INRECON / SOLARIS AW22 brought London-based Danish designer Jens Laugesen his second Fashion Design of the Year title at the International Design Awards, in 2022, five years after his HYreCON collection won in 2017. The collection also took Gold in women’s prêt-à-porter, women’s avant-garde and Apparel Projects.
Laugesen continues to develop his signature hybrid design vocabulary, which grows from a fascination with utopian, unisex clothing. He re-appropriates iconic generic garments, such as oversized men’s jackets and shirts, slicing and recutting their seams so that they gain a new gender utility and movement, with organic folds that adapt to the body beneath. The collection pays homage to Tarkovsky’s poetic, dystopian Solaris, and its accompanying glitch film was selected for the La Jolla film festival.
Laugesen showed at London Fashion Week from 2002 to 2008, and his work is held by the V&A, the Musée de la Mode in Paris, FIT New York and Design Museum Denmark. INRECON shows how a conceptual practice can stay rigorous over decades by returning to the same basic garments with new questions.
Official award record: International Design Awards winners
The most familiar garments can still be taken apart and asked something new.
International Design Awards, 2022 — Fashion Design of the Year