The Mint Institute, Henrik Vibskov, AW09 collection, Copenhagen
You can’t pigeonhole a Renaissance man like the Dane Henrik Vibskov. He isn’t just a fashion designer but also a musician, stage designer and artist too. With collections like the AW 2009 “Human Laundry Service”, which saw Amish hat-wearing models powering human-sized hamster wheels, the designer takes clothes out of their utilitarian context and into the avant-garde. This book is the first comprehensive documentation of his decade-long career written and edited by Viskov himself, and offers the reader a front-row view into the inner workings of his brilliant mind. Its uniqueness becomes immediately apparent with a handwritten introduction letter, a short story based on Vibskov’s “universe” and a portrait. Its strength is its insightfulness, which is established through use of sketchbook images, moodboards and scanned emails.
The chapters aren’t chronologically ordered but divided instead in colours to explore Vibskov’s exceptional projects such as AW 2008’s “The Mint Institute”, which included an inflatable mint structure, mint drinks and mint clothes. Texts describing his projects are mostly written by Vibskov, and similarly offer an idea of his everyday life. This monograph successfully articulates Vibskov’s rejection of the fashion mainstream, providing a glimpse of how he manages to turn his fantastical ideas into equally fantastical reality.
Available from Gestalten
Text by Grashina Gabelmann