Close to the Clothes: Materiality and Sophisticated Archaism in Alexander van Slobbe’s Design Practices

This article looks at the work of contemporary Dutch fashion designer Alexander van Slobbe (1959) and examines how, since the 1990s, his fashion practices have consistently and consciously put forward a unique reflection on questions related to materiality, sophisticated archaism, luxury, sustainability, and the place of the wearer in fashion design. This article focuses on recent cases that reveal the designer’s view on fashion and clothes. I will argue that Van Slobbe is not only a fashion designer but also a fashion theorist and show how his work, while often located within the legacy of Dutch Modernism, moves beyond any culturally fixed paradigm as is made clear by his design mentality, itself epitomized through the notion of ‘the hand’. My aim is to emphasize that the hand, in a direct or indirect manner, is the connective thread which links every aspect of his designs as well as the way he conceives of fashion. Van Slobbe’s fashion is not about creating clothes in order to think, but rather about thinking closely through the clothes themselves and ultimately rethinking the integrality of the design process in bringing ‘the hand of the maker’ and ‘the hand of the wearer’ into a close relationship.