Niels Klavers spring—summer 1999. Fashion has gone to such extremes at the end of the mil
Niels Klavers spring—summer 1999. Fashion has gone to such extremes at the end of the millennium that designing something truly shocking practically requires an electrical socket and a bucket of water. In all the hoopla, the three-armed jacket stands out as the biggest fashion joke of them all, the most obvious example of the lengths to which some designers will go to make us sit up and take notice. Dutch designer Niels Klavers has created a jacket with multiple sleeves—his had four. He has also made three-legged pants, a four-armed sweater, and a coatdress colonised front and back by two identical coatdresses. And Klavers has done these things in all sincerity, with a straight face. “I do this work very seriously,” he says. “I don’t laugh about it. I’m not making fun with it.” Klaver’s modus operandi is to take a side of clothing we already know, to which we have already become blinded by complete and utter familiarity, and add another dimension. His first collection, Show Me Your Second Face used what he calls “feature doubling,” or the annexation of duplicates to this effect. A pair of ordinary trousers suddenly becomes less ordinary when it had five pairs of the same trousers trailing behind it. In his second collection, which was presented in Paris as a part of group showing of the Fashion Institute Arnhem in the spring of 1999, Klavers took this idea and twisted it slightly. A jacket shifted ninety degrees on its axis, the arms protruding from the chest and back; a skirt sprouted shoulders and sleeves; a garment that may have started as a pair of pants morphed into a skirt. The models who walked the runway had their hair combed into their faces; there was no telling if they were coming or going. “We aren’t used to a top as a skirt,” Klavers says. Indeed we are not. -- source link