ANKE JONGEJAN Making do and getting by Something I've been battling with ever since I started my studies is whether there's a way to escape the straightjacket that the world of fashion design encapsulates you in, almost from the first day. The final year of my studies seems the right time to switch from some subconscious resistance, to the real search for my own space in this fashion world full of its systems and rules. I've always felt that true beauty is in things that were created sort of by accident. Not for the purpose of being beautiful, anyway. For me it's in the things that are created with a function/for a purpose, with just the materials that are at hand, and a certain sense of aesthetics. Like one of those ramshackle houseboats, with walls added with whatever was available. I think you can feel that those things are created out of no other source than itself: they hold the greatest strength and beauty and offer the opportunity for the accident of serendipity. But how to translate this in clothing? How can this 'randomness' exist within the system of guidelines and rules that fashion is? How can something only be based on itself when fashion nowadays is almost always a rub off of history, or of some inspiring person or of an interesting image? Is there a place in this enclosed area that offers enough space and freedom to ask those questions? And then, if a 'margin' could be found within this world, and any innovation should take place, how can it be maintained? Just like an Autonomous Zone, that has to be nomadic in order not to become the system itself, the danger of the commercial embrace is always at hand for those people trying to operate independent of the system. This is nowhere clearer than in the field of fashion, where people revolting against the system and trying to overthrow it will usually be lovingly embraced by it. (And consequently suffocated, cut up in commercially understandable pieces and sold off to the masses.) I think nowhere the margin is claimed quicker by the mass than in fashion. I find myself looking for a margin, a counterculture; people who are trying to escape the system of guidelines and rules that society is and try to create a space in or outside it for themselves. I'm wondering whether and where this can still exist in an age known for its consumerism and in a country where most everything is decided. [email protected]

All Fashion Names Nora van den Berge Manon Giljam Anke Jongejan Wing-Yi Kong Anna Lindeman Judith van Valen Kim van de Veerdonk Anna Wonder