Filed under: Design,Fashion by Orangemaster @ 5:59 pm
Dutch design duo Viktor Horsting and Rolf Snoeren (aka Viktor & Rolf) have recently presented their spring-summer couture collection at Paris Fashion Week, featuring highly ‘instagrammable’ dresses.
The bright coloured tule dresses boast texts that read ‘I’m not shy I just don’t like you’, ‘Go to hell’ and ‘Go fuck yourself’, the later with each word on a colourful candy hart.The ‘weed’ dress shown above matches the colours of many of the tourist shops in downtown Amsterdam.
Fun fact: eight kilometres of tule were used to make the dresses.
After a decade of fighting in court with American shoe company Converse over ‘fake’ All-Stars shoes, Dutch company Sporttrading Holland is now awaiting about 100 million euro in compensation. Just the lawyers cost easily 2 million euro, according to the Dutch company.
In 2009, Sporttrading Holland went bankrupt over Converse’s decision to sue them for selling similar shoes. Amusingly enough, their shoes were made at the same place that Converse’s shoes were made and were even distributed by the same distributor.
The Dutch company managed to rise from the ashes, but now it will have the chance to continue the way it should have in the first place instead of being ‘portrayed as a bunch of criminals’. Dutch distributor of Converse shoes Kesbo Sport hasn’t said anything in the media as we write this.
Amsterdam-based Dutch fashion designer Iris van Herpen has created a series of dresses that replicate the feathers and soundwave patterns of birds in flight, which was presented a few days ago at Le Trianon, Paris for the Paris Haute Couture fashion week.
To go along with them, Lonneke Gordijn and Ralph Nauta of Amsterdam’s Studio Drift had an installation of moving glass tubes that also capture the motion of birds in flight. Inspired by Studio Drift, Van Herpen also used chronophotography, a Victorian photographic technique that captures movement in several frames of print.
While the score was 1-1 at half time for German-owned Dutch shoe chain Van Haren that had received advice from top experts that they would most probably win their case against French brand Louboutin with their trademarked red-lacquered sole, Van Haren has now lost their case at the European Court of Justice, making it a 2-1 victory for Louboutin.
A few years ago, German-owned Dutch shoe chain Van Haren was selling red-soled shoes that were very similar to Louboutin’s iconic high heels. Louboutin was not amused and took Van Haren to court. The European Court received advice from their top experts that ‘you can’t trademark a colour if it stops the competition from making wares with the same functionality, especially combined with the form’, and most folks thought that’s the way the ruling would go, but it didn’t.
Yesterday, judges rejected the official advice of their own top lawyer who said in February that the red soles could not be trademarked. Louboutin has faced a series of legal battles over its distinctive soles. A Paris appeals court in May ruled against the French shoe company Kesslord after it sold red-bottomed shoes and ordered it to pay 7,500 euro in damages to Louboutin.
Filed under: Design,Fashion by Orangemaster @ 12:47 pm
For her graduation project at the Willem de Kooning Academy in Rotterdam, Corlieske Visser has made shawls with interactive prints featuring audio patterns of her father’s bouts of swearing caused by his Tourette’s.
To create the shawls, Visser sat down with her father in a recording studio for two and a half hours. The sound waves of the recordings were transformed into images and eventually abstract prints (Dutch), which were then linked to the Dutch augmented reality app Layar. You can scan the prints using Layar and hear what Visser’s father had to say. The shawls are for sale, and 15% of the profits go to the Dutch Gilles de la Tourette Foundation.
Names after French physician Gilles de la Tourette who coined the syndrome, Tourette’s is often made fun of and not taken seriously. Part of Visser’s goal with her shawls is to draw attention to some of the positive aspects of Tourette’s. Visser explains that swearing puts people off and because of this, people with Tourette’s like her father are seen as crazy or anti-social. However, Visser’s father is also very good at imitating sounds, which shows a positive side of the syndrome.
A few years ago German-owned Dutch shoe chain Van Haren was selling what appeared to be a nod to French brand Louboutin’s high heels, with their trademarked red-lacquered sole. Louboutin picked up on that and took Van Haren to court, and Van Haren lost.
The basic story was that the colour of the sole and the Louboutin brand were difficult to see separately because they used it on all their shoes. Even though a pair of Louboutins can cost up to a couple of months’ rent, the ones Van Haren sold cost 40 euro, but even though there was no comparison, it was all about the sole.
Van Haren decided to duke it out in the European Court, which received advice from their top experts that ‘you can’t trademark a colour if it stops the competition from making wares with the same functionality, especially combined with the form’. And usually the European Court sides with their advisors.
The Deltapark Neeltje Jans, a Dutch theme park near the Delta Works, is currently hosting the Healthy Seas Fashion Exhibition, featuring fashion created by Greek students from waste found in the sea.
The exhibition tells the “journey from waste to wear, the problem of ghost nets, recycling, circular economy and see what fashion design students created from the recycled fishing nets”.
The Netherlands is home to the Healthy Seas organisation, and the combination of the Neeltje Jans and Delta Works gives the exhibition an additional dimension, according to them, as they also claim that 10 percent of the waste found in water is fish nets, which explains the fish net fashion.
Find out more about how it all came about (in Greek with English subtitles):
Dutch designer Pauline van Dongen, who designed the full solar jacket for Wadden Sea walkers and a few other items, has now introduced the FysioPal undershirt, designed to correct bad upper-body posture by alerting the wearer when they are slouching, which helps correct their posture.
The top, which contains sensors that send information to a smartphone, measures the position of the neck, shoulders and back. The measurements are then sent to an app, which visualises the data and assesses the wearer’s overall posture. If it it detects slouching, the top will softly vibrate, alerting the wearer to change their posture.
It’s the modern-day version of having your parents tell you to stop slouching, but way cooler.
The windmills of the Zaanse Schans near Zaandam are the backdrop to a fashion collection presentation made by Mexican brand Liverpool. If that sentence didn’t have enough cultural references in it for you, the model featured is Portuguese, the first shot of the video is of Amsterdam, not Zaandam, and there are Frisian flag clogs as well, try to spot them.
Filed under: Fashion,Music by Branko Collin @ 11:57 pm
At first it seemed a joke to Bravour, a shanty choir from Woerden. When the Dutch police introduced a new uniform in 2014, it turned out to be the spitting image of the choir’s uniform, dark blue with broad yellow bands across the chest.
“We’ve suddenly gained tens of thousands of new members”, the choir’s chair person Ad de Goey quipped in Algemeen Dagblad that year. “The local police also thinks it’s funny. Well, they’re all welcome to join as far as I am concerned.”
The shanty choir were all good sports about it. Not only did they come up with a new uniform, but on 26 February 2016 they invited the police choir from Gelderland to the Cross Church in Woerden for a joint performance. As Joe Cocker’s You Can Leave Your Hat On was played over the tannoy, Bravour members performed a striptease in which they tore off their old uniforms, revealing the new uniforms underneath. From now on the shanty choir will perform in dark blue with a broad, light blue wave.
At first it seemed a joke to Bravour, a shanty choir from Woerden. When the Dutch police introduced a new uniform in 2014, it turned out to be 