This is a fashion story that has nothing to do with trends, seasons or sales. It is a tale in which fabric is conjured into fantasy, where dolls come to life and people sometimes walk upside down. It begins with two boys growing up in provincial Dutch towns, unknown to one another, but sharing a dream of faraway beauty. Like all great fairytales, it contains threads both strange and magical – a lot like the clothing they would come to create.
When Viktor Horsting and Rolf Snoeren met at the Arnhem Academy of Art and Design in the late 1980s, it was the beginning of an extraordinary partnership that they would come to describe as "one brain in two bodies". As children, both had been transfixed by perfume and fashion advertisements, capturing a world Horsting says "had nothing to do with our everyday reality".
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Viktor&Rolf; exhibition comes to Melbourne
Viktor Horsting, Rolf Snoeren and their atelier staff prepare for their upcoming exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria.
In the 23 years since they started their ground-breaking Viktor&Rolf; fashion label, Horsting and Snoeren have dressed their models in all manner of make-believe: upside-down dresses; towering, Cubist-style "sculptures"; bedtime sleeping gowns with inbuilt pillows; and headwear plucked from the nearest wheat field. They've arranged black-clad figures into a living zen garden, carved discombobulating holes into tulle ball gowns, and encased one waif-like creature in nine layers of clothing weighing a whopping 70 kilograms.
The transformative vision glimpsed years before in those glamorous ads would go on to inform every aspect of the Viktor&Rolf; story – from the avant garde clothing to the wildly successful Flowerbomb perfume launched in 2005, and a book of fairytales published in 2011.
"Transformation, being different, is an important theme in everything we do," says Horsting. "It's an alternative to reality – a parallel universe."
In preparing their most recent collision of art and couture for this year's autumn/winter "Vagabonds" collection, the pair took meticulously made garments from earlier shows and ripped them apart. Fashionistas might well have wept, if not for the fact that what emerged was the most beautiful "recycled" clothing the world has ever seen: from haute couture carnage to happily ever after. What's more, says Horsting, all that chopping and ripping "was actually very nice". Liberating, even.
Unshackling fashion from all that has come before is something these serial iconoclasts have built their dreams on. Taking his lead from Picasso, Snoeren says "it's important to destroy before you can create … a lot of our work is about raising questions".
These questions, you should know, don't always have an answer. Inside the Amsterdam atelier that is now the centre of Viktor&Rolf;'s enchanted realm, I peer at one voluminous, multi-headed creation and ask how on earth fabric was made to do that. "It's a secret," says Horsting, laughing. Look as long and hard as you like, he might well have added. You'll never be able to figure it out.
When Viktor&Rolf;: Fashion Artists opens at the National Gallery of Victoria on October 21, Melburnians will have a rare opportunity to see these extraordinary creations up-close. The exhibition includes more than 40 works, ranging from the pair's first, punkish "Hyeres" outing, through to the nine-layered "Russian Doll" collection, the celebrated wedding dress commissioned by Holland's Princess Mabel in 2004, and the masterpiece-meets-fashion moment that was "Wearable Art". Usually, Snoeren says, fashion "passes in a few seconds", but here is a chance to gaze upon what is arguably the world's most inventive couture and see "how beautifully it has all been made".
The laborious craftsmanship that turns fabric into fantasy was something curator Thierry-Maxime Loriot was keen to highlight when he drew up his wish list of works for the show. The French-Canadian fashion curator, who wowed Melbourne with the Jean Paul Gaultier exhibition in 2014, points out how rare it is to see such "spectacular" garments up close. "It's easier to see a Picasso painting in a museum now than a Viktor&Rolf; dress," he says.
The NGV exhibition – which Loriot describes as "a nice story about friendship and how you can envisage a dream" – began with its own element of fairytale happenstance, via a mutual connection with singer Rufus Wainwright and a chance encounter in a Paris restaurant last year.
"I was having dinner at the counter alone," Loriot recalls. "For many years Rufus had been saying, 'You should meet Viktor and Rolf, and do a project together'… and then I see them coming in, and I go up to introduce myself. I say 'I am a friend of Rufus who did the Gaultier exhibition', and they said, 'Ah, finally'. I said, 'Do you want to do a project together', and they were like, 'Yes. When?' I was like, 'Now', and they were like, 'Perfect'. The stars were aligned."
Transformation, being different, is an important theme in everything we do.
The trio decided against a chronological retrospective, opting instead for a non-linear presentation of what Horsting calls "our most iconic" designs. While some are on loan from museums and private collections around the world, many of the exhibits come from the Viktor&Rolf; archive, housed in the stately Amsterdam atelier that started life as a mayoral residence in the late 1600s.
Inside one room of this grand canal-side mansion – along with the odd shipping container and a humble ironing board – these daringly original garments are gathered together on racks and mannequins, awaiting their Australian debut.
