Exhibits Are Us could be the motto of the Hollein household this May. In the span of nine days, architect turned designer Nina Hollein attended the Met Gala in a dress of her own design with her husband the CEO and director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Max Hollein; was the subject, with Elfie Semotan, of an exhibition in New York; and headed to Linz to set up a retrospective show of her work in her native Austria.
It took Hollein, who had always sewn her own clothes, 15 years to get to this point. Passionate about ballet in her youth (its influence is present in her fashion work), she studied architecture and worked in the field in the ’90s in New York. She returned to her needles and threads when taking a pause from her career to raise her family. “I needed to have something to compensate,” she said at a preview. [To show] “that I’m working and that I’m creative and that I produce something.”
Hollein’s approach was to start close to home in more ways than one. Her first designs were for children, and her chosen fabrics (tablecloth and apron checks among them) were traditional Austrian home textiles from mills she had personal relationships with, that were repurposed for fashion. When the Holleins moved from Germany to San Francisco in 2016, Nina closed up shop and adapted to her new environment. In the U.S., she said, “I really started to work on more glamorous dresses because especially in San Francisco, they have all these galas and evenings and everyone is dressing up all the time. So I figured this is a niche that women are interested in, and it works pretty well actually here in New York where in our circle of friends, there are many women who really want to have something that nobody else has and that you can wear in the evening.”
And so Hollein added to her repertoire and materials. Today she works with a transparent Austrian tulle that she cuts into a tube dress with drawstring ties that the wearer can transform into something more cloud-like. “My idea was to encourage the woman to really define what she wants to do with [the dress]. To get active and not just be the passive customer, but [be] little more involved with what is her individual style.” This is an asset that the designer tries to work into her work as much as possible; in the New York exhibition there’s a miniskirt, for example, that can be worn as a cape; similarly easy and elegant evening dresses can be worn belted or loose.
In the context of Hollein’s heritage, one could make a connection with the loose body-freeing “reform dress” proposed by the Wiener Werkstätte in the 1910s, though Hollein is focused on being forward-looking. She attributes her interest in comfort and movement to her dance training. “I always wear dresses that are really comfortable because that’s important for me,” she said. “To be able to move, to see how the dress moves with you, but also to have this feeling, to be able to raise your arms and legs and show this off; this just is more attractive to me, not only to wear, but sometimes also to see and to watch in other women.”
What’s interesting is that in the case of Hollein’s no-waste “color field” dresses, the flou is achieved through the puzzling of straight-edged geometric forms. (These dresses happen to have a sort of spiritual affinity to Sonia Delaunay’s Simultaneous dress now on exhibit at Bard Graduate Center.) As Hollein develops the sustainable aspects of her designs by working with upcycled men’s suiting (sourced in thrift-shops and her husband’s closet) she is leaning into the hard lines associated with architecture. Yet the dresses she makes in which the arms are connected to the skirt are frillier and more romantic.
There’s one of those dresses, in gold, suspended, bird-like, in the air at the Austrian Cultural Forum New York (ACFNY), where Hollein’s work is being shown alongside that of the Austrian artist Elfie Semotan in an exhibition, curated by Dr. Gerald Matt, called “Inspiration Comes From Everyday Life: Work by Elfie Semotan & Nina Hollein.” (Fashion folk will remember Semotan’s name from her star turns on the runway for Helmut Lang.)
What’s revealed is that these two women take a somewhat abstract approach to fashion, both in terms of their practices and in their work. Hollein’s business, for one, is small and personal. She makes things herself and in New York, working from her home. Semotan’s name is globally recognized for work that is not conformist. As she said in a statement, “I have always been interested in people, their innermost feelings, and how this leads to various forms of self-expression as a result. Fashion has always been a tool in this sense; an indispensable medium for self-expression.” Semotan’s portraits share space with fashion shots and more interpretive sittings focused on fabrics and nature. There’s a sense of openness in these women’s work, and an acknowledgement of the body as an extension of the self rather than primarily as a tool for seduction or status signaling, which is refreshing and apt. Fashion’s future isn’t only about individuality, it’s about connecting on a personal, human level.
