Introductory Essay for MJKVDL 2021

Published by Chateau International, Summer 2021

I wrote the introduction to MJKVDL 2021—an anti-lookbook of sorts—which features photography by Rick Pushinksy charting designer Mark Jan Krayenhoff van de Leur’s unique approach to garment making and his provocations to traditional processes of tailoring. When I first met Mark a couple of years ago in Berlin, I was completely taken by his highly systematic designs, which begin from one core concept and result in such complex, visually-distinctive outcomes.

As I write in the essay: “An opening questioning of norms, commitment to materials, and holistic thinking combine to form Mark’s singular queering of modernism, at once true to its egalitarian mission and resistant to prescriptive codification... Making, stitching, constructing, designing, wearing—these acts have the power to make fashion an intensely personal undertaking, one that goes beyond trends and into something meaningful, serious, and self defining, an endless variation of a theme.”

You can read an edited republication of my text over at Elephant magazine. Or you can purchase the zine via its publisher Chateau International.

Credits:

Design by David Hitner (A Common Purpose) and Kerry Williams

Photography by Rick Pushinksy

Colour grading work by James Midwinter

Editing by Lillian Wilkie (Chateau International)