Temporary Fashion MuseumTemporary Fashion Museum

Designer Pauline van Dongen has been fascinated by the human body since childhood. Another of her fascinations is materials, which she experimented with extensively during her fashion studies at the ArtEZ University of the Arts in Arnhem. 'I've been explerimenting for as long as I can remember,' she says. 'During my time at fashion school, the application of technology in fashion was not such an obvious area of study, so I spent a lot of time developing new materials. When I made my first 3D-printed shoe during my master's course, I was sold.'

After graduating, Van Dongen initially opted for the 'old-fashioned' fashion system: creating, showing and selling two collections a year. After having a showroom in Paris for a while, she realised that this way of working did not chime with her vision.

'I think that if you work in one of the most polluting industries, you have to work in a conscious way. I couldn't see myself making two or perhaps even more collections each year.'

Van Dongen decided to work instead on a project basis and to create partnerships with various companies, research institutes, programmers, etc. 'The aim of these partnerships is to inject new values into fashion. I try to go against the trend of mass-produced clothing as disposable items.'

And not without success. Her Wearable Solar Dress, a dress with solar cells, earned her a place among the three finalists of the SXSW Accelerator Award. She has designed a bespoke dress and 3D-printed shoes for Jet Bussemaker, Minister for Education, Culture and Science, and has a successful, growing studio where she works on her latest innovations with a staff of ten. Van Dongen: 'Working on a project basis suits me because it's broad and diverse. I don't like working for a long time on the same thing. This way constantly enables new approaches; it is enormously dynamic.'

Through working with technology, Van Dongen has broadened her scope beyond fashion to sportswear and activewear and even into the medical field. Nonetheless, she thinks it's important to stay in contact with fashion because, as she says: 'fashion is a powerful medium. Because it is so close to our skin, I think it's interesting to integrate technology, thus giving a new significance to clothing and the way we experience our environment through what we wear.' In order to stay in contact with the fashion world, Van Dongen initiates projects with textile manufacturers and fashion companies. For example, she is currently developing a nano-coating in collaboration with an Italian denim manufacturer. But what are the benefits of working with technology?

Van Dongen: 'On the one hand, from a design perspective, technology establishes limitations and you have to see how you can translate those limitations into possibilities. But at the same time technology poses challenges that create possibilities in design that you wouldn't otherwise have discovered. It's that interaction that I'm constantly searching for.'

The common thread that runs through View on Fashion V - _Body Informs Material Informs Body _is Van Dongen's long-term experimentation with and quest for a certain dynamism in materials. 'If we look at the world around us, we see that everything is becoming smarter, more flexible and more fluid. And I believe that fashion also has to respond to that. That can be done through technology - through programming - or by adapting materials. That is actually the analogue variant of what I do with programming.' For example, for her Oloid collection in 2014, Van Dongen developed a fabric through laser cutting. The pattern in the fabric changes as the wearer moves. It is the interaction between designer and material and also between the design and the wearer that Van Dongen finds so fascinating. But she goes a step further: she believes that technology can be used to create forms that fit the body perfectly.

'We can use programming to make bespoke clothing. We can return to how tailors worked in the past, which is something that has become unaffordable.'

An important aspect of her work, which is explored fully in her presentation in the Temporary Fashion Museum, is the process. Van Dongen: 'Because my work is so experimental, you don't know what you're going to encounter. You have to be very flexible. You can't have a fixed idea or design: it forms itself during the process. I have to continuously explore the body and test everything, then adapt it and test it again.' It is a process of trial and error, with the aim of changing the world that surrounds our bodies.

Mehtap Gungormez

See also the Fashion Data publication, with more information on Pauline van Dongen as well as other Dutch designers, and the essay 'Cybercouture: Transformations of Body and Identity' by Anneke Smelik, including references to the work of Pauline van Dongen.