From their home base of Antwerp, An Vandevorst and Filip Arickx may be safely removed from fashion’s madding crowd, but that doesn’t keep them out of the loop. Far from it, in fact. This season, the married couple linked up with New York–based photographer Steven Sebring, whose multimedia studio contains a 360-degree camera rig, built for the creation of 3-D holographic fashion images (including an inaugural shoot for Vogue). “We had this idea of trying to do something that shows the movement in clothes, or how we can have the experience of a fashion show in another way,” Arickx said. “With this way of filming, we could achieve that same experience, and it’s even easy to share with people all over the world.”
One month ago, Arickx arrived on the Lower East Side with their Fall 2019 collection and found a creative soul mate. “With Steven, it was like we’d worked together for years,” he said. “He is from the same generation,” Vandevorst added, “but we’re both still anxious to work with these new technologies and have this evolution.” At their Paris presentation, the designers projected a video lookbook of their models leaping and freezing in midair, the 360-camera spinning around them.
To complement this dynamic footage, Vandevorst explained, they chose bright colors like chartreuse and violet that popped on-screen, working off a rough vision of a young American girl running around the countryside in her parents’ clothes. Think: a boxy blazer cut from bonded wool with invisible zippers up both arms to provide freedom of movement—“Papa’s suit coat,” Vandevorst called it. The high-waisted pleated skirts and long, wide-leg pants conveyed that same notion, as movement remained front of mind. Should the three choose to collaborate again next season, it will be fascinating to see what else might be best expressed in holographic form.
