JEANNE VICERIAL

A resident of the prestigious Villa Medici program in Rome in 2020, Jeanne Vicerial, became, at not yet 30, the first French Phd Graduate in fashion design. Through her practice, she questions the mechanisms at work in the design of contemporary clothing and proposes an alternative to the Taylor-made/ready-to-wear dichotomy associated with fast-fashion culture.

Just like a runway show of static models, the exhibition unveils a dozen of sculptures of innovative textiles and textures, which are at the heart of current issues around ecology and the articulation between ready-to-wear and haute couture. In the Brussels space, her dresses created from a single thread of several hundred kilometers long, imitating muscle fiber, strangely echoe the human anatomy and seem to come to life. Baroque and unsettling, her creations forge unexpected links between design, crafts, fashion, arts and science, while to substantially redefining ideas about the body and clothing.

Born in 1991, Jeanne Vicerial lives and works in Paris. Her passion for clothes design began when she was a teenager. After studying costume design and obtaining a Master’s degree in clothes design at the Paris École des Arts Décoratifs in 2015, she started a research project which led to a Sciences, Arts, Creation and Research PhD. She took her research further by teaming up with the mechatronics department at MINES ParisTech to develop a patented robotised process for producing made-to-measure clothes with no waste. She also chose an artistic path which led her to work with Hussein Chalayan and then found research and design studio CLINIQUE VESTIMENTAIRE. In addition to producing her own creations, she has quickly established an array of partnerships with artists working in different fields, including photographers, sculptors, performers, choreographers, musicians and perfumers. Jeanne Vicerial was the artist-in-residence at the French Academy in Rome, at Villa Medici, in 2019-2020. Her work has been widely shown, including at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris (2018), Villa Medici and Palazzo Farnese in Rome (2020) and Collection Lambert in Avignon (2021), and it recently entered the collections of the Centre National des Arts Plastiques in Paris.