The venue of FFOLDS by Oslo based designer Anne Karine Thorbjørnsen used to be an old laundromat on the Eastern side of Grunerløkka. The sunlight fills the room through big windows and illuminate garments and plastic sheets hanging from the ceiling. Placed on chairs, laying on the floor and wrapped around steel bars, her collection reminds us of a contemporary art exhibition.
Thorbjørnsen has a predilection for the art of draping and the indefinable. She graduated from Central Saint Martins in London in 2014 and this is her first year back in Norway. Earlier in March she had a presentation of her newest collection that she chose to show on street casted models of both genders. Thorbjørnsen is a womenswear designer but told us that she wanted to see if her design would work on the guys as well.
I have worked with the masculine suit and draping as a contrast between the hard and the soft, Anne Karine Thorbjørnsen explains for mon Dieu. The suit works as a power uniform: an object representing the role of a male leader. Playing this reference up against the softness and femininity of the ancient draping technique, we get an interesting outcome reflecting the masculine versus the feminine roles of today’s society.
The draping technique is often presented as very sublime: mostly seen in fine art. I wanted to put this in another context with fabrics representing another kind of beauty, Thorbjørnsen says pointing towards a pink dress hanging close to one of the windows. With its pink layers in low-cost material the item might come of as cheap and unattractive. The transformation is first seen when the sunbeams hits the fibres: making the dress shine like the threads are interpreted with small diamonds. In this way mon Dieu sees it as a nod towards a modern interpretation of high-cultur meeting low/popular culture as is seen a lot in fashion these days.
There were a lot of interesting pieces that caught our attention: a suit jacket tuned into a skirt with pleats and pockets and an outwear piece transformed from the inner lining of another tailored-made item. The feet of the models wore glitter splashed sandals and heels; Thorbjørnsen wanting us to imagine that they had just returned from running through a deep mud bank; a mud bank filled with glitter.
