FASHIONCLASH PRESENTS ITS MOST UNRULY EDITION YET

Maastricht is not the first city most people think of when it comes to experimental fashion, which is probably exactly why FASHIONCLASH has been able to spend eighteen years quietly turning it into one of the more interesting places in Europe to see what the next generation of designers is actually making, away from the commercial pressure that tends to flatten graduate work once it reaches the bigger fashion weeks. This year’s edition takes over venues across the city for three days in mid-November, with a programme that moves between runway shows and film screenings while leaving plenty of room for the kind of work that would struggle to find a stage anywhere else.

Things begin on the Friday evening in the Sphinxkwartier, a former industrial quarter that has become the festival’s natural centre of gravity, where the core exhibition New Fashion Narratives opens at Bureau Europa before a free show runs the length of the Sphinx Passage, featuring young designers alongside the Dutch studio Teigetje & Woelrat. The exhibition has been put together by four curators who developed its concept during a residency in April, and their working title of Fleshy, wobbly, slimy gives a fair sense of what to expect from a show built around work that leaks and mutates and refuses to settle into any neat category. Among the pieces on display, Aurore Montagner presents a collection she created with women held at Rennes Prison, who together imagined a wardrobe built around the idea of escape, while Johannes Hartmann has gone in the opposite direction entirely and dressed the street bins of Vienna as though they were mannequins.

The Saturday belongs to The CLASH House, the festival’s performance programme, which fills the vast Peutzhal at the old ENCI cement works with ten designers who have spent months being coached to present their collections as live performance rather than a conventional walk, with a €2,500 prize going to one of them at the end of the night. The afterparty that follows in the same building runs under the theme Childhood Fantasies, Surreal Realities, and guests are asked to come dressed as whatever person or creature they once dreamed of becoming, with their favourite plushy in tow.

Running alongside all of this, the Fashion Film Program at Lumière Cinema screens 44 short films from around the world across the weekend, and on the Thursday before the festival officially opens it shows The Designer Is Dead, the documentary about Miguel Adrover and the radical, politically charged mark he left on New York fashion around the turn of the millennium. The campaign imagery this year comes from Hashim Nasr, a Sudanese artist and photographer based in Alexandria who originally trained as a dentist and whose staged yet dreamlike photographs draw on African and Middle Eastern traditions to explore memory and displacement.

With so much spread across so many venues, the sheer size of the programme can make it hard to know where to look first, and some of the smaller presentations around the city risk getting lost behind the headline events. Even so, for anyone curious about where young fashion is heading once it steps outside the usual industry calendar, FASHIONCLASH remains one of the most generous and least predictable places to find out, with tickets on sale now and a good share of the programme free to attend.