Report by Branko Popovic
The annual Fashion Show of the Gerrit Rietveld Academie once again demonstrated why the department continues to occupy a distinct position within Dutch fashion education. Presented at De Hallen Studio, the show brought together the work of graduating students alongside contributions from first-year students.
This year’s edition was framed by a series of questions rather than statements. When is a fashion show public? Who gets to witness it? Fashion shows traditionally operate behind closed doors, relying on immense amounts of labour while remaining accessible only to a select audience. The Rietveld show challenged these conventions by positioning itself somewhere between performance, exhibition and public life. Rather than presenting fashion as a finished commodity destined for the street, it explored how fashion already emerges from the street, from communities, rituals, memories and bodies.
The result was a presentation that felt playful and unpretentious. While many graduation shows can become overburdened by conceptual ambitions, the performances here succeeded because of their clarity of gesture. The work often operated through simple yet effective performative acts, allowing the narratives and materials to speak without excessive spectacle.
Taken together, the Class of 2026 presented a coherent set of concerns. The collections frequently moved between the personal and the collective, using fashion as a tool to process identity, memory, heritage, gender and bodily experience. Rather than attempting to solve social issues or overwhelm audiences with theoretical frameworks, the designers worked through specific lived experiences. Rituals of coming-of-age, family histories, sensory sensitivities, archival fragments, queer fantasies and bodily autonomy became starting points for broader reflections on how we inhabit the world.
The show’s central proposition, questioning where fashion happens and who it belongs to, felt relevant. By collapsing distinctions between performer and audience, costume and clothing, personal story and public presentation, the Gerrit Rietveld Academie demonstrated that fashion can be a space for critical inquiry without losing its emotional resonance.
Rituals of Transformation
The show opened with promise with Mikołaj Szwaja’s Funeral of My Childhood unfolded as a collective ritual featuring musicians and a choir dressed entirely in black. Rather than mourning, the performance carried a sense of optimism. Framed as a symbolic burial of childhood, it marked a transition into adulthood, artistic practice and self-definition. The ceremonial atmosphere immediately set the tone for a show.
Many of the graduating students approached fashion as a vehicle for personal narratives, often rooted in memory, family history or embodied experience.
The closing performance by Feliz Aaliyah Sánchez Buitrago provided an energetic counterpart to the opening ritual. Her project, World of Feliz, culminated in a joyful dance performance accompanied by 1990s R&B tracks. Drawing from Colombian heritage, spiritual references, family memories and the influence of artists such as Aaliyah, the work transformed the runway into a celebration of resilience, ancestry and healing.
Family members appear throughout her practice not merely as subjects but as collaborators and sources of inspiration. Through an intuitive working process based on existing materials, Sánchez Buitrago constructed a world where different cultural references merged into a vibrant and emotional landscape.
Clothing as Sensory Experience
A notable thread running through several collections was a focus on the body as a site of sensory experience rather than idealised appearance.
Evelina Nanny Eliasson’s All I Can Take emerged from a deeply personal exploration of sensory hypersensitivity. Beginning with the discomfort of clothing labels, tight waistbands and stiff fabrics, she transformed second-hand garments into pieces designed around bodily comfort. Her collection questioned conventional assumptions about fit and wearability. Loose silhouettes could feel intimate; close-fitting garments could become almost imperceptible. Rather than fashion as visual spectacle, Eliasson proposed fashion as a negotiation between body, material and sensation.
Similarly, Estefania Escalona Millano’s Skin Potions centred on embodied knowledge and sensory relationships. Her performance stood out in its performance dramaturgy, creating intimacy, and getting close tot he overall questions posed. What distinguished an audience from a passerby? Can the show be a snippet of life and be embedded in it?
Celebrating the diversity of female bodies, the work investigated connections between human beings and their ecosystems. Natural elements such as seawater became active collaborators in the making process, generating garments and gestures that felt ritualistic. Pleasure, intuition and material responsiveness form the core of the method that treats fashion as a living exchange rather than a static object.
Archives, Fantasy and Reclamation
Some graduates used fashion to reimagine inherited histories and cultural narratives.
For Johanne Fage-Larsen, dressing is fundamentally performative. In The Pieces That Escaped the Archive, she transformed fragments of historical garments, antique fabrics and eighteenth- and nineteenth-century documents into fragile paper costumes. The collection blurred the boundaries between fashion, costume and archival practice. By elevating discarded materials and forgotten fragments, Fage-Larsen questioned prevailing notions of value and beauty while embracing dressing-up as a artistic method.
Meanwhile, Joris Janssen’s SO OBSESSED approached fashion through queer culture and camp aesthetics. Starting from a fascination with diva worship, Janssen examined why iconic female performers have occupied such a central place within queer communities. His conclusion, that divas provide an escape from heteronormative culture through fantasy and camp, formed the basis for a collection that reimagined familiar masculine stereotypes.
Through upcycling, archetypes such as preppy boys and tracksuit-wearing lads were absorbed into elaborate diva fantasies. The collection was playful, humorous and politically sharp, asking questions such as: What if a tracksuit bro joined a girl group? What if fraternity boys had to navigate wardrobe malfunctions usually reserved for female pop stars? Instead of trejecting mainstream masculinity, Janssen transformed it through camp exaggeration and affection.
Questioning the Gaze
Questions around representation, gender and bodily autonomy surfaced throughout the show.
Simone Winder’s Buttscrunched tackled the increasingly blurred boundaries between sportswear, shapewear and the sexualisation of women’s bodies. Inspired by observations in gym culture, Winder questioned why contemporary athletic wear often accentuates the same body parts historically targeted by the heterosexual male gaze.Her collection sought to reclaim agency over these representations. By examining the design history of women’s sportswear, she challenged assumptions about performance clothing and exposed the ways in which erotic codes have become embedded within garments marketed as functional. The result is both critical and accessible, addressing a highly visible contemporary phenomenon.
Photography: Branko Popovic
