Graduation Shows: HKU – Utrecht

Yesterday 25 students of the HKU (Hogeschool voor de kunsten Utrecht) presented their graduation collections. In a beautiful location, called Winkel van Sinkel, they all gave their own little fashion show. The event was named ‘Platform’, yet each student could give his/her collection it’s own name. But apart from the name, they also had to come up with a theme, a collection (of course), the styling, the make-up, the choreography and the music. So you’ll guess they’d been working on this for months.

All the hard work was definitely visible; we saw some great collections.

Let’s start with Mariko Ferrier. Her theme was ‘The beauty of the ugly truth’. Her models first walked on stage very slowly, but started to walk faster towards the end. Her clothes were a mix of beautiful and ugly details. She, for example used light transparent fabrics combined with heavy, thick woollen parts. Her pants, her jackets and her tops all had wholes in them. They were hanging together by thick threads of wool. We loved the dip-dying she used, yet the music was awful.

Then we had Barbara Langendijk. She called her collection ‘Me versus My identity’ and was inspired by the search of her own identity. Her models stepped on the runway in towering high shoes and wore eye-catching glasses. Barbara had used her own shadow in her designs, which therefore had very high shoulders. She came up with strange combinations of fabrics like velvet and very thin transparent ones. An item we very much liked, was her beige cape.

The presentation of Mark Stadman, a fashion communication student, really stood out. Mark, who named his collection ?Mark, took his inspiration from the boy-bands in the nineties. He came up with five totally different outfits to stress the individual characters of ‘his boy-band’. His models had studied strange movements and wore crazy wigs. Mark didn’t design a collection, yet he managed to portray a very clear fashion message.

Esther Vijftigschild used the life’s tale of her Grandmother’s skin as a starting point for her collection ‘The metaphor of skin’. Like your skin can tell the story of your life, Esther did that with her clothes. Her designs were a mix of light and heavy fabrics. They had accentuated shoulders and volume in strange places. The ends of the fabric were decorated with thick wool. The silhouette was long.

Roos Woudenberg designed a good collection of men’s clothes. Not only did the designs look very wearable, they were all made out of sustainable materials too. Shades like brown/deep red were combined with dark blue. Especially the coats looked strong. Hats off for Roos for this sustainable and fashionable collection.

Jan Boelo Drenth’s collection was (like his music) very Gothic. He designed everything in black from capes to trails and cowls. It felt dark and mysterious, like he intended it. Jan used many different fabrics and created lots of volume. His great passion for couture was visible is lots of small accents he’d put on his garments. The good thing about this collection was that it was cohesive and became more dramatic with each outfit appearing on the runway. The skirts and the trails became bigger with each look. That’s how a good collection works. Well done.