VANITAS_21 / a Trend Book concept (Master-of-Arts Thesis)

VANITAS_21 – a Trend Book concept
Master of Arts_Thesis (07/2009)

A visual volume celebrating The Fragile Beauty of Life & a quest for the vanitas motifs of today

Welcome to vanitas_21,
– a volume full of inspirations to ignite creative processes from the rich fields of fashion & textile design, art and culture.
The content of this book is deeply rooted in the visual world surrounding us every day.
Vanitas_21 wants to provide you with new and surprising perspectives on the familiar.
It’s an answer on the new quest for meaning in design and consumer culture.
vanitas_21 is a place where form & content come together.
Design concepts that trigger emotional interaction,
– a process where personal meaning can develop.
vanitas_21- a compendium full of innovative ideas stretching in all different directions;
creative threads, waiting to be taken further by you and given their own meaning.

fashion & the vanitas motif
The vanitas motif bears a strong connection to Baroque symbolism.
In her book “Fashion at the Edge: Spectacle, Modernity and Deathliness” Caroline Evans juxtaposes modern fashion imagery with Baroque vanitas allegories.
Both Fashion and Baroque vanitas imagery use antitheses to play with different layers of meaning.
Furthermore, they share an intrinsic focus on transformation.
Caroline Evans states that ”Instability is the very characteristic of fashion (…)
„It is in the nature of fashion to transform everything”,
a distinctive quality which Walter Benjamin attributed to Baroque art.
(…)