Awarded

Mariel Manuel

'Keep your Eye on the Doughnut', collection de mode (2011)

 Fashion and Textile Design

Jury report

Let’s keep our eyes on Mariel
We all re­mem­ber the in­spi­ra­tion for the third col­lec­tion by Mariel Manuel, 'What Hap­pens in the Grotto, Stays in the Grotto', in which lov­ing cou­ples fled into a magic wood and be­came trans­formed into an­i­mals, adorned with crowns of twigs and with claws pro­ject­ing from fur-trimmed sleeves.
Her de­signs for her fourth col­lec­tion, en­ti­tled 'Keep your Eye on the Dough­nut', show eight women with crowns made of shells, stand­ing on piles of sand and dream­ing of sun browned mus­cle­men. She dis­plays an eight-woman 'Venus Gang' - in­spired by a sum­mer spent in Cal­i­for­nia - with one leg in the sea and the other in a Paris salon. The play­ful ref­er­ence to Bot­ti­celli's Birth of Venus is un­mis­tak­able, as are the Mus­cle Beach prints on one of the fab­rics cre­ated by Manuel for the col­lec­tion.
As with her pre­vi­ous col­lec­tions, it is the ir­re­sistible fab­ric prints that ini­tially en­chant the viewer. They pre­sent el­e­ments and crea­tures from land and water on the wide and un­du­lat­ing cuts of fab­ric in colours that are re­strained yet full of rich con­trast. In ad­di­tion, Mariel Manuel lets algae leaves play around seams, hems and the over­long sleeves. The tal­ent and the hu­mour of this fash­ion de­signer are also re­vealed by her sketch­book. Its col­lages of pho­tographs, print­outs and hand draw­ings show the fan­ci­ful fan­tasy world that lies be­hind this com­pelling and dis­tinc­tive col­lec­tion.
Win­ning the Swiss Fed­eral De­sign Award 2011 made it pos­si­ble for the young de­signer to pro­duce a lim­ited-edi­tion se­ries of silk shawls in­spired by a par­tic­u­lar col­lec­tion. We await this new se­ries with in­ter­est. It is a shame that we do not yet know the title of the new col­lec­tion.

Biography

Mariel Manuel
Born in
1987
Education
Mariel Manuel

Web

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2011

2021