Garnir2, a fashion design tandem composed of Klara Rešetič and Gašper Gajšek, enjoyed major success at this year’s KO-LAB, the final fashion show for students of textile and clothing design at the Department of Textiles, Graphics and Design of the UL Faculty of Natural Sciences and Engineering, winning first prize. This year’s KO-LAB presented collaboration as a fruitful basis for developing high fashion in connections between people inside and outside the realm of fashion. The two designers got involved in this realm through a mutual synergy, defined by a carefully considered and original vision, a confident toying with materials and an intertextual approach to fashion design, an interweaving of fashion with references from various other fields of culture.
This becomes entirely clear in the series of creations entitled Countess de Castiglione Goes to the Hospital. This is an eclectic, decadent and particularly witty fashion narrative, with centre stage taken by the life of Olivia Oldoini, the famous Italian beauty, the mistress of Napoleon III who used her beauty and vanity in the patriotic service of Italy. The controversial figure of the “divine countess”, so far removed from the political correctness of our time, becomes the starting point for nine creations that present her to us in the moment of unravelling, in which the Countess armours herself even more firmly with her fortitude and dignity.
The garments, full of irony, humour and an infectious charm, waver between the sculptural and prosthetic, they record tragicomically the fragility of human fate and the volatility of the moment, but at the same time they serve as a tribute to the unbreakability of the human spirit. The fact that the garments were worn for their ‘premiere’ by their creators indicates that this is a very direct articulation of an artistic credo about the perseverance of the creative spirit, despite human fragility, or about the power of creation motivated precisely by an awareness of the ephemerality of everything we idolise. A testament to this is the extraordinary tenderness, at times even a singular awkwardness, in the creations of Gašper Gajšek and Klara Rešetič, which leaves nothing out in its imaginative brilliance.
Students: Klara Rešetič, Gašper Gajšek
Mentors: prof. Almira Sadar, assist. Petja Zorec
MGBS Curator: Vladimir Vidmar
Production: Faculty of Natural Sciences and Engineering, University of Ljubljana
