Henrik Vibskov photographed by Collector’s Agenda by Florian Langhammer. Read the article here.

Meet Danish creative Henrik Vibskov - fashion designer, costume designer, curator, musician and professor. He shows at Copenhagen Fashion Week (which is coming around again next week) as well as in Paris, and he has a store in New York. A supremely conceptual designer – his last collection, Long Fingers To Ma Toes, was inspired by the tomato in weird and wonderful ways.

In this interview, Henrik his experience of living up to CPHFW's recently introduced 18 Minimum Sustainability Standards. What did find de-motivating and what kept him going? But also, how did he get here? Why the vegetable obsession? Would anyone come to a 3-hour fashion show? (Spoiler alert: they did!) What is fashion actually for in 2023? And what do the next generation of artistic designers need to make it? It's all up for discussion in this charismatic convo.

NOTES

IS FASHION ART? Read the ‘for & against’ with Zandra Rhodes and Alice Rawsthorne here.

Clare recommends the following Eps with similarly idiosyncratic fashion designers:

168 with Vin + Omi

172 with Andrew Logan

158 with Akira Isogowa

COPENHAGEN FASHION WEEK Spring ‘24 starts on August 7th. Discover the schedule, then re-listen to Episode with the event’s visionary CEO Cecilie Thorsmark, here.

Discover Henrik’s work and the current collection, LONG FINGERS TO MA TOES, here.

Climate change is coming for your ketchup, apparently. “The bulk of the global production of processing tomatoes is concentrated in a small number of regions where climate change, according to a professor from Aarhus University, is projected to have a significant impact on the future production and supply to the processing tomato industry.” Read the rest here. But we’ve still got LA TOMATINA! Every year, on the last Wednesday in August, people travel to Buñol, 40 ks from Valencia, Spain, to hurl ripe tomatoes at each other. Some throw the red stuff for less joyful reasons though. In October 2022, Just Stop Oil protestors threw TOMATO SOUP at a priceless Van Gogh in London’s National Gallery. It was safely behind perspex though.

Part of Henrik’s “Due to Sudden Weather Change” installation for Spring 2019.

Bringing sustainability to New York’s High Line, September 2022, with the installation, “Jungle of Tongues & Ears”

For his SS17 men’s collection, shown in Paris, Henrik conjured “Salami Kitchen of the Non-Exi-Stent”

P.I.G. Henrik Vibskov’s P.I.G Foundation is selling textile salamis to support new talents for the P.I.G Award. “All profit for this product goes to the annual P.I.G Foundation which awards a new talent with a prize money of 25.000 danish kroners. The aim is to focus on outstanding new talent, selected from across all creative fields, and to help them financially proceed with their work. All of the salamis come from a big HV installation and now hopefully gets a new recycled life…” Buy one here.

So, what’s with the SALAMIS anyway? The show, for Spring ‘17, was set in Copenhagen's Meatpacking district, where “a fashion slaughter house was created to merge the two opposite worlds together. The setting of the show was created in the yard of the slaughter houses, with piles of salami hanging from the massive structures covering the runway. The meat and butchers were at the center of the whole setting. The vibe was raw, expressing the roughness of this world, filled with a gloomy and dark atmosphere. Opposing that, an idea of vegetarianism at the time when it's stronger than ever and we can ask ourselves: Will meat one day be just a relic of the past?” Via Nordic Style mag. More here.