Charlotte Simons
September 3, 2024
Thank you for having me! I am a multidisciplinary designer from the Netherlands, active in the fashion field. My work revolves around creating contexts for both contemporary and historical fashion. I often like to say that I work around the clothes rather than with the clothes. In contemporary settings, this involves collaborating with figures like Ronald van der Kemp to produce show videos and campaign visuals, contribute to set design, and handle music production. My historical fashion work seeks to bridge past and present by finding and presenting relevances that resonate today, usually through film, and sometimes AR and VR get involved as well.
For me, design differs from art in that it prioritizes the audience's experience over the designer's personal expression. A lot of my work is closely related to branding, where the priority lies in emotionally connecting with your audience rather than merely finding the purest expression of my inner self.
My fascination with fashion stems from its intimacy with the body and its role in personal expression. The inherent power of fashion to evoke strong emotional responses offers a strong platform for telling emotionally charged stories, whether set in contemporary times or drawn from historical contexts.
Originally, I come from a retail design background. I studied retail design and worked as a graphic designer for two different marketing and communication agencies. Early on, I realized that I really enjoyed immersing people in stories. Later, during my studies at Design Academy Eindhoven, my fascination with branding crystallized, and I was able to integrate it with fashion during my internship at Ronald van der Kemp. I now aim to bring the excitement of fashion to heritage objects in my recent work. By combining fashion with a rich historical context, I strive to create the ultimate fusion of telling stories of significant substance while still generating buzz and forging an emotional connection with the audience.
The essence of fashion lies in the balance between individual identity and communal belonging. Recently, we've seen a shift in consumer behavior, with people moving away from singular brand loyalty, influenced by designers frequently being shuffled around brands, like a deck of cards, thereby obscuring these brands’ unique identities. This has led to very fragmented and blurry brand identities. Moreover, the "ready-to-wear" collections often diverge significantly from the (haute couture) garments showcased on runways, focusing more on brand status than on design quality. This strategy makes these items appealing tools for social validation, encouraging consumers to mix and match different brands and styles without a deeper connection to the ethos of any.
I envision social media playing a transformative role in redefining these connections, creating new networks where emerging designers and subcultures can find each other. I do believe still in the fact that people won’t follow a singular brand ideology anymore, I mean, aren’t we all part of multiple Reddit groups? And I think it suits our day and age to have this social fluidity. I hope the democratization of fashion through the internet could further encourage this new cultural synthesis.
Ultimately, I am always fascinated by human behavior and how we function collectively. For my film "To Die For"; I wanted to explore the repetition in human behavior concerning beauty ideals and how the desire to belong to a certain group or adhere to specific practices can overpower our concern for health. In "To Die For"; I draw a parallel between the 19th-century poisonous pigment "arsenic green"; and our current use of plastics, which result in microplastics. What I particularly appreciate about comparing historical periods to the current time is that it makes history more relatable and easier to understand, while also providing people nowadays with a broader perspective on our current era. This dual approach enhances the relevance of both past and present.
I believe that history has often been taught in a very factual manner. I focus on understanding the reasons behind the facts—why things were done in a particular way. One of the worst things we can do with history is to exoticize it and suggest that we have advanced or evolved beyond it. This approach is particularly dangerous in a time of great polarization.
I strongly believe in adding more perspectives to our heritage, as history does not stem from a single perspective, and things are constantly being reinterpreted from contemporary viewpoints. 3D scanning offers an exceptional solution for this, as its goal is to capture objects without context or background. This allows anyone who wants to comment on a particular piece of heritage the opportunity to fully integrate the 3D scan into their narrative. Even by just changing the lighting (HDRI) with which a model is illuminated, you can tell a completely different story each time. I also believe in the value of photogrammetry or 3D scanning because it captures all the little imperfections that a piece of heritage has acquired, making it a true digital twin of the original.
Finessing-wise, I’m captivated by the interplay between tactility and usability. Is it possible to optimize a model to such an extent that it can be used for conservation practices - meaning that you can count all the threads - but can it at same time also be used by a storyteller who wants to incorporate the model into their specific VR scene? However, as I have minimal knowledge in CGI, the steps I take are usually small, but I hope they will have a lasting impact.
Without spoiling too much, I have been intrigued lately by the way fashion uses copies and replicas to cascade its designs all the way through multiple layers of society, and I think I found a historic parallel to this.
What really helped me and what gave "To Die For"; it’s traction is that it was able to create an eclipse of what I believed in and what the museum world was looking for. I would encourage anyone to try and find that balance between truly listening and believing in yourself, and being open-minded enough to integrate that with what is happening around you.
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[1]: Dreams of Blauw are any form of crystallised thought based on honest expression. Sometimes they linger a shade of blue in your after-image.
