). I have used this opportunity to summarise a certain period in my work/life, accumulated in the Bugao Li jacket. Below is the to be exhibited diptych and accompanying wall description:

After designing the annual 2nd-years graphic design course’s exhibition ‘HQ’ in 2012, I was invited to travel to China. It fascinated me tremendously, to the extent that I returned and eventually would spend most of my graduating year over there. Graphic design is my professional expertise, but in my personal time do I like to work with photography and clothing design. Working with concepts (something my degree has thought me) also comes to the fore in my hobby’s. This work is an accumulation of all these interests; inspired by the history of Shanghai, I made this jacket as if it were that of a gatekeeper in one of the Lilong alleyway estates ‘Cité Bourgogne’ (1930) in the old French Concession.

Published by

On how 2020 changed the course of the fashion industry

Here at Hermès we use an equestrian phrase that seems particularly apt in this day and age: ‘Straight ahead, calm and poised.’ Fashion maintains a strange relationship with time: it consumes it. Yesterday tends to be devalued in favour of novelty, supposedly the only carrier of the future, but modernising does not mean throwing away the time that came before. We can’t erase the past. The frantic and superficial aspect of fashion is not helpful and doesn’t interest me. We should focus on creation first. I am optimistic: we are all artisans of innovation!

Véronique Nichanian of Hermès, in Fantastic Man No.32 (F/W 2020/21)

Published by

Change in fashion

Fashion brings joy, inspiration and beauty to many, but increasingly it seems like an unmanageable beast stuck in a rigid and unsustainable set of parameters that is has constructed around itself as it tries to plough ahead in the distracting and pleasurable business of producing new and desirable garments.

Issue No. 32 (FW20/21) of Fantastic Man

Published by

Ambitions vs. reality

Although there was much ambition to be read in the previous updates I wrote here, not much has come to fruition. After all, what a chaotic year it has been, to make any ambitions come true.
  But that is not to say you can’t do a thing during a pandemic. Somehow we (the well-off global middle-class) have become used to the idea that everything gets better, grows larger, and generates ever more returns. And when it didn’t this year, that was a shock to the expectations we had gotten used to. Suddenly we are not able to fly everywhere, go out to drink expensive coffee’s in cafes or beers in pubs and aren’t able to just do whatever we’d like. Because the pandemic limits our lifestyle you’d almost think that life is based solely on the things we are currently limited to do. Which isn’t the case.
  This all to say that during this year I have tried to set some goals or aims as a substitute to all the supposed other things that would have filled my time if there wasn’t a pandemic to live through. This to give myself a sense of purpose it seemed. But I didn’t do any of it. Which is fine. Because something isn’t only important or worthwhile when it has a seeming sense of purpose. Reading for example, or relaxing on the couch or watching a film for the second time.

This year has brought a big change in my lifestyle; We moved countries (from The United Kingdom to The Netherlands) while keeping my job at Applied. These were all unforeseen life events that we had planned to do in the future, but did not think possible in a pandemic year. And after all that, I even managed to get a new job (starting January 2021) to top it off. So there you go; ambitions are good after all – just don’t be too strict with planning them. It’ll happen when it comes to you most naturally.