Henrik Vibskov

The Danish fashion designer Henrik Vibskov doesn’t like to be pigeonholed. Besides designing four collections a year for both men and women, Vibskov plays drums in the live band of electronic musician Trentemøller and is part of The Fringe Project, together with visual artist Andreas Emenius. Everything Henrik Vibskov does has only one goal: to create his own surreal universe where the sky is the limit. Vibskov, a true romantic at heart who only applied to the fashion design course at Central Saint Martins because a girl he fancied was going there, finds his inspiration in Nordic folk traditions and childhood memories of his hometown in Jutland, Denmark. But it’s never just about the clothes with Henrik Vibskov; to present his collections he creates extravagant narratives, filling catwalks with bicycles, wooden boats, shiny boobies, humongous hamster wheels and black carrots, like a little boy’s fantasy that has come to life. His style is best described as whimsical and quirky, with show titles as The Fantabulous Bicycle Music Factory (SS08), The Human Laundry Service (AW 09/10) and The Last Pier Pandemonium (SS11) that sound like Roald Dahl stories. Vibskov’s world looks like it’s made of Lego with colorful designs that sometimes seem to belong in the circus instead of on the catwalk, but they never stop being wearable, they never completely lose touch with reality.

Image: Henrik Vibskov's Big Wet Shiny Boobies collection (SS07)

Video: Henrik Vibskov's The Human Laundry Service collection (AW 09/10)

Rodarte

Fashion is mostly an endless repetition of something you already have seen before. Season after season trends are recycled to awaken a new desire within the consumer, making fashion the ultimate post-modern expression. But every now and then someone tries to escape this endless cycle of repetitiveness. Kate and Laura Mulleavy of Rodarte have tried to do so ever since they presented their first collection in the spring of 2005 in New York. In their parent’s garden house in Pasadena, California, the self-taught Mulleavy sisters first started creating dresses for their Barbie dolls, and even though Rodarte is now one of the most anticipated shows of the New York fashion week, Kate and Laura Mulleavy never really escaped that doll-like dream world. Their intricately and obsessively handcrafted designs show an otherworldly desire. Even though the Rodarte girl – she is always a girl, never a woman - is more than equipped to deal with reality in her spiked and studded heels, her camouflage body art and her tribal dresses, she above all projects a childlike naivety. A naivety that is corrupted and innocent at once, whether it is the Japanese horror goth from their Fall/Winter 2008 collection, the post apocalyptic warrior negotiating between culture and nature from their Spring/Summer 2010 collection or the ethereal Mexican sleepwalkers from the troubled border town of Ciudad Juárez represented in their Fall/Winter 2010 collection.

Image: Daria Werbowy in Rodarte SS10 photographed by David Sims and styled by Grace Coddington for Vogue US March 2010