Fashion Machine 2015-16

HNI/Temporary Fashion Museum

September 2015 till May 201The upper floor of the Temporary Fashion Museum in Het Nieuwe Instituut in Rotterdam had been turned into Fashion Machine, a large installation, part of the exhibition Fashion Data, which showed the fight against the destructive reality of fashion industry.

Fashion designer Conny Groenewegen designed it and put it in motion and she did so in cooperation with graphic designer Rudy Guedj. He demonstrated on posters in clear lines what was going on in these spaces filled with volunteers and miles of fleece threads.

Fashion Data incorporates Fashion Machine: an installation by Conny Groenewegen in which she and her team cut up and re-work a typical leftover product of the fast fashion/clothing industry, the fleece sweater. Together with a large group of volunteers they cut up and ‘re-spun’ the fleeces onto giant spools and looped them onto huge knitting benches’ to demonstrate the scale of waste and the banality of the fleece jumper, which is largely undesired as a second-hand product and regularly finds its way into mattresses at the end of its lifecycle, or worse still, landfill. Conny makes thought-provoking statements about the role of designers in mass manufacturing for fast fashion.

Curator Fashion Data: José Teunissen

Graphic Design: Rudy Guedj

Exhibition Assistant: Verena Michels

Exhibition production: Babette Zijlstra

Special Thanks to: WereldWijven, Jolanda Branderhorst, Wieland Textiles, HKU fashion students, Wendy Cornelis

Video: Marit Geluk

Photography: Johannes Schwartz, Ralph Vaessen