March 16, 2021
Tom Van Der Borght's Collection " 7 Ways to be TVDB" Combines High Art and Sustainability.
“The collection is an extreme self-portrait. I started working on it when I was going through a more difficult time. In this moment, I learned that we all deal with our own problems in an individual way, but we all sometimes feel that we’re not good enough for this world. So I wanted to create a collective feeling that everything that is non-conformist or outside the box has a right to exist. It’s translated in my work as a vision for a contemporary urban tribe, where I research what luxury and haute couture can be in the future.”(source)
Tom Van Der Borght, the winner of the Première Vision Grand Prix, provided a dose of much-needed optimism with his playful designs, constructed using upcycled rope, plastic tubing, vegetable fur, and sequins. The 42-year-old Belgian designer — who graduated from the Stedelijke Academie voor Schone Kunsten (SASK) in 2012, a fine arts academy in Belgium — follows in the footsteps of the likes of Anthony Vaccarello and Viktor & Rolf in claiming the festival’s top fashion prize. (source Vogue UK)
CREATOR OF HIS OWN TECHNICOLOUR UNIVERSE
TEXTURE, VOLUME AND COLOR
Tom is based in Gent, Belgium. He studied at Stedelijke Academie Voor Schone Kunsten Sint Niklaas.
Tom Van Der Borght (1978) is a fashion designer who lives and works in Gent. He is a graduate of the Stedelijke Academie voor Schone Kunsten Sint Niklaas.
Tom Van Der Borght is not in search of traditional beauty or honey-sweet cutesiness. Bold combinations of bright colors, psychedelic graphics and textures make for a true bombardment of the senses.
This new kid on the fashion block is not only exploring the boundaries of traditional beauty. He boldly crosses them to create his own standard of beauty. TVDB is always on the look-out for the unconventional and puts into question mainstream social structures. What does society considers normal and why?
What is weird and why? His garments serve as armor for strong super humans in an urban setting. Yet all is not serious. A sense of humor and self-depreciative playfulness show in the way he teasingly covers and reveals in his designs. Another hint of this can be seen in his use of extreme detailing .
Throughout his impeccably finished couture collections strong influences of streetwear reverberate. Van Der Borght’s collections are full with original prints . Modern, industrial techniques such as printing and digital knit happily co-exist with traditional handicrafts.
Already during his studies Fashion Design Van der Borght was a promising student.
After an internship at Maureen De Clerq, he won as third year student the Triumph Inspiration Award 2011 and could show his collection at Berlin Fashion Week. After graduating in june 2012,Tom Van der Borght showed his graduation collection “Church Of Chica” in Berlin and Paris Fashion Weeks Spring/Summer 2013.
After winning the ASVOFF ‘05 award for best emerging talent with his fashionmovie ’Danny’, he founded his label on 1st january 2013. Only two weeks after starting up his business, he won the Premium Young Designer Award during Berlin Fashion Week FW13 with his latest collection ‘Aponycalypse’. In 11 april 2013 he was chosen by the jury and public vote as the C&A Reimagine Design Challenge winner between 8 European designers selected by C&A to represent their country’s.
7 ways to be TVDB // research video
We all have moments in life where we feel defeated, vulnerable, mistreaten, sad, lonely or excluded. In our modern times society we have the tendency to deal with these emotions in a super-individualised way. Our technology-based society is built on likes, and sharing “a constructed vision” on our own lives, but often we deal with negative things and “real life” in loneliness.
In such moments we look for ways to find ourselves again, we crave for a survival guide to our own life, we have a hunger for connection and community as a antidote for loneliness and exclusion.
To find more collectivity in this, TVDB develops a series of 7 rituals, based on 7 stages in his own life, on the intersection of fashion and performance, that introduce the audience into the TVDB universe. Through the method of extreme self-portrait, awareness and sensibility for the ‘strange’, the ‘special’, the non-normative, the queer in all of us are created. His ongoing artistic research explores the representation and celebration of non-normative bodies in a myriad of fashion, performance and visual art.
In ‘Act 01: Create a Safe Cocoon’ high-tech bricolage fashion is placed in a framework of a low-tech procession. The catwalk performance explores the exciting tension between wearing and being worn, between carrying and being carried. 7 outfits created out of 7 limited non-normative fashion materials are at the core of this performance and are an exploration of the concept of restriction as a base for experiment and materialization. 7 is and will always be a magic number.
