`Medium´

The recipient of the 2009 MoMu Award was Alexandra Verschueren (°1988, Antwerp, Belgium), who presented `Medium´, the collection she had designed for her final degree project at the academy.

Both had to do with paper.

Demand recreates everyday objects and interiors from paper and then photographs them, while the YouTube film showed a young couple inspecting a house that gradually turns out to be built of paper. In both cases, paper is a strong medium in exposing the artificiality in normal life.

That is what I hoped to put into my collection by working with paper and with fabrics that refer to paper.

Paper is moreover the first material for every designer – your first sketches are on paper and you make your patterns from paper.

In terms of technique and form, I found inspiration in Japanese Origami architecture and tried to incorporate different folding techniques in my silhouettes.

For the colours and prints, I referred to the crude, first strokes in children's drawings, to marks on blotting paper, chalkboard, and so on.

In short, I play with the tension between textiles and paper. I play with form. What you see is not always what you get."

In 2010, Alexandra Verschueren won the Grand Prix du Jury L’Oréal Professionnel at the Festival International de Mode et de Photographie à Hyères. In 2015, she obtained a Doctorate in the Arts from the University of Antwerp with a study entitled `Doing Fashion Design: Autoethnographic Reflections in Dialogue with Architecture´, written while she designed, produced, and marketed six collections of her own. She now lives and works in Vancouver, Canada.

www.alexandraverschueren.com