At the recently held Amsterdam International Fashion Week, Blend had a fun little conversation with Fred Farrow about the collection he did together with Britt Avelon Tan. Fred won the Frans Molenaar Prijs in 2010 with a collection he and Britt had coloured and painted with water soluble ink. As a follow-up each winner shows a glance of their world and inspirations in the consecutive year. Fred discribed the collection as ‘a Vajazzled underage girl, who sexed up her innocent wardrobe for Frisco’ (San Francisco). Fred and Britt’s preference to work with new materials, to create new silhouetes, working with silly and unusual inspirations and most of all having fun (!) reflects throughout this vivid collection.

“We were inspired by a new kind of subculture that is mainly found on internet, pictures and endless videos of cats. These silly images and video’s with easily over 60.000.000 hits are becoming the new heroes of todays youth. We took images of icons such as Invisible Bike Cat, Nyan Cat, I Can Haz Cheeseburger? Cat and many more, and portrayed them in a ‘PoeziePlaatje’ way.”

 
“These overly sweet and kitch images we loved in our youth started us on developing prints and a new embroidery technique we used for a sweater and a dress (final piece) — this took a million hours to make, as it requires to handstitch torn ribbons of fabric ( silk organza and mousseline) one by one, making it voluminous like a heavy knit, but light as a feather. For the San Fransisco feeling we started with grunge philosophy, adding knitted eco-friendly raffia, not just for the hats ( beanies/ rastafarie hats) but also for some clothes. We wanted this very summery/beach feeling for styling, grunge, and kitchy sweet at the same time. This resulted in a totally new and strange image, best showed with our nauseating Nyan Cat music. We are happy to add that most of the fabrics we used are Eco-friendly, and continue to strive to do so!” At the moment Fred farrow and Britt Avelon Tan are terribly busy with yet another assignment…

for further info:
Fred Farrow
Britt Avelon Tan

related feature:
Magnus Dekker gets Frans Molenaar Award 2011