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Joy Ahoulou

Awarded

Joy Ahoulou

Menswear collection A/W 09/10

Fashion Design

Jury report

Grounded and Quirky
Joy Ahoulou has won a Swiss Fed­eral De­sign Grant for the sec­ond time. Last year it was for his in­ter­me­di­ate diploma and his de­gree piece. This year, the award is in recog­ni­tion of his Au­tumn/Win­ter 2009/2010 col­lec­tion for men. His focus is on merg­ing and po­si­tion­ing two things: the label and the col­lec­tion. Aim­ing to es­tab­lish his label in the in­ter­na­tional world of fash­ion, Joy Ahoulou con­cen­trates not only on sources of in­spi­ra­tion, choice of ma­te­r­ial, colour and form, but also on pro­duc­tion costs, sales and dis­tri­b­u­tion chan­nels.
This col­lec­tion cen­tres on the ar­tic­u­la­tion of a con­tem­po­rary male image that in­cor­po­rates both mas­cu­line and fem­i­nine as­pects. While his role mod­els in­clude his­tor­i­cal fig­ures such as Al­bert Gri­maud, Comte d'Orsay, who in­flu­enced the dandies of the late nine­teenth cen­tury, he also finds in­spi­ra­tion in his im­me­di­ate en­vi­ron­ment and builds on his own ear­lier works.
The pre­sen­ta­tion is out­stand­ing in two re­spects: the look­book and pho­tographs con­vey the mood and state­ment of the col­lec­tion. The an­drog­y­nous young men fea­tured in the look­book show a be­wil­der­ing and un­set­tling com­bi­na­tion of male and fe­male at­trib­utes. Joy Ahoulou is a mas­ter of sub­tle in­nu­endo. This is ev­i­dent on look­ing more closely at the col­lec­tion. It con­sists of a va­ri­ety of mix and match tops, shirts, trousers and shoes in high qual­ity ma­te­ri­als such as neo­prene, tulle, fus­t­ian and var­i­ous types of wool, to which he adds the re­cur­ring ‘cheap and cheer­ful' motif of a plas­tic back­pack fas­tener. In this way, Joy Ahoulou con­trasts and off­sets the sig­nif­i­cance of the ma­te­r­ial and the cut. The in­di­vid­ual pieces are metic­u­lously crafted with painstak­ing at­ten­tion to de­tail.
By con­cen­trat­ing on cou­pling the label closely with the col­lec­tion, Joy Ahoulou suc­ceeds in cre­at­ing clothes that make a state­ment. His col­lec­tion is bold, strong and con­fi­dent: a first step in the right di­rec­tion.
Pa­trizia Criv­elli

Biography

Joy Ahoulou
Born in
1983
Education
Fashion designer

also in

2008

2011

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