Sara Vrugt

picture by Lisa Wieringen

1. Please introduce yourself to our readers. (Who are you, where do you come from and what is your field of specialization?) 

I am Sara Vrugt, a 30-year-old autonomous designer. I’ve studied at the KABK Royal Academy of Arts in The Hague, specializing in fashion and textiles. After graduating in 2006 I set up my own practice, studio vruGt. I make garments as well as textile installations, and work on miniature embroideries as well as on large-scale community projects. 

2. What fascinates you about design and what made you choose to work with a combination of fashion, textile and performance? 

Art and design have the power to irritate and to touch, to lift you out of the ordinary and to make you look beyond what you expect. With my work I want to evoke a second look. 

As I like to search for the boundaries of my discipline I look for a combination of fashion, textile and performance-art, each time stressing one of those aspects. 

3. You are going to exhibit 3 projects at this year’s FASHIONCLASH Maastricht 2012. For your 3rd project you will be going to Iran. Can you describe the idea behind that project and what it is about?

I'm very interested in the concept of veiling and the way women deal with this controversial piece of fabric. While traveling from The Hague to Iran, I wanted to keep a log of embroidery. So instead of making sketches in a diary of what I saw and who I encountered, I would draw and write on small pieces of fabric. 

4. Can you tell us a little bit about the two other projects? 

Next to the tiny log posts I'll present an embroidery of 100 square meters, placed in a spiral-shaped installation. This work has been executed in three months time, with the help of 250 seasoned stitchers as well as needlework novices. 

At one end of the tapestry I portray different girls, randomly selected from Facebook. These faces are leading to an abstract version of the retina of the human eye. Those two structures have been interwoven, so that the two instances of being viewed from the outside and looking from the inside out, are forming a relationship. Incorporated in the tapestry are round, transparent sections, which line up with each other in ever decreasing size to form tunnels, a telescopic window effect. 

The other project I'll present is an ever-growing and evolving collection of garments in which embroidery plays an important role as well. 

5. How do you get inspired and by what do you get inspired? Particularly for the 3 projects you are going to present. 

I get inspired by people and the ways in which we connect to each other. The subject matter of my work is the fine line between innate reflexes and social conventions in nowadays society. By recreating situations in which the (non-)relations between people are tangible I investigate and question this line. 

As for the embroidery installation this becomes a manifest to spectators by walking into the spiral and not only look at the embroidery but also at each other, from different perspectives and angles. The outfits I'll show will be presented on mannequins with living eyes. The audience cannot look at the clothes without being looked at themselves… 

6. What made you choose Look at you 05 / 06 / 07 as titles for your projects? 

I’m fascinated by the way in which other people look at each other, the way in which I look at people, but also how people look at me. Because all the experiments, installations and garments I have been making lately are connected to this subject I have chosen this title for the series. It is work in progress. 

picture by Lisa Wieringen

7. What does “fashion clash” or a “clash with fashion” mean to you personally? How do you define that for yourself? 

My work focuses on the combination of fashion, textile design and (performance) art. I use clothing as part of an autonomous language. Therefore I'm not a 'regular' fashion designer; the boundaries of the discipline interest me more than the discipline itself. 

http://www.vrugt.com/