Looking on the Dark Side

The colourful streets of Amsterdam are a laboratory for fashion designer Brigitte Hendrix, 27. Her collection ominously entitled ‘Something Here Feels Horribly Wrong’, which she designed as her final exam project at Amsterdam’s Rietveld Academie, has been exhibited several times and repeatedly praised in the media.

“I’m hugely fascinated by the street scene in Amsterdam," says Brigitte Hendrix. “Everyone here follows their own style. People don’t identify with one specific look any more; they combine all kinds of subcultures." This postmodernism is on its way out, though, according to her. “Exciting times are coming for designers. I get the distinct impression that people want to start expressing more ideas again, for example in the way they dress."
Although she loathes the word ‘trendspotting’, Hendrix obviously has an eye for emerging elements in fashion. “I get my inspiration from elements that are in the air: what is affecting people, and how do they consciously or unconsciously express their feelings in the way they dress? Last year, for example, I noticed people were wearing a lot of army clothes: camouflage outfits and army-green trousers and caps. War icons for mobile phones are also popular."

Pin-pricks and random rabbits

“I designed a provocative Arafat scarf based on those symbols: mobile phones, skyscrapers and airplanes, the three ingredients of 9/11, combined with the black-and-white-chequered motif of the Palestinian resistance. The scarf’s symbolic value is of no importance for most people who wear it. I like to play with that fact by seeing how far I can go. I deal out little pin-pricks."
Hendrix’s collection also takes note of opposition to the culture of violence: “My clown army uniform is based on squatters in England who dress up as clowns and engage in nonviolent protest," she says. “You can also see serious, sometimes moralistic clowning in the dance style krumping, which was recently introduced in the Netherlands. It’s a wild style that arose in Los Angeles in response to the dominant culture of violence. Why do young Dutch people in the Netherlands feel attracted to this wild dancing? Is it just a cool new fad to them, or does its ideological charge also play a part? Those questions inspired the small four-outfit collection I designed for Streetlab, an exhibition about street fashion in Amsterdam that started in 2005.
“But I don’t always have underlying questions like these. Sometimes I just spot something and try to get a grip on it. My rabbit-ears, for instance, came solely out of seeing those random rabbits popping up in films like Donnie Darko and Gummo."

A spreading air of menace

The rabbit may seem to have been put there at random, but once you know where it came from, it expresses that same uneasiness. This is enhanced by the black balloons that were part of her final exam show, which formed “a kind of dark cloud hanging over an obscure celebration," as Hendrix puts it. You got the feeling they might burst at any second, releasing poisonous gas contained inside.
About the collection’s vague air of menace, Hendrix says, “In the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam I was very affected by the Dutch still lifes of the Golden Age. They have the same kind of double message. Lovely scenes of things like bouquets of flowers go hand in hand with very dark references to death and mortality. It was in an essay about that that I came across the title ‘Something Here Feels Horribly Wrong’, which for me precisely captures the essence of my ‘obscure celebration’."
Hendrix does not yet really see herself as a fashion designer. “This is my first experience making a total package of clothing and everything that goes along with it," she says. “I chose very labour-intensive clothing: the scarves, for example, have to be woven at the textile museum. That’s why it’s only available in limited numbers." This year, Hendrix plans to concentrate on further developing her style. She will do so together with the designer Jolanda van den Broek, under the joint name ‘...and beyond’. The two designers have been collaborating on independent projects as ...and beyond since their second year of art school. The duo’s success is already certain: part of their collection is already for sale in Belgium, in the Pulp Magazine store, a hip Antwerp fashion boutique. They’re also talking to a shop in Tokyo.