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Camie Rebord

Awarded

Camie Rebord

'Flowers Bones', diploma collection (2010)

Fashion Design

Jury report

A Morbid Fairytale Quality
With her women's col­lec­tion 'Flow­ers Bones', tex­tile and fash­ion de­signer Camie Re­bord from Valais earned her BA from HEAD Geneva in 2010. It is also on the basis of this work that she is awarded the Swiss Fed­eral De­sign Award this year.

The evoca­tive title of the work cat­a­pults its viewer into a spe­cial world, the world of beauty and ephemer­al­ity. Camie Re­bord took as her in­spi­ra­tion the po­etic na­ture of death, a pop­u­lar aes­thetic at the be­gin­ning of the 19th cen­tury, and in­cor­po­rated it in her sub­ject mat­ter. This aes­thetic re­flects the idea of that era of sur­round­ing the dead with many flow­ers and in that way to pho­to­graph them as if they were still alive.

This gave rise to 17 idio­syn­cratic dresses whose light trans­parency and ex­tremely fine pas­tel shades con­jure up the as­so­ci­a­tion of a fairy­tale-like world of elves. With their play­ful shapes they nonethe­less fully match cur­rent fash­ion trends. Yet this first ap­pear­ance is de­cep­tive: whereas the ma­te­ri­als and cuts used are fully in line with the spirit of the time, the print­ing in con­trast makes for mo­ments of sur­prise and in some cases even pro­vokes re­vul­sion. Thus only a sec­ond look at a light syn­thetic blouse re­veals that its motif rep­re­sents a human pelvis. The shock that fol­lows the re­al­i­sa­tion of the true na­ture of the pat­terns, which Camie Re­bord cre­ated using x-ray im­ages and old pho­tos, is pre­cisely what makes her fab­rics and dresses fas­ci­nat­ing. It is due to her courage that in her col­lec­tion death is firmly an­chored in the pre­sent. Thus the dresses pro­vide each viewer with in­spi­ra­tion to give free rein to their own per­sonal as­so­ci­a­tions and mem­o­ries. Camie Re­bord's em­bell­ish­ment of her col­lec­tion is as rad­i­cal as her choice of sub­ject: the fairy­tale qual­ity of her dresses is sup­ple­mented with lit­tle crowns and shoes as if in prepa­ra­tion for a fin de siècle ball. Del­i­cacy, play­ful­ness and a focus on mor­bid­ity are what make the col­lec­tion unique.
Petra Bäni

Biography

Camie Rebord
Born in
1985
Education
Fashion Designer

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