CHRISTMAS COMES EARLY AT VICTOR & ROLF EXHIBIT
Byline: Miles Socha
GRONINGEN, The Netherlands — It was hard not to think about “How the Grinch Stole Christmas” after making the six-hour trek from Paris to this remote northern city, the site of a major exhibition of the work of Dutch couturiers Viktor Horsting and Rolf Snoeren that opened Sunday.
Christmas first came to mind as soon as the plane landed in Amsterdam. Although it’s still early November, there are twinkling Christmas trees and sparkling garlands strewn throughout the airport.
But parallels to the Dr. Seuss fable were cemented upon arrival at the Groninger Museum — four trains and two taxis later — when Viktor & Rolf talked about the exhibit and what message it might convey to the public.
As the story goes, on the day the Grinch realized that Christmas meant something more than commerce, his heart grew three sizes. “It came without presents, it came without tags. It came without packages, boxes or bags.”
Snoeren and Horsting held out the same hope for visitors who would encounter their tuxedo jacket trimmed with thousands of bells, the blouse with foot-deep ruffles around the neck and the black sheer dress stuffed with helium balloons still attached to their strings.
“I hope they’ll see fashion as a lot more than a jacket on a hanger in a store,” Snoeren said. “I think there’s a lot more to it. It’s a broader phenomenon than just buying clothes.”
Certainly, the Groninger Museum thinks so. When Viktor & Rolf launched their couture career in 1998, it provided a stipend to the designers and agreed to buy selections of their work for its permanent collection. The 28 pieces from five couture collections constitute the exhibit.
Groninger Museum curator Mark Wilson said he had an “instinct” that the Dutch duo would produce works with artistic merit, but he acknowledged his approach of buying work sight unseen is unorthodox.
“Most museums are dinosaur repositories. They collect relics. Even with contemporary artists, they make their picks later,” he said. “I think it’s more important to pick people rather than pick objects.”
The museum displays the Viktor & Rolf designs on eyeless mannequins in a darkened room with spotlights illuminating each silhouette. The nine outfits that constitute their famous Russian-doll collection for winter 1999 rotate on turntables, their Swarovski crystals sparkling like the snow on Mount Crumpet.
They are testimony, Wilson said, to the fact that the designers are artists: sculptors who work with cloth and create such thought-provoking designs as their atomic-bomb-shaped suits and dresses.
But for Horsting and Snoeren, the exhibit marks the end of a period for them. In fact, they disclosed to WWD that they might stop making couture collections in order to pour their energy into ready-to-wear, which they launched earlier this year with Gibo SpA, their manufacturing and distribution partner. The experience of showing couture last July and then rtw in October proved to be trying.
“We noticed that we can’t do that,” Snoeren said. “We are not Chanel. We are too small to put out four collections a year. Right now, we need to be realistic.
“Also, we are evolving more and more. Now we are participating more in the business side of fashion, making it more wearable and commercial.”
Backing up their assertion, dozens of women who attended the opening-night party came dressed in items from Viktor & Rolf’s debut rtw collection, especially items in a stars-and-stripes print.
The museum estimates 70,000 people will see the Viktor & Rolf exhibit before it closes March 25. It is being held concurrently with an exhibit of fashion photographs by Ines Van Lamsweerde and Vinoodh Matadin.