The most viral designer of London Fashion Week – WWD

Dirk Vaessen never expected his graduate collection to go viral on TikTok hours after the London College of Fashion’s Master of Arts graduate show on the first day of London Fashion Week.

“I thought, ‘Okay. My job is a little weird or whatever. I think it will turn heads but I didn’t expect it to be so massive,” Vaessen said via Zoom from his home near Arsenal in north London.

Views of the #dirkvaessen hashtag, along with videos showing his spectacular wooden shoes descending the catwalk, hovered around 22.1 million at press time. This figure exceeds by 7.5 million the total views of the hashtag #richardquinn, which was one of the most viral brands during the last London Fashion Week, which ended on February 22.

The 26-year-old Dutch designer, who has been interested in shoemaking since he was 15 because “I wanted to wear heels, but there weren’t that many heels in my size,” said the idea for his master’s graduate collection was beyond Shoes. .

“The shoes are not there to be shoes, but rather as a tool that changes your posture. He was based on the concept that form follows function. So I removed all the unnecessary things from the shoes.

“I am a shoemaker. I know how to make proper shoes. This collection for me was a very interesting new process. I used completely different techniques with milling, laser cutting, and water jet cutting. That’s why they look so abstract,” explained Vaessen, who hails from Arnhem.

He added that these shoes were originally made for his alter ego, Brave Hendrik, who lives in the 2070s. The title of his graduate collection is “Brave Hendrik’s New Identities.”

“It is a world where you no longer have anything and where you only have your body, and how do you identify yourself if you have nothing? So you have to identify yourself through your posture. And that’s why I used to make these shoes for myself because I really had to research how I wanted to do something with my body,” she said.

“Brave Hendrik in Dutch means a person who sticks to the rules and will never step out of line. But in English, the word brave means courage and heroism… It just makes you brave to get out of those rules of society. That’s why his name comes to mind. Also, Hendrik is my name on my passport,” he added.

When asked why he chose wood as his main material, Vaessen said it didn’t occur to him at first that it was a nod to his Dutch heritage, even though the country’s most famous shoes, clogs, are made from wood.

“It’s quite amusing to see my heritage creep into my work. The choice of materials had to do with functionality. I needed something strong but light. That’s why I worked with aluminum, wood and leather,” he said.

A look at Dirk Vaessen's graduate collection

A look at Dirk Vaessen’s graduate collection
James Reese/Courtesy

To ensure the models could comfortably walk the runway, Vaessen practiced on them, eventually becoming a model for their lineup.

“The shoes really ask you to adapt and work with the shoes instead of the shoes working with you. I always ask my models if they are comfortable. If not, we will find another way. That’s why I was also walking on one of the shoes because those were the most complicated. I was like, ‘OK, this is about my alter ego. If I’m pushing people down the catwalk with difficult steps, maybe I should be a part of that too,” she said.

Before attending London College of Fashion, Vaessen earned a bachelor’s degree in product design from ArtEZ University of the Arts, where he also served as a professor of footwear development after graduating in 2019 until last December.

Following the viral debut, the designer said he wants to continue creating conceptual works in the Netherlands, rather than London.

“I don’t see myself as a ‘fashion’ fashion designer. I’m more like a narrator. I don’t just do it through footwear, but also through masks and through self-inflating objects. I think I’ll go further with the concept I’m working on right now, and then see how I can also change posture through other things around the human body and create shoes along the way,” Vaessen said.

Source: wwd.com