Henrik Vibskov showed his combined men’s and women’s Fall 2018 collections a few weeks ago in Paris. Yesterday, he stood inside a small booth at Copenhagen’s fashion trade show talking about an art piece by Jan Fabre that he saw in Japan last summer and the runway performance piece he produced that included naked people lying on the floor underneath a taut rubbery film and others above them manually controlling mops to guide their movements. Vibskov is not a trade show guy. The designer needs a stage—some empty space to express his deep thoughts about the intersection of art and fashion. During our conversation, he rarely pointed to the clothes on the racks, instead opting to pull up a video of the Paris show and explain what the Fabre art and the naked robots and, yes, the clothes, too, were about: Our society’s obsession with measurement in all its forms. “We measure ourselves: size, height, distance, amount, time, intelligence, popularity, and even feelings,” Vibskov said. “If we want to change what we care about, shouldn’t we change what we measure?”
The naked bodies were a “visualization on how people become the machine controlled by measurements.” A few cardigans and sweaters were decorated with grids and long lines like those found on measuring tape, and numbers popped up on fun scarves and socks, but the majority of the pieces stood out on their own without explanation. His quilted outerwear and tasseled jackets were beautifully made, as were the oversize denim items. Even if you can’t quite pinpoint the through-line all the time, Vibskov’s work leaves an impression, which is certainly a good measure of success.
