Sophie Fuhlbruegge - Hochschule für Technik und Wirtschaft Berlin

playing with patterns – Hochschule für Technik und Wirtschaft Berlin

‘playing with patterns’

As a young fashion designer on the doorway to work in fashion, I am often questioning my place in such a fastmoving and unsustainable industry. Fashion constantly reinvents itself, yet recites what has already been – but what if the old can be new again? The work should be understood as a call to engage with the things around us and focus on what already exists in order to identify the potential in it, to appreciate and to make use of it. For this, the gaze is turned to the past, into craft, design, values and transmission, but not without looking into the future at the same time.

‘playing with patterns‘ simultaneously juxtaposes and combines innovation & tradition, handicraft & machinery, digital & physical, old & new, coincidence & planning, by playfully breaking with different patterns. In this way, handicraft references and design become perceptible and visible through the fusion of production methods, handmade and machine-made, as well as analogue and digital techniques: e.g. woodcarving, 3D printing, molding leather, screen-printing, engraving, CNC-milling, laser cut, bonding. A former family-owned tailor’s shop is available