MIRIAM LAUBSCHER
Ronald Stoops
Yellow, Red and Blue. Womenswear SS16 by Miriam Laubscher

Miriam Laubscher (1983) is a Swiss fashion designer. She completed her studies at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp and gained valuable experience as fashion designer from high-end and fashion houses, such as Vivienne Westwood and Alexander McQueen in London, and Uniqlo in Tokio.
As she explains in our interview, her inspiration comes from both simple gestures, like a stroll, a conversation or a good book, but also from personalities that she admires, for example Lygia Clark. These constitute the essence that Miriam skillfully translates and moulds into her collections.

How relevant is the notion of UTOPIA within your practice, approaches and strategies?

Most of the ideas I have are sometimes the consequence of a walk, a conversation or a common daily experience. In the context of an exhibition, the art piece is an ambiguous object – it produces an echo and I build my own story. I might even draw minimal sketches or take pictures and archive my personal interpretation. The idea becomes active, creating a focus on what has captured in my memory. Fashion is not flat but rather multi-facetted. It’s storytelling, giving a statement, experimenting with the conventions of beauty and we have the need and the right to have beautiful things around us.

JAN ϟ JORRE
Yellow, Red and Blue. Womenswear SS16 by Miriam Laubscher

Utopia can be understood as the mental construction of an ideal system or pattern of a civil organisation. How do you see the role of creative practice within this concept? Or otherwise, can design change society?

I would like to see people embracing their individuality. I would like people to feel comfortable in their clothes, be an individual and question things in our society. And that they are more experimenting with the conventions of fashion.

What inspires you? Are there any other manifestos, publications or thinkers that have influenced your work or mindset?

For my last collection I was inspired by the artist Lygia Clark (1920 – 1988). She was a Brazilian artist best known for her painting and installation work. She was often associated with the Brazilian Constructivist movements of the mid-20th century and the Tropicalia movement. Throughout her career trajectory, Clark discovered ways for museum goers (who would later be referred to as “participants”) to interact with her art works. She sought to redefine the relationship between art and society and her works dealt with inner life and feelings.

As for her influence on my own work, I took the multi-sensory experience of Lygia Clark as a guiding principle; in her work, the viewer is asked to manipulate the artwork and not stay neutral, in a similar way this is true for these dresses that are like canvasses out of which a woman walks. The wearer is part of the canvas, walks out of it and creates her own story.

Ronald Stoops
Yellow, Red and Blue. Womenswear SS16 by Miriam Laubscher

Our best ideas come to us in a walk, a small habit or a reading, we capture the emotions of that idea and sublimate them into a new shape in our life. In this way the collection takes different fragments  of fabric of different textures and vibrant colors which symbolise different thoughts and emotions and creates a new shape.

The emotions are translated into geometrical shapes, close-ups of fabrics become a new pattern, the fabric samples shape the silhouette. This collection references the unbearable lightness of being, revealing a woman with a real presence, challenging the conventional notions of beauty.

More about Miriam Laubscher here.