Floating Skin

Marlene Hübner and Amelie Schlemmer

When does a garment become part of swimwear and when and why would you (also) wear it on the street? We are researching the „in between“, the sometimes sharp and sometimes blurry borders of the two poles in order to create crossovers between swim- and streetwear. Our garments materialize the process of our artistic research.

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Floating Skin experiments with dresscodes both of swim- and streetwear. The subtitle of the project Nicht Fisch - nicht Fleisch (Eng. neither fish nor fowl) assumes that a garment is hybrid and does not belong to a specific category of clothing. The person who wears or looks at our collection of garments gets confronted with the question about one’s own (often not reflected) dressing habit in different social spaces: Which norms did I integrate in my own clothing style and why?

This research collection shows how we follow certain norms in spaces of public bathing or on the street and how clothing rules and social norms are closely interconnected.

The body of garments consists of wearable pieces, which we designed and hand-sewed. As a method, the typical elements of a street jacket and the ones of a historic swimsuit were combined in multiple ways, for example: typical swimwear textiles with the silhouette of a jacket. This combination challenges the habitual categorization of where a certain piece of clothing belongs to.

The created garments invite us to leave the office for a swim and be dripping wet on the way back into the city – all in one outfit – thus softly challenging and transgressing rules of different spaces.

Time
Winter Semester 20/21
Team
Marlene Hübner and Amelie Schlemmer