Marga Weimans

After switching careers from business management to fashion, fashion designer Marga Weimans (1970) graduated from the Antwerp Academy of Fine Arts in 2005.

Weimans won the i-D magazine Award for her graduation collection “The Power of my dreams”. The prize was work experience at the London i-D magazine headquarters. Weimans returned to the Netherlands and founded her namesake couture label. Weimans work, while highly biographical, experiments with materials and pushes the boundaries of art, architecture and design. Weimans showed her collection ”Debut” of, “2” and “Wonderland” off schedule during Haute Couture week in Paris and was featured in a number of exhibitions. The Groninger Museum is a regular collector of the work and momentarily exhibits pieces of the whimsical Wonderland collection in the group exhibit “Material world” with a.o. Iris van Herpen, Joris Laarman en Pieke Bergmans. “The Green Landscape dress” made out of coated foam, served as an icon for the exhibition and was printed on everything from the museums façade, to cakes and to nationwide distributed poster campaign.

Salon/2 in het Geelvinck 1 t/m 17 juli 2011

“Knot Dress”

The “ Knot and bow dress” selected for Salon/2 is part of the Wonderland Collection. The Wonderland collection tells the story of Weimans’ escape from the everyday urban ugliness of her work environment, located in the poorest area of Rotterdam, into a world of hallucinatory beauty. Dresses are printed with thefacades of the gloomy flat building located opposite of Weimans studio. These dresses morph into fairy tale dresses seemingly made out of bright coloured candies. The reason why this particular dress was selected for Salon/2 is because it contains all the disciplines Weimans applies in her designs. The dress shows where the surreal, the decay and the ugliness meets. It depicts the rough steel wire construction of a flat building, with blotches of concrete, dipped in soft foam and worn out silver. The story ends when hard wire morph’s into a silver bow; the symbol of the pretty girliness of an Alice in Wonderland, fallen through the rabbit hole. The drama of the materials and shapes gets extra meaning against the overwhelming baroque background of Museum Geelvinck.