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Joy Ahoulou

Awarded

Joy Ahoulou

Women's collection, spring/summer 2012

Fashion Design

Jury report

Finally!
Al­ready a prize win­ner in the Swiss Fed­eral De­sign Com­pe­ti­tions in 2008 and 2009, this is the third time in suc­ces­sion that Joy Ahoulou re­ceives an award.With his long awaited women's col­lec­tion, the de­signer – who is by now well-known in the Swiss world of fash­ion – con­tin­ued his pre­vi­ous work­ing method for cre­at­ing ex­trav­a­gant menswear and set out to fathom the bound­aries be­tween un­com­pli­cated yet el­e­gant ladies wear – a tightrope walk. The re­sult is a women's col­lec­tion of ex­treme ex­clu­siv­ity.A good ex­am­ple of this ex­clu­siv­ity is the swing­ing beige coat made of 100% cot­ton whose flow­ing fab­rics make not only for clas­sic fem­i­nine el­e­gance but also serve the prac­ti­cal pur­pose of of­fer­ing pro­tec­tion against rain.An­other ex­am­ple is the curled black-and-white evening dress. Made in equal parts of silk and cot­ton, the dress has a sim­i­larly flow­ing and at the same time al­most un­speak­ably frag­ile qual­ity to it and unites trans­parency and opac­ity. It thereby gives the woman wear­ing it an air of dis­tance and eroti­cism. Both ex­am­ples pro­vide hints as to Ahoulou's in­spi­ra­tional sources: as re­gards ex­e­cu­tion, his ideas came from out­door and stan­dard ready-made cloth­ing, whereas py­ja­mas, In­dian saris and African boubous served as the mod­els in terms of sil­hou­ette and wear­ing com­fort.If the viewer seems to be taken back to the 1980s by the cuts and fab­rics for a mo­ment, the sim­plic­ity and sen­su­al­ity of the fab­rics and the func­tion­al­ity of the items soon re­store a sense of the pre­sent. The pho­tos doc­u­ment­ing the col­lec­tion in par­tic­u­lar make it clear that the blouses, jack­ets, dresses and trousers exude a cool­ness and fragility which can only rep­re­sent the ur­ban­ity of the 21st cen­tury.With these works, Joy Ahoulou proves suc­cess­ful in his tightrope walk. The bound­aries dis­solve in a world where fragility and trans­parency meet pleas­ant wear­ing com­fort and down-to-earth­ness. What re­mains is a se­ries of beau­ti­ful, per­fectly ex­e­cuted dresses which arouse a de­sire to touch them, to try them on and to com­bine them. It is not sur­pris­ing, then, that Joy Ahoulou dares ven­ture into the in­ter­na­tional fash­ion arena with this col­lec­tion. May he suc­ceed in this en­deav­our!
Petra Bäni

Biography

Joy Ahoulou
Born in
1983
Education
Fashion designer

auch im Jahr aussi en anche nel also in

2008

2009

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