VIKTOR & ROLF: CONCEPTUAL DUO FOR MILLIONS
Viktor Horsting and Rolf Snoeren were born in 1969 in South Holland. In 1992 they graduate the Academy of Arts in Arnhem. Their first success they achieve in 1993, when they win three awards at the festival Hyères. Some time they are members in the group of the free Holland designers “Le Cri Néerlandais”. They participate in the organized by the group fashion-shows in Paris. They show their works of art with puppet miniatures and vials of perfumes in Torch Gallery in Amsterdam in 1996. In 1998 they make their debut during the week of the haute couture in Paris. They launch their men’s line clothing (2003). The Paris Louvre Museum organizes their exhibition on the occasion of the tenth anniversary from the beginning of their creative career. In 2004 they launch at the market their first perfume “Flowerbomb”. To order of the famous Swedish multiple “H & M” they create special bridal collection that in 2006 is put on the market at accessible prices.
The unprecedented triumph of the Holland fashion duo Viktor&Rolf (Viktor Horsting and Rolf Snoeren) had strongly shaken the pessimists regarding the development of the fashion design as art and conception. Welcomes in their beginning with the deafening silence of the media and ironically threw out as “non-fashionable” and “out fashionable” creators, today the two designers receive a lot of tempting proposals, and the press and the TV compete to court and flatter them. It’s enough to stare at “Top ten” of the world fashion Bible – “Vogue” in the occasion of the most important fashion moments of the fashion-show of Viktor&Rolf spring-summer 2007, to consider their unbelievable success:
1. The music sound recording of the fashion-show by the Canadian performer Rufus Wainwright and his 20-membered band;
2.The sensation of the public that it is in splendid ballroom;
3. The starry symbol, that is present everywhere;
4. The attractive satin shoes with plastic heels;
5. The gradation and the mixture of the men’s and lady’s components in the clothing;
6. The multi-colored accents and spots;
7. The brave and refined roles, resembling to cut paper;
8. The silky tights in flesh-color, decorated with sequins;
9. The bitted into and scrubby borders;
10. The geysers of champagne in full daylight.
How succeed to two fashion geniuses to transform the concept for “chic” and “fashion”, “elegant” and “stylish”? What is the reason their deeply non-commercial art to conquer the market and to realize staggering selling? Why the experts today call their design “meta fashion”, emphasizing on its communication character? Have both of them contribution to the fashion formula of the scandal and in what consists it? Who and why likes their creative?...
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The childhood and the adolescence of Viktor and Rolf are similar, as are similar in fact their fates, interweaved soundly in search of the perfect design. Both of them as children are sentimental and impressive. Both of them dream to make fashion – different, peculiar, wonderful and noncommercial. Both of them suffer from deficit of information, because – by their admissions – the only one TV broadcast for fashion in Holland and a little of BBC weren’t enough at all, to learn and to receive everything for the fashion and for the fashion design. They meet each other still the first semester in the Academy of arts in Arnhem, where they are studying. Talent, ambition and…..the need to be together brings them closer. Yes, just the wish to form one organic whole in the basis of their future unusual breaches in the world fashion. In the beginning of their friendship and creative collaboration, and later they by all possible means make people accept them as one whole or as once shares Viktor “We want to suggest that we are one brain, one person, one designer”. Curious are the impressions from both of them of Polly Vernon, shared in “Observer”: “Rolf is with skin head that helps very much in the recognition who is who. In fact Rolf and Viktor resemble each other so much. Viktor is taller, darker and obviously – more handsome. His English is much better, and his smile is wider. Rolf is more delicate, witty, physically is stranger and he is with big eyes as of a deer. But in the same time the possibility to be mixed-up is very big. With identical styling, with embroidered logo at the front pocket of their jackets, with the same glasses with dark frames – all this makes them very identical and easy to be mixed-up. They fish for being mixed-up that in fact is their aim...” . But why both of them think so highly of their tandem?
