Anna Bueser - Hochschule für Technik und Wirtschaft Berlin

LIMINAL BODIES – Hochschule für Technik und Wirtschaft Berlin

My name is Anna Büser, I’m 25 years old and I recently finished my master’s degree in fashion design. For my graduate collection, I developed 3d printed accessories and sneakers, among other things. The focus on 3d printing has evolved for me over the last few years. In my opinion, this technology offers a great potential for innovation in fashion that needs to be explored. It is my goal to bring 3d printing technology into my work as a fashion designer in an innovative, utilitarian yet creative way.

Fashion, as the interface between the self and the other, is still exchangeable. The possibility of communication comes from the fact that one can choose what to wear and change clothes according to one‘s mood. Fashion is a tool whose special feature is that it is almost always with us, directly on our bodies. Fashion is a phenomenon that is constantly inhabited but also constantly changed. Parallels can be drawn here with liminal spaces. These are de- contextualized everyday transitory spaces. Like clothing, we encounter them every day. Liminal spaces are also an aesthetic phenomenon, just like fashion. Of course, the two phenomena (fashion and liminal spaces) are not one and the same.

Fashion is expressed in clothing and liminal spaces in architecture. Nevertheless, a certain grotesque uncanniness can also be developed in fashion. This uncanniness is achieved in fashion through decontextualisation too. This can already be observed in digital space, where everyone can hide behind an anonymous figure or reveal exactly what they most want to express about their personality. Digital avatars offer complete anonymity on the one hand, but also complete freedom of expression. This principle of the anonymity of avatars and the concept of uncanniness through decontextualisation is now taken as inspiration for the following looks.

Through 3D printed accessories, shapes and structures are created that would not be possible by conventional means. through these digitally created masks and accessories, parts of the body and clothing are decontextualised and deformed. Through the minimalist garments, there is still something very familiar underlying the looks, but made uncanny by the accessories. The reminder of the temporality of being, which also underlies Liminal Spaces, is now taken as an amplifier of the uncanny. Through structures that are reminiscent of anatomical details, the temporality of the human being also becomes evident in the accessories.

Credits – Photo: Joshua Woller, Hair and Makeup: Chihiro Meifuku, Model: Laetizia von Hofe, Asmaa, Glebs signed at esselle agency