Grow Up Or Grow Home

These days I don’t wear a lot of colour and print.

When we moved house I had to be completely ruthless and purge any clothing that I didn’t completely love or didn’t get worn regularly. Once I started the purge I realised how attached I was to my core wardrobe - the leather, the band t-shirts, the copious amount of black - and not much else. The coloured pieces I have kept I absolutely love. Everything else was garnish in my wardrobe. Now, when I buy something coloured or patterned it has to be something I know I’ll wear a lot.

However, that doesn’t mean to say I don’t still appreciate colour because I most certainly do. And if I had access to very conceptual pieces that were brightly coloured I’d absolutely wear them.

Rena Jansen is a young Dutch designer currently in her final year of the bachelor Fashion and Design at the University of the Arts Utrecht. Her work is colour and pattern at it’s most joyous. Her work is filled with youthful narrative about growing up and the challenges of fitting in and finding yourself.

ado less sense

“The years between being a child and being an adult is a time of many changes: your body grows, your emotions get more intense, unwritten social rules get rewritten and society starts expecting things of you. It happens all at once, and you don’t have control over it and your questions don’t get answered. When reality gets so confusing, wouldn’t you rather just remain a child for as long as possible? That’s what 14-year-old me thought. I covered myself in hundreds of rainbow-colored accessories and wore a pacifier around my neck with pride, while simultaneously hiding underneath my oversized tees and my fringe. My appearance became a parody of that of a child, and I used it to rebel against the expectations of a girl in puberty; desperately wanting to become older. Why don’t some of us want to grow up? Are we growing up too fast? With this project I dove deep into my past and tried to uncover the reasons behind my behaviour and that of others like me.”

Loonatiek

“Loonatiek is a group project commissioned by the Imagine Film Festival.
The collection is based on Stanley Kubric’s “A Clockwork Orange” and “The Shining”. These surreal films have deeper meanings hidden in every detail. The misplaces objects, eerie music and strange interactions left us intrigued and inspired. We experimented with misplacing body parts and items of clothing on the body. We digitally filled in certain parts of photos to play with flatness and dimension. This led to multiple textile and print designs. We also played around with shapes, volume, genderroles and distorted angles. After three months of hard work, we presented our collection of 6 looks in a performance and an installation in the beautifull EYE film museum in Amsterdam.”

Y So Serious

“My generation, best known as Gen Y or the Millennials, is often labelled as being entitled, lazy and childish. We tend to keep living at our parents’ house for as long as possible and we have trouble growing up and choosing a career. But we can’t live like this forever: soon the older generations will retire, and all the responsibility will be on us. So what will it be like when these child-at-hearts enter the professional world and get a boring desk job? This collection is a visualisation of this near future. I used the grey suit jacket as an archetype for adulthood and mixed that together with shapes and colours inspired by my own drawings as a child. By disregarding how a suit should be worn and by constructing items as if a child drew the patterns, I strived to create a humorous yet eerie feeling. All the fabrics used in this collection are overstock, including the PVC which is leftover material from a bouncy house factory. In this collection I embody the childhood nostalgia millennial’s are known for, while acknowledging that this is not a sustainable state. Welcome to our future!”