FASHION CAFE GENEVA – ANNULATION
→ DuplexA collaborative project between HEAD MA Fashion Design X HEAD MA Interior Architecture and HEAD MA Workmaster
Coordination: Marlie Mul (Lecturer Work.Master programme HEAD Fine Arts Department)/ Aude Fellay (Lecturer HEAD Fashion Design Department)
FASHION CAFE is a spectacular one-day public event that aims to present and build on fashion’s potential and energy in its most accessible form.
FASHION CAFE is not just a random event, it sets out to find new ways of doing fashion, expanding its field and finding new spaces for fashion to happen, while emphasising its intuitive overlaps with art.
In FASHION CAFE fashion is used as a connecting tool. This will be a hands-on project, accessibly and horizontally organised with and amongst the students, opening up to fun, inventiveness and self-organisation as the motor for transversal and shared collaboration amongst our students at HEAD.
FASHION CAFE is originally an initiative of Marlie Mul in collaboration with Eilidh Nuala Duffy, a fashion journalist (Bog, Vogue) based in London. Marlie Mul is a visual artist and since September 2019, also Co-coordinator of the Work.Master MFA department at HEAD. She exhibits internationally and has a diverse professional background in amongst others fine arts, fashion, textile design, publishing and architecture. In Summer 2019 the first edition of FASHION CAFE was held at Kantine, a not-for-profit art space on the 6th floor of a glass office tower in the centre of Brussels.
FASHION CAFE came forth from the desire to present fashion in a more open, spontaneous and inclusive situation. Self-created outfits would be worn directly while having conversations in a beautiful environment created by artists and fashion makers in spirit of Fashion Café, an international establishment (New York, London, Abu Dhabi, Vienna, etc.) by the now defunct TV channel, from the late nineties, early noughties: Fashion TV. Fashion TV – the product of perhaps more deceivably decadent times than those of 2020 – was an indulgently glam, bling, marble, dirty martini, supermodel affair, and the enterprise Fashion Café was a non-virtual extension of this; a place where one could ‘meet and mingle with the Fashion Elite while enjoying a Fashion Beverage, and stimulate your fashion senses’.
Our Geneva FASHION CAFE adopts this framework in a slightly satirical way, but this time in a deeply Do-It-Yourself manner. Marlie Mul has now teamed up with Aude Fellay, who teaches in the HEAD Fashion Design Department, to initiate a like-minded event in Geneva.
This event – FASHION CAFE GENEVA – is completely adapted to the curricular context of HEAD and will be a transversal project between the HEAD MA Fashion and WorkMaster departments, and including constructions and appropriations by HEAD’s Interior Architecture department. In a space created for and by its users we will have live fashion making, dressing up ourselves and any other potential drop-in fashion models, walking on catwalks wearing outfits from HEAD’s Fashion Design Department, posing for fashion photographers in all-day photo-shoots, lounging around in beautiful self-created outfits and accessories, consuming fashionable drinks, reading the FASHION CAFE Journal produced especially for the day by students from Work.Master, shopping in the actual FASHION CAFE Boutique, and basking in the generally fashionable limelight that beams down on any participant or passer-by of this one-day event.