The beautiful city of Maastricht in the Netherlands is always a delight to visit for its medieval architecture and its vibrant cultural scene, which includes FashionClash, an annual festival every November that’s a brilliant mashup of fashion, art, film and performance. When creative director and cofounder Branko Popovic launched FashionClash over 15 years ago to promote emerging design talent, his main objective was to create an event that was fully inclusive because traditional fashion weeks can feel intimidating. And, along with a keen and hard working team, he has certainly created a really unique annual event. The festival events are open to all, with free entrance or a nominal ticket price.
The FashionClash Festival is all about discovering and supporting talent and participants of the festival belong to a generation of designers and artists who explore and question the boundaries of their discipline. With their works, they move between fashion, social design, performing arts and visual arts. The annual festival is the result of a selection from various open calls and from projects initiated by FashionClash itself and developed in co-production with various organizations and makers.
For this year’s festival, over 100 designers and artists from more than 20 countries were given a platform to present their work to an international audience. More than 100 young people were actively involved in Fashion Makes Sense, FashionClash’s participation program, through workshops, co-creation projects or as performers. Spread over 13 locations, there were exhibitions, performances, workshops, lectures, films, a designer market, and more. Even the festival Afterparty was transformed into a showcase of fashion, dance and spoken word.
The Clash House
Design meets theatre at Clash House, a regular feature of the annual festival. And the shows, opened this year by Wim Hillenaar, the Mayor of Maastricht at St. Anne’s Church, certainly weren’t standard runway shows. The catwalk was built over the altar in the shape of a bridge, metaphorical for the various bridges or clashes that FashionClash is building between fashion, people, disciplines and society. The designers, supported by theater maker Nadîja Roza Broekhart and dancer and choreographer Laisvie Andrea Ochoa, explored alternative ways of making and presenting fashion. Participants included: Megan van Engelen, Julia Burak, SHIFT Studio, brzkna and Paula Dischinger.
Among the highlights of Clash House were I See You Seeing Me by fashiondesigner Katharina Spitz and poet/artist Manka Menga. Questions were asked about being a woman, the desire for rituals and the location of the physical body in space and time. The moving performance was shown again in a more intimate space later that weekend. With Human Herd, Paula Dischinger asks whether man is a herd animal and translates this into everyday human activities such as following each other, walking together and running. On Sunday morning the performance was repeated in a public space where the group of performers moved like a flock of birds across Plein 1992. Polish designer Julia Burak concluded the opening night with Ate and left no crumbs, a celebration of body diversity and a statement against prejudices about how overweight and obese people are perceived.
New Fashion Narratives:Â Exquisite Corps Exhibition
An exhibition at Bureau Europa showed the work of five fashion practitioners commissioned by the festival to collaborate on the concept of New Fashion Narratives. This year’s curatorial team included Chaewon Kong, Karime Salame, Katharina Spitz, Simon Marsiglia and Teresa Carvalheira, a group of fashion makers with diverse backgrounds and practices within and beyond the fashion landscape. Hongkai Li, Jiwoo Lee and Hankyul Jeong used dried food to embellish a very wearable collection of separates while upcycled earrings by 2mm made from found objects created standout displays.
FashionClash Film program
The fashion short film has become an established medium in which designers are presenting their brands and ideas. It is one of the more effective and sustainable ways to capture a fashion narrative and to reach a wide audience via online platforms and festival all over the globe. And the fashion film program has been a central part of FashionClash since day one. Shown at the historic Lumière Cinema, the program consisted of 31 films from different countries in the world, thus showing a very diverse range of perspectives, disciplines, cultures and stories.https://embedly.forbes.com/widgets/media.html?src=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fembed%2F1K_j1Aeem4U%3Fstart%3D7%26feature%3Doembed%26start%3D7&display_name=YouTube&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3D1K_j1Aeem4U&image=https%3A%2F%2Fi.ytimg.com%2Fvi%2F1K_j1Aeem4U%2Fhqdefault.jpg&type=text%2Fhtml&schema=youtube
There were three premieres of fashion films produced by FashionClash. In m i k, a film by Pablo Salvador Willemars, Klaar Straatman and Lianca van der Merwe, the story follows m i k on a journey through a world in which she encounters different characters who embody different forms of non-verbal communication. In A Breathe Moment, a film by Jodie Cranen, Leda Spiranec, Povilas Gegevicius and Hsin Min Chan, a group of workers are trapped in a vicious circle of labor; trying to take control of their own efforts within a system that is motionless. Purification, the film by Tobias Van Nieuwenhove, Coco Simons and Tyna Le, depicts a dystopian representation of the journey where present and future merge in a macro dynamic world. Five finalists were chosen with the FashionClash Festival 2024 Fashion Film Award worth 1000 euros going to Shame ( عxب ‘) by the French/Lebanese filmmaker and artist Hadi Moussally for his powerful exploration of the relationship between shame, self-expression and culture. The other finalists included: Tutu Academy by Hong Kong Ballet, celebrating the 45th anniversary of the institution; Lisa Konno for BLACK TEETH, Delia Simonetti for Dell’Altro and Sel Kofiga for Donkomi.
Next year’s festival
The 17th edition of Fashion Clash is scheduled for the weekend of 14-16 November 2025.
Where to stay
A former monastery and gothic church in center of the old town are now Kruisherenhotel, a luxury hotel with a great restaurant, Spencer’s. Part of a family owned group of three hotels in the area, this unique property is filled with contemporary art and oozes with character in each of its 60 guestrooms. For a more economical accommodation near the train station, the Town House hotel and Design Hotel are both comfortable options.
Credit: Forbes