In one ingeniously constructed work from the 2015 autumn/winter "Wearable Art" collection, a Dutch masterpiece appears to have slipped off a wall of the Rijksmuseum and wrapped itself around a dressmaker's dummy. The painting's subject – a pale, powdered lady, lost to time – has been rewoven onto a modern-day canvas, her "frame" rebuilt out of fabric and staples: timber reborn as lapel and hemline.
Nearby, looking like the intoxicated remnants of some wild Cubist costume ball, are three oddball offerings from this year's spring/summer collection. The all-white "Performance of Sculptures" show saw a simple polo dress morph into ever-wilder eccentricities, swamping the models in oversized masks and exaggerated frills.
"Those two collections are probably the most literal in their references to painters or sculptors," says Horsting. "At the time we made those collections, we had just stopped doing ready to wear, and we wanted to express, well if we don't do ready to wear any more, what does fashion mean to us, and we thought, well it's couture, and we thought of the term 'Wearable Art'. In order to express that literally, we thought, how do you wear a painting? And with 'Performance of Sculptures', we thought, how do you combine clothes and sculpture, and how do you show that?"
As with every collection produced by this tirelessly inventive duo, these wearable artworks involved countless technical hurdles and hundreds of sewing hours.
"Sometimes the craftsmanship will be more clearly expressed, because it's a difficult shape, and sometimes the craftsmanship is hidden," says Horsting. "But there will always be a level of difficulty that our team will have to master."
Anyone who has ever struggled to sew a French seam or buttonhole will goggle at the sight of a large, defiant "NO" built into the bodice of one chic woollen coat, or the fabric flowers snaking upwards from the hemlines of last year's exuberant "Van Gogh Girls" collection.
Miranda Wallace, senior curator of international exhibition projects at the NGV, says Horsting and Snoeren are "more like sculptors" than fashion designers.
"So much couture looks ordinary when you look at what they're doing – they really do push the boundaries."
At the heart of this adventurism, she says, is a sense of duality about the pace of modern fashion. "They have this paradoxical thing in their work of two different times. They have this interest in historical costume, and things that aren't about the speed of the fashion industry – they are more reflective and romantic souls at heart, I think, and couture is one area of fashion where you can have 300 hours put into one dress and it's not based on this fast industry. But at the same time, they still display their work as part of fashion week … they love fashion, and they think it should be much more experimental and avant garde."
Capturing this sense of historical interplay, the exhibition will include 21 of the porcelain dolls that have become synonymous with the Viktor&Rolf; brand. Clad in sample looks from their various collections, these miniature models mimic the 17th-century fashion dolls that were an early form of advertising for European dressmakers. There will even be an animatronic version, whose quarter-hourly catwalk appearances will evoke the cuckoo clocks of old. "The doll is an automaton," says Horsting. "She will move like a small robot. It's a bit like the fashion system, performing every hour."
Snoeren says the dolls, which are as impeccably dressed as their life-sized counterparts, remain an important part of the Viktor&Rolf; story. "We keep on making porcelain dolls of our work," he says. "We like how contemporary fashion becomes historical. We make it look as if it has been there for centuries."
In another nod to history, the designers commissioned four tapestries for the exhibition, recreating key milestones, including their first magazine cover from 1993 and a promotional shot for the Flowerbomb perfume: fleeting moments woven into something more lasting.
"Fashion is there and then it's gone," says Snoeren. "We like in our work always to see how we can hold on to those moments. We once did a collection that was all dipped in silver because there is a custom here in Holland that when your baby grows up, you dip the baby shoes in silver to keep them forever. For us, the tapestries are the same."
Time can also be traced via a specially created wallpaper, printed in Melbourne out of thousands of sketches. Plastered across one room at the NGV, it reveals the pair's creative process in what Loriot likens to "a backstage pass".
And in another first for the Melbourne chapter of the Viktor&Rolf; story, a children's section will include assignments, inspirational messages and a chance to be photographed in high-fashion mode.
"What I really like is that there is this special kids' department," says Snoeren. "It will be Viktor&Rolf; explained for kids, with a special catalogue and special assignments that we created. It looks so nice. We just saw a little film that was created for children. It's very energising. It's so great that that's possible."
Inside the show's junior atelier, budding fashion designers will create their own accessories, inspired by images and catwalk footage from Viktor&Rolf;'s spectacularly theatrical shows. Dioramas capturing some of their signature looks will urge children to "wish upon a star" and "follow your own path".
"I think it's very necessary for the young generation to be exposed to stories like theirs," says Loriot. "To see that you can believe in your dreams and believe in your own creativity and do something fantastic with it."
Once upon a time in the Netherlands, two boys beheld a faraway world and dreamt of what might be. Who knows where the next story will begin?
Viktor&Rolf;: Fashion Artists is at NGV International, October 21-February 26, 2017. Viktor&Rolf; in Conversation with Thierry-Maxime Loriot, October 21, 6.30pm.
Lindy Percival travelled to Amsterdam courtesy of the NGV.