Liminal Objects – Contemporary Critical Fashion

Liminal Objects – Contemporary Critical Fashion

Led by curator Ane Lynge-Jorlén, the new Paris exhibition ‘Liminal Objects’ showcases eight visionary Nordic designers who are reshaping the fashion landscape

Curator Ane Lynge-Jorlén has never taken the opportunity to explore the impact of fashion lightly. Adding to her impressive oeuvre, ‘Liminal Objects’, a newly-opened, free-of-charge exhibition at Le Bicolore in Maison du Danemark on Champs-Élysées in Paris, investigates the fine line between art and fashion walked by the most exciting emerging Nordic designers.

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A showcase of contemporary critical fashion, ‘Liminal Objects’ ties together eight rising and established Scandinavian voices that challenge classic definitions of what fashion can, should and could be. The exhibition captures fashion’s unique ability to convey meaning and symbolism, interrogating the role that materials, functions, bodies and identities play within fashion and art.

In a speech marking the exhibition’s recent opening, Lynge-Jorlén spoke of fashion as a safe house for otherness, endorsing its place as an artistic and critical practice, and highlighting its potential to push and change agendas.

Throughout the artifacts on display, selected by the Nordic designers to be showcased (along with one specially commission piece), ‘Liminal Objects’ poses as many lasting questions as it ventures to answer. “There are three main perspectives that I wanted the show to express,” says Lynge-Jorlén of her intention with the exhibition. “A new craftsmanship has emerged that uses invaluable and upcycled, conventional and everyday objects as material for new shapes and silhouettes,” she says. “This strand scrutinises the value of things and offers creative critique of the fashion system. Another perspective is how fashion, known for idealisation and stereotyping of bodies, gender and identities, is also safe space for otherness, fluidity and ambiguity, and that transgressional stages of bodies are universal,” she goes on.

“Finally, the exhibition is concerned with critical storytelling embedded in the clothes that bridge the past with the future. Oppressive regimes and thought police are not a thing of the past, and what we wear and how the clothes are made can be acts of rebellion and empowerment.”

Photos ©Le Bicolore.