Awarded
Melanie Fischer
Fashion collection 'où tu vas comme ça?', about 100 pieces and 10 accessories
Fashion Design
Jury report
'où tu vas comme ça?'
Fashion should not be a luxury – The fashion designer Melanie Fischer makes unique objects – they sound like exclusive models for the 'happy few'. And yet Fischer's credo is that attractive clothes should be accessible to people on a tight budget too. But how can you make reasonably priced unique objects? Melanie Fischer says there are enough fabrics in Switzerland. You just have to find them, print them, cut them up and sew them together again. She often buys fabric remnants and makes them into collages. The challenge she sets herself is to make unique objects rationally. She has also demonstrated this successfully as a member of the artists' duo 'Boycotlettes' (with Lara Schwander). Although the recycling idea has been around now in the West for about two decades, it has made surprisingly little impact on the fashion world. Melanie Fischer is showing us that things can be different. This unconventional fashion designer first trained as a women's tailor and then graduated from the Basel specialist fashion class. She has developed from being a Swiss tailor and cutter into a 'cutter-up' who does not just sew, but also cuts up, dyes, bleaches and prints. Several study visits to West Africa have made their mark on this Basel woman. She was very impressed with the Senegalese tailors' speed and productivity. Fischer also took an interest in patchwork techniques, which have a long tradition there.
Transformation is her working principle, and she is one of the most courageous exponents of it. Just as she gives fabrics a second life, she also subjects the patterns and prints she finds to a kind of 'iconographic recycling'. She presents her colourfully printed patchwork creations, which she produces in large numbers, in cardboard boxes printed with images of people wearing her clothes. And what they get to wear so proudly are casual clothes that really are cut for everyday use, in an eclectic mix of colours and styles. Fashion has seldom seemed so uncomplicated, cheerful and fresh.
Peter Stohler
Biography
Melanie Fischer
Born in
1976
Education
Designerin FH in Modedesign