In contemporary times style has become the core of our everyday life. As art critic Ina Blom puts it:
“As style has ripened into an intrinsic and influential form of information, it seems that anything can and will be stylized, and the burdens of social reality, the attention to real material concerns, disappear behind ever more abstract conceptions of value”.



Anything can and will be stylized. Any attitude, any subculture, the un-glamour, the homeless, the unfashionable, the vulnerable.
Identity is no longer what I contain, mean, imply but how I design, give shape to my life. We construct our identities with all the images that are brought to us by television, movies and fashion magazines. We get more and more information, but it seems we experience less. We forget to look, we leaf through, like we do with fashion magazines.
Is it possible to look at things outside of the imposed media? To focus on something that is outside of the subject of the image? Maybe this is one of the reasons why we started to look at ‘men in black’. With the idea of making a fashion collection and show with a personal interest in black, the visible and the invisible we started our research. The original idea was to create a London and a Vilnius fashion collection. We first looked at dress, styles and situations within the context of London. We took photos and discussed what would be interesting to work on. In the collection was enough inspiration material for some fashionable collections, but we found that we were more interested in the non-spectacular-material: men in black, black suits.
So why focus on men in suits? In our research we tried to scrape down all the information that distracted us. For us the men in suits stand for a kind of invisibility. They are so much part of our public conscious that we forget about them, they have an invisible quality, they are the daily invisible. And besides that they are timeless. The suit as a blank medium that reveals other details, the otherness and above all can tell us something about time, locality, personality and behavior.
Little behaviour that is almost opposed to the intended use of the suit. Intended use of the suit is only to sit behind a desk and to walk straight. Improper use is for instance using the jacket to sit on.
Inattentive as opposed to attentive, constructed, designed, styled. Uninhibited as opposed to inhibited, conscious, aware, posed.
The body performs unconsciously a whole repertoire of personal and, or copied behavior. Within one suit and body we can refer to different stages, versions like “the clerkmen, the machomen, or the babymen”.
We wanted to translate that behavior in the suit and body into the form of a fashion collection- and show. For the fashion show we made a choreography of the photo material and found out while practicing with performers in suits, that it was not possible to keep the idea of ‘revealing the invisible’ alive; the dynamic between people, and other people in their clothes. People taking off and putting on their jackets, rolling up sleeves, putting things in pockets; uninhibited, unintended, undefined. The fashion show is already going on.
The visible invisible and the invisible visible can only in a natural way be shown by individuals who have a certain level of unawareness or inattentiveness towards fashion.

Sir Edward, King of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, who was more interested in his attire than in anything else, was somehow the inventor of the turnups. He rolled the bottoms of his trousers to prevent them from getting dirty while hunting. From that time on the turnups have become a style option that no longer has functionality.
Can dandysim be seen as the highest attainable level in fashion, that of the creative individual. Dandyism it is not about being fashionable but being fashion itself. It is not a suit of clothes walking about by itself. On the contrary, it is the particular way of wearing these clothes with a personal attitude which constitutes dandyism.
Dandyism can be seen as the perfection in performing oneself without being too aware or forced. Maybe the dandy is able to transgress a garment beyond shape and style. True dandies can stay almost invisible.
Onderzoek in samenwerking met Maaike Gottschal. Het onderzoek is gepresenteerd tijdens de Baltic Triennial en ging vooraf aan de piano recital door Julius Vischjager.