And Viktor, and Rolf think that “together” is a key word for their creative. The work in tandem allows them to go deeper in the idea for the conceptual cloth and its realization. Their collaborative creative and consequently business activity is a way of survival at the fashion market. Both of them realize that their duet makes their life and their work more interesting, even – more amusing and jolly. As Rolf once confesses in one interview: ”If I was alone, I would never engage in it!”. The relationship between them is extremely strong. The synchronization between them is so strong and good that even, when they are separated and they are in different latitudes, both of them wake up and start to work at the same time. They can’t live each without other and through SMS they communicate, when they are separated by hundred and thousand of kilometers. Nevertheless they prefer the most of the time to be in Amsterdam, than in Paris or in New York. Many people had sought extraprofessional reasons for this intimacy, even there are hints that they were for some time boy friends, but asked pointblank they deny such kind of thing.
ATOMICBOMBINTHEFASHION
Till their arrival in Paris Viktor & Rolf had walked not so easy and complicated road. Even only for some years, they had attracted the attention of galleries and museums, art critics and fashion experts with their innovative design, with their wish to create fashion that is out of the fashion and to create clothes that as a rule are “immunized” against vulgarity, street challenge and superficial market orientation. Still in the same beginning they find the formula of the difference, making nonfunctional clothes and searching new dimensions in the fashion design. Still from the first years of their appearance make impression the excessively volumetric sleeves, the cool eclectics, achieved through many necklaces and complements and their deviations to the gigantic, excessive, super volumetric. Immediately they graduated, they impose them selves with their impeccable sense to the space, proposing not only tailored clothes from textile, but real sculptures, charged semiotically and conceptually with many meanings.
Their wish is to be interesting, extravagant, and to pay the necessary tax to the experiment stimulates them to the creation of virtual perfumes (the distribution of empty vials, making parody with famous brands as for example “Chanel № 5” and postmodern installations, launching little dollies – models, remembering the prototypes of the fashion communication in ХVІІІ century, when just through the little and the big Pandora were distributed the news for the fashion tendencies. Some experts even compare the early creative experiences of Viktor & Rolf with the style “ready made” of the famous Marcel Deschamps, according to whom in the creative is more important the idea, than the work of art itself, the result itself. Viktor testifies on the efforts that both of them put during these years:”The installation expressed our ambitions. We said to us that the things don’t go, as we’d wanted. Because of that we decided to make the following: to imagine figuratively what we would like to be. Clarifying this – to create it, but in miniature mode. Just for this we organized a miniature fashion-show; we created small boutique and like this we realized exact projection of our ambitions”.
In the first years of their manifestations in Paris the hopes of Viktor & Rolf are strongly damped by the icy silence of the press. To attract attention, they distribute by them selves photocopies of their message on the cover of low-circulated magazine. The year is 1996 and it is spectacular with the fact that the fashion duo goes on strike – a protest against the media and public disinterestedness concerning their creative. However, this is only prelude to the bomb that is coming to be thrown – besides atomic. “The atomic project” of Viktor & Rolf is related to the brave, and according to some people – wild decision to present their collection in Paris during the week of the haute couture. The year is 1998 and at the fashion-show almost no one journalist from the world media don’t pay big attention with one “small” exception – the photo reporter of magazine “Time” that publishes a photo of a dress in the form of a mushroom of atomic bomb. Just this photo attracts the common interest and from here starts the legitimacy of the design success. The apocalyptic character of the fashion image and the “atomic dresses” show the provocative thinking of the creators. They quite purposefully throw this challenge:”People usually think that we very attentively analyze the road, which our career will develop at, but let they know that it’s about most of all intuition. After the press didn’t respond to our first messages, we supposed that we weren’t concrete and because of that with our first collection haute couture we decided to send very clear message. We made it and like this we provoked the reaction”.
