2016
Maarten Van Mulken
  • SUMMARY
graduate of MAFAD Maastricht Academy of Fine Arts and Design

About the collection

I try to let my designs embody an idea, shaped into a form that clashes two worlds. On one

hand it’s clothing that is well crafted, and on the other, it brings a statement that should raise

questions with the audience about how they make their decisions in buying clothes. They

cannot just be beautiful pieces of clothing, they have to give the viewer something to think

about.

For this collection I looked at the ‘autarkic egos’ of people. The autarkic ego is a term

invented by philosopher Ayn Rand. She states that someone who holds an idea doesn’t

change that to please other people. It’s a person who makes his own rational choices and

thinks before he acts. With my collection I wanted to transform opinions people have towards

consumption. I wanted to create my own resistance army of aggressive women that embody

this idea. They choose for themselves and will not yield their ideas to anybody.

At the start of my design process I cut up a lot of army clothing and rearranged it in a new

order to show the ridiculousness of how fashion makes clothing that’s rather impractical to

wear. I chose army clothing for multiple reasons, but mostly because army clothing is practical

and by cutting it up the practical side gets lost. From that point on, I wanted to work with

patterns that save fabric in cutting, but because of that you lose even more fabric in a piece of

clothing. Normally making patterns for garments produces a lot of wasted fabric, in my

collection I instead create patterns that use the whole width of the fabric, which does not

allow for waste. However, the design keeps all the lost fabric on the body, so in the end much

more fabric is used compared to a conventional way of construction. This could trigger the

audience to question their views on overconsumption in fashion.