Crafting Fashion for Possible Futures

Amaaena, Dead White Men’s Clothes, Allesandro Sant, Flora Miranda, Hvala Ilija, House of the Very, Julia Koerner, Kids of the Diaspora, Matthias Winkler, Mühlbauer, Larissa Falk, Published By, Rudolf, Susanne Bisovsky

Design holds the potential for change and possible, better futures. In a time of chronic political, environmental, health, and social struggles with a lingering fear of an imminent crisis, an intrinsic question arises: What can design really do, right now?

With the exhibition Crafting Fashion for Possible Futures, curated by Camille Boyer and Miriam Kathrein, the Austrian Cultural Forum New York presents for the first time a comprehensive overview of contemporary Austrian fashion design.

The exhibition focuses on the working methods of professional fashion design practitioners, concerned with their responsibility in the socio-political, sociocultural, and socio-economical realm. Their fashion design practice explores and investigates fields of identity politics, activism, sustainability, or the interdependency of traditional production processes and new technology.

In the exhibition objects such as garments, shoes, accessories, textiles, images and films are shown to ask one question:

How can the act of crafting fashion drive positive and systemic change?

This is the question the fashion practitioners try to answer through finding possibilities within their designs to work on societal transitions. They do this by giving visibilities to those often not represented in society, by challenging large fashion-corporations through championing community and identity and by – quite literally – de-seaming masculinity and interlacing the demand of feminism into the wearable. Every single designer whose works are shown trigger these changes in one or more ways. Their designs stand for optimism, solidarity and hope.

Before co-founding the Austrian Fashion Association, Franco-Argentinian Camille Boyer has been working in the areas of design, PR and sales in Paris, Shanghai and Vienna. Her twenty years of professional experience in various fields of the fashion industry give her a unique understanding of the entire value chain. She heads since 2014 the Austrian Fashion Association, for which she designs all programs and interventions with the aim to support the development of a new generation of designers ready to make an impact in the world. She is a sought-after expert and is regularly invited at conferences and talks nationally and abroad. Topics such as women empowerment in fashion, sustainability, digital transformation and community-building build the core of her interests and expertise, together with a very deep know-how of the Austrian fashion scene. She has also initiated the Take Festival for independent Fashion and Arts, and the B2B sales platform DACH Showroom together with the organisations Mode Suisse and Berlin Showroom.

Miriam Kathrein is a design practitioner, curator, and cultural researcher. She is interested in post-disciplinary, processual, and collaborative practices. Areas of focus include Design as Social Practice, Design Justice, Design and Cultural Practitioners as Agents of Change, and the Circular Economy. She was responsible for program development in the fields of design, architecture, and fashion at the creative center departure, Vienna Business Agency, with a focus on urban production, circularity and sustainability, new work, and social entrepreneurship. She has served as managing director of Werkraum Bregenzerwald, where she was concerned with the role of craftspeople and designers as agents of change. She established her curatorial practice at Kunsthaus Bregenz and MELLY – Formerly known as Witte de With – Center for Contemporary Art in Rotterdam, worked as a curator at Kunstverein Hamburg, and TBA21 in Vienna. She has taught at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna in the fields of Contextual Design and Art and Communication and has conducted research on the topic of the exhibition as practice.