Different are the sensations, provoked by the collections of Viktor & Rolf. The emotional range of colors is rich and variegated: from surprise and mistrust, through light sceptisim – to absolute enthusiasm from the refines tuxedos, the dresses with crinolines, the lace ornaments, the doll manner, the floored clothes, the great number of flounces, frills and all sorts of eccentric details, and also dress-coats, top-hats etc. The conceptuality of the two designers and the sources of their inspiration: the spirit of the 40s, the world of Walt Disney, the fantasticality and the world of the fashion itself with all its specialties, strangeness and challenges – all this forms the amalgam, called fashion innovation and fresh innovation in the design. Sometimes their collections are real performance, where the models offer supporting structures with turned inside searchlights, to light the new works of art (autumn-winter 2007/2008), and other time the tunics and the lady’s slips concede the rank to the former dresses in sacred cut to show how the simple and the cleared can be the attributes of the elegant and of the beautiful (spring-summer 2008). The colors vary from bonbon pink, blue, green and yellow, to black, brown and grey, hinting the different colorist directions of the creative strategy. Among the most ardent admirers of this style are the celebrities Cate Blanchett, Gwen Stefani, Tilda Swinton etc.
“OURFASHIONISSUITABLEFORTHOSE, WHOESTIMATESIT”
The philosophy and the aesthetics of Viktor & Rolf shows at least three things: individualism (that in this case is equal at high self-confidence), striving for over construction and permanent experiment. It is curious their thinking, their concept for the fashion design that has to attract the attention. For them more important for the design it self is its possibility to communicate, to deliver concrete messages. Both of them think highly of the autonomacy of thier collections and they are convinced that once finished the fashion, respectively their collection, is suitable for those, who estimates it. The design profession is a big challenge, because it “requires diversity of skills that go beyond the design skills. The making of design is very difficult taken alone, but the illusion that every time we will perfect, makes us continue”. When people ask them what their final aim is, their answers – even though different – focus their passion and their workaholics in one whole. They want to be famous, rich and real, but not false stars. This is their fond wish to transform in the new luxurious brand of ХХІ century, to have more and more stores. To distribute in the whole world the licenses for their perfumes and cosmetic brands!
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The general impression from the art of Viktor & Rolf is undoubted hope regarding the future of the fashion design. Thanks to the depth and to the conceptuality in their collections still more clearly distinguishes the role of the fashion as art and visual culture, staying in the vanguard of the contemporary aesthetics. Original and provocative, over-precise and sensitive, Viktor Horsting and Rolf Snoeren personify particularly brightly the new postmodern tendency in the world design and appeal to more originality and thought, technological perfection and artistics. Because of that curators from the Louvre to the Metropolitan Museum compete to organize their exhibitions and retrospectives, because with their originality and permanent ability to overbuild them selves, Viktor & Rolf enrich the today’s culture and go beyond the elementary commercial criteria of the market-oriented person.
Notes:
Davis, Boyd. Viktor & Rolf: A Cut Above The Rest. In: FashionWindows.com,Inc. ;Evans, Caroline. Fashion at the edge. New haven and London, 2003; Fashion now. i-D selects the world’s 150 most important designers. Edited by Terry Jones & Avril Mair. – Köln: Taschen, 2005; McDowell, C. Fashion today. Phaidon Press Limited. London, 2000; VOGUE.COM ; Vernon, Polly 'We are one brain, one person, one designer' , “The Observer”, November 13, 2005 etc;
Photos:
1. Viktor & Rolf
Photo: © Anuschka Blomers and Niels Schumm / Fashion now. i-D selects the world’s 150 most important designers. Edited by Terry Jones & Avril Mair. – Köln: Taschen, 2005, p.218.
2. Works of art of Viktor & Rolf, spring-summer 1996
Photo: © Galerie Patricia Dorfmann, Paris / Evans, Caroline. Fashion at the edge. New haven and London, 2003, p.105.
