Exploring a New Identity
The exhibition Swedish Fashion – Exploring a New Identity showcases a new generation of Swedish fashion talent with the work of thirteen designers who challenge the stereotypical picture of Swedish fashion as blonde, functional and minimal. Showcased in a stark architectural setting, the show highlights the bold, the avant-garde and the surprising. October 30 2008, it opened at Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo where it was shown till the end of January 2010.
For the international public the image of Swedish fashion might be synonymous with trendy denim brands or inexpensive fast fashion. But there is another side to Swedish fashion that only recently has gained attention outside Sweden and is more about individual expression, critical thinking and avant-garde attitudes.
Sweden did not acquire anything resembling a fashion system before the 1980s. As the subtitle (Exploring a New Identity) conveys, this exhibition is about a work in progress, a fashion scene that is under development. The exhibition features thirteen fashion designers who have debuted since the new millennium, or later.
By taking inspiration from a wide range of sources, such as social stereotyping, subcultural styles transformer dressing and radical handicraft, the designers in the exhibition not only make strong individual statements but also redefine the face and concept of Swedish fashion. They relate as much to the issues and movements on the global fashion scene as to the traditional Swedish design heritage.
Being a small country on the fringe of the fashion world – geographically, culturally, psychologically – Sweden has before been forced to relate to its more illustrous fellow players in Paris, Milan, London and New York. What has happened over the past decade is that Swedish designers have started to contribute on their own terms in a more substantial way to the international fashion system.
Read more about the designers in the left-hand menu.
Curator: Maria Ben Saad
Art Director: Stefania Malmsten
Assistant Art Director: Ulrika Hellberg
Exhibition Design: Ola Andersson and Joel Hedgren / A1 arkitekter
Film: Göran Olsson / Story
Stylists: Naomi Itkes and Karin Smeds
Project Manager: Anna Maria Bernitz
Assistant Project Manager: Asta Rantanen