Open Call For Entries for Fashion My Religion!

Fashion My Religion! The 10th edition of FASHIONCLASH Festival 15 – 17 June, Maastricht 

FASHIONCLASH presents Fashion My Religion! (FMR), the 10th edition of the international & interdisciplinary fashion festival in Maastricht. During this three-day festival over more than 100 emerging designers and (performing)artists from all over the world get the opportunity to show their work to a diverse, international audience. The multidisciplinary program contains fashion shows/presentations, exhibitions, installations, awards, fashion theatre and dance performances.

The overarching theme of the festival is “Fashion My Religion!” (read ‘fashion’ as a verb). The encounter between fashion and religion is not new. For decades, fashion has frequently drawn inspiration from the religious idiom and its decorative splendour. Both from purely aesthetic motives and from substantive critique. “Fashion My Religion!” explains fashion to a religion and investigates whether fashion can serve as a place of reflection and a guideline in the quest for a meaningful existence.
“Fashion My Religion!” places the designers, the industry and the audience in a clashing field; fashion vs religion or in other words, modernity and tradition. We look at the usual approach to the topic of ‘fashion and religion’ and focus the research on the cultural, anthropological, political relation with religion in the todays world. We set the old, absolute truths opposite the fluid truths of this time by addressing burning social issues such as new feminism, gender equality and human rights. Using the art of fashion design, we dissect the changing awareness around our relationship with our environment to create new narratives and approaches around the subject of “fashion and religion”. Can we rethink the way we see the values, norms and rules related to religions and create a more inclusive world, without proclaiming a value about religion?

The rise of fashion is one of the decisive events in the world history, because it indicated which direction modernity is going. Fashion contains an essential feature of modernity: discarding traditions. Fashion is irrational, fashion is a change because of change. Can fashion be the material expression of a meaningful existence, without losing its dynamic character? May we speculate that fashion will no longer be irrational. Fashion as a guide in life, because it teaches us to live in a world where everything is constantly changing and can be the playfield where we can discover ourselves.

Fashion exists beyond static garments, and has a necessitated relationship with the wearer and its body. In a time where fashion has arguably stagnated it seems more urgent than ever that fashion is placed in a context that forces you to question its true value. Fashion My Religion! is an appeal to the new generation of designers and artists to fight for the right of the existence of fashion! Rebel! Research and express the inner value of fashion and spread it out. Out of love for your art, make fashion as your religion where there is attention to nature, well-being, tolerance and equality.

With the 10th anniversary of the festival, FASHIONCLASH aims to empower, use and celebrate the strength of fashion by sending out the massage to the designers and the audience to look at the immaterial value of fashion as an artistic discipline. To use fashion as an instrument to actually contribute in the debates related to ecological, human- and social issues in our society. Fashion as a second skin tells your environment what relationship you want to have with it and simultaneously shows you what your heart beats for.

 “Everyone is an icon – that reflects the divine in you. You are an incarnation, bringing divine into the material world.”

 More information about the festival and how to submit your work: http://fashionclash.nl/open-call-for-entries/