Dear Shaded Viewers,
The 15th edition of the international and interdisciplinary FASHIONCLASH Festival is scheduled to take place in Maastricht, the Netherlands, from November 17 to 19, 2023. This three-day festival provides emerging designers and performing artists from around the world with a platform to showcase their work to a diverse international audience. Through exhibitions, performances, talks, workshops, and fashion film screenings, the festival presents projects that explore, contextualize, and celebrate contemporary fashion culture.
FASHIONCLASH Festival aims to discover, stimulate, and contribute to current developments in fashion while making them accessible to a wide audience. Participants of the festival represent a generation of designers and artists who challenge and push the boundaries of their discipline. Their works traverse the transdisciplinary domains of fashion, social design, and visual arts.
The festival program is a curated selection of proposals received through open calls, as well as projects initiated by FASHIONCLASH in collaboration with various organizations and creators. This annual event serves as a platform to showcase the outcomes of projects and talent development initiatives that take place throughout the year.
The program includes diverse elements such as the Clash House performance program, the Fashion Film Program featuring awards and premieres, the New Fashion Narrative exhibition at Bureau Europa, and the Fashion Makes Sense segment, which encompasses presentations and workshops for participation projects. The festival concludes with an afterparty featuring live performances.
As part of this year’s exhibition program, FASHIONCLASH has invited five independent fashion practitioners to form a curatorial team. Together, they will collaborate on the concept for the New Fashion Narratives exhibition, which will be presented at Bureau Europa during FASHIONCLASH Festival 2023. The curators aim to emphasize the creative process itself, exploring the use of resources from the past, their impact on the present, and the context they create for the future.
Additionally, FASHIONCLASH actively engages various target groups and a broad audience, particularly young people, through a series of activities organized throughout the year. This year, the festival campaign was developed in collaboration with young participants, involving them in outfit design, styling, and performances. The resulting collection of outfits, along with accompanying photos and a fashion film, will be used for the festival campaign and exhibited at Center Céramique during the event.
FASHIONCLASH Festival is an initiative of the Maastricht-based FASHIONCLASH Foundation, which serves as an interdisciplinary showcase and development platform. The foundation has cultivated a global network of new generation fashion makers and performing artists. Over the years, FASHIONCLASH has successfully realized more than 250 projects in the Netherlands and abroad, supporting over 1500 artists and designers from around the world.
To get a glimpse of the festival, you can watch the 2022 Aftermovie, and previous program parts from the past two editions are available on the official YouTube channel. For more information about the festival, residencies, curators, and open calls, please visit www.fashionclash.nl