3. Work of art of Viktor & Rolf, autumn-winter 1996/1997
Photo: © Viktor & Rolf / Evans, Caroline. Fashion at the edge. New haven and London, 2003, p.83.
4. Work of art of Viktor & Rolf, spring-summer 1997
Photo: © Claudie Krommelin / Evans, Caroline. Fashion at the edge. New haven and London, 2003, p.82.
5. Advertising poster of perfume of Viktor & Rolf, spring-summer 1997
Photo: © Wendelien Daan / Evans, Caroline. Fashion at the edge. New haven and London, 2003, p.82.
6. and 7. Styling of Viktor & Rolf, 1997
Photo: © Viktor & Rolf / German “Vogue” / Evans, Caroline. Fashion at the edge. New haven and London, 2003, p.44 - 45.
8. Work of art of Viktor & Rolf, 1998
Photo: © Lee Jenkins / McDowell, C. Fashion today. Phaidon Press Limited. London, 2000, p.317.
9. Works of art of Viktor & Rolf, spring-summer 1999
Photo: © F.Dumoulin / Java / Evans, Caroline. Fashion at the edge. New haven and London, 2003, p.46.
10. and 11. Works of art of Viktor & Rolf, autumn-winter 1999/2000
Photo: © Peter Tahl / Evans, Caroline. Fashion at the edge. New haven and London, 2003, p.182 - 183.
12. Work of art of Viktor & Rolf, autumn-winter 2000/2001
Photo: © F.Dumoulin / Java / Evans, Caroline. Fashion at the edge. New haven and London, 2003, p.62.
13. Work of art of Viktor & Rolf, autumn-winter 2001/2002
Photo: © Roberto Tecchio / Evans, Caroline. Fashion at the edge. New haven and London, 2003, p.43.
14. Work of art of Viktor & Rolf
Photo: © Fashion now. i-D selects the world’s 150 most important designers. Edited by Terry Jones & Avril Mair. – Köln: Taschen, 2005, p.219.
15. Works of art of Viktor & Rolf (detail), March 2002
Photo: © Richard Burbridge / Fashion now. i-D selects the world’s 150 most important designers. Edited by Terry Jones & Avril Mair. – Köln: Taschen, 2005, p.222.
16. Work of art of Viktor & Rolf (detail), March 2002
Photo: © David Lachapelle / Fashion now. i-D selects the world’s 150 most important designers. Edited by Terry Jones & Avril Mair. – Köln: Taschen, 2005, p.221.
17. Work of art of Viktor & Rolf (detail), September 2002
Photo: © Christophe Rihet / Fashion now. i-D selects the world’s 150 most important designers. Edited by Terry Jones & Avril Mair. – Köln: Taschen, 2005, p.223.
18. and 19. Works of art of Viktor & Rolf, autumn-winter 2006/2007
Photo: © Marcio Madeira/VOGUE.COM
20. and 21. Works of art of Viktor & Rolf, spring-summer 2007
Photo: © Marcio Madeira/VOGUE.COM
22. and 23. Works of art of Viktor & Rolf, autumn-winter 2007/2008
Photo: © Marcio Madeira/VOGUE.COM
24. and 25. Works of art of Viktor & Rolf, spring-summer 2008
Photo: © Marcio Madeira/VOGUE.COM
26. – 32. Works of art of Viktor & Rolf, autumn-winter 2008/2009
Photo: © Marcio Madeira/VOGUE.COM
33. – 36. Works of art of Viktor & Rolf, spring-summer 2009
Photo: © Marcio Madeira/VOGUE.COM
VIDEO:
Viktor & Rolf Spring 2009 Fashion Show (Full)
Viktor & Rolf Fall 2008 Fashion Show (Full)
Viktor & Rolf Fall 2008 Fashion Show (Full)
Read: 13734 times © Fashion Lifestyle Magazine, issue 17, December 2008
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