#Introducing: Menswear fashion designer Gösta von Platen, from ESMOD Berlin. Lookbook and fashion film for the Graduate collection: Bodily Encounter / Materia Wound. Photography by Polo Lindström Muller. Models are Jan Seevetal and Nikolas Brummer. Hair and make-up by Tony Lundström / Blossom Management. The fashion film is Created and directed by Gösta von Platen and Marcus Rönne. Music by Sean Alexander.
“Throughout one’s life we surround ourselves with material objects. We seek to build our own world through the things we choose to live with. It is a relationship we take for granted and mostly see as one-sided; we are the ones choosing our things. In my graduate collection I investigate our relationship to objects and how we live together with them. How they inspirer us, call us, affect our behaviour, touch us, react with our senses and transport our thoughts.
Through personal experiments and research I want to enter this inner universe as a different state of mind to see how it affects my own behaviour. It is a smooth space yet in constant movement, as a liquid pouring out of an emerging hole. Sensational as well as sexual, as a wound which does not heal yet does not bother you. Some specific materials origin in nature has an especially strong ability to generate intense and overwhelming experiences as well as calmness and balance. The research process consisted of three parts that together built the base for the collection. First of all the self-experiment taking place in my own home where I met my personal material world. Instead of seeing me as the only actor in the network of things surrounding me I let the objects themselves have as much influence as the I. After all, the body is itself only an object, but an object we cannot choose.
This was the belief of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, who meant that one could never separate mind from body. Instead of a dualistic living where my thoughts are disconnected from my physicality, they melt together to blur the border between inner and outer self. Instead I am only a part of an expansive network reaching out in a non-linear structure, connecting otherwise unreachable layers of depth in a constant process. A physical version of the rhizomes described by Deleuze and Guattari. Every material part of this network is just as much an actor, either it is non-human or human, as explained by Bruno Latour with his actor-network theory.
To further understand the relationship between person and material certain artists work was an important source. Joseph Beuys saw the world as a wound that he healed with his artistic practice. The materials he used in his performances and installation was his instruments in this process, charged with emotion and symbolic value. Mark Rothko’s big abstract paintings also pursue a feeling both overwhelming and calm. The paintings opens up a door to another dimension for the spectator which can transport both thought and body.
To capture this I approached the collection as an installation where the garments connect with each other. By seeing the collection as one entity I broke out the outfits and the garments from this landscape. This required to develop my own draping and construction techniques. The pattern of the jackets wraps around the body and extends outwards, as if the body has been caught in an abstract room. The prints that are done by hand with screen-printing reaches through the different looks and unifies the collection.
Today we have a world expanding on many different levels and with constantly increasing information where one easily looses sense of time, place and identity. In our digital era physical objects are perhaps more important than ever even though becoming seemingly less necessary. They are after all a link between our inner self and our surrounding environment, which we are still very dependent on.
Clothes are arguably the objects we keep closest to our body. We actively interact with them throughout our daily lives. They touch our skin and our senses as well as they visually help us to communicate with the outside world. Therefore clothes are also an interesting medium to process this project. To further embody the aim of this project I decided to approach the collection as an installation where the clothes create a space for the person(s) wearing them. The garments then become a link between the body, the material and the environment it is situated in. The collection calls for a search of a new type of spiritualism where one can continue a modern lifestyle in symbioses with our material reality to transcend our own materiality. A new type of living where communication between body, environment, nature and material is essential.” says Designer Gösta von Platen
Designer is Gösta von Platen / www.gostavonplaten.com / Instagram: @gosta_v_p
LOOK BOOK credits:
Photography by Polo Lindström Muller / www.cargocollective.com/polopolo / Instagram: @Poloparkpolo
Models are Jan Seevetal and Nikolas Brummer / Instagram: @fake_falsification and @nikolasbrummer
Hair and make-up by Tony Lundström / Blossom Management / Instagram: @tonytarkort
VIDEO credits:
Created and directed by Gösta von Platen and Marcus Rönne
Concept by Gösta von Platen
DOP by Marcus Rönne / www.marcusronne.com / Instagram: @marcusronne
Models are Jan Seevetal and Nikolas Brummer / Instagram: @fake_falsification and @nikolasbrummer
Hair and make-up by Tony Lundström / Blossom Management / Instagram: @tonytarkort
Music by Sean Alexander / www.soundcloud.com/seanac Instagram: @s.alexande_r
