Narelle Dore
Renowned for her fine and unexpected use of macramé which runs through each collection, each piece in Narelle Dore's collection is hand crafted in her Antwerp atelier.
Jantine Van Peski
Jantine van Peski is one of those rare and wonderful examples of a designer that manages to balance art, artisanship, craft and design in equal balance; a rare trait, in a world where so many manage to excel in only one. It requires a very fine balance not to stray to much into craft over art, artisanship over design, to bring the whole to represent a single united vision.
A graduate of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp, Jantine interned at both Haider Ackermann and A F Vandervost. Influenced by the 1970’s macramé sculptures, where three-dimensional textiles are created from a series of knots, this slow and time-consuming craft results in a highly textural textile, punctuated by knots, threads and the spaces in between. Experimenting with a single knot type in a multitude of patterns and configurations, and working with cord and yarn, Jantine works directly on the body. Her final MA thesis collection consisted of a twelve-piece collection produced entirely from macrame’, entitled Wires 10.0’, which was recognized by the Trieste design festival.
The reinterpretation of this traditional technique is central to Jantine’s work. Inspired by the Russian architect Alexander Brodsky, she painstakingly translates his geometrical drawings into her three dimensional macramé designs. The yarns and cords she works with include cotton, wool and silk, in rich color combinations of ochre through to dark red madder. Her silhouettes are based around process and labor intensive craft. With little affinity to the mainstream industry, Van Peski is committed to quality and sustainability, refusing to buckle to market pressures of seasonal collections.
With a raised awareness of slow fashion and craft in design, as well as a general movement towards quality versus quantity in design, the Dutch embassy created High Fashion Low Countries, as a collaborative promotion of Dutch and Belgium fashion. Of course Jantine Van Peski was one of the designers invited by the Dutch government to showcase her sustainable, slow design collection of unique pieces, and showcased in Amsterdam, Antwerp and Brussels at a series of events.
Website: www.jantinevanpeski.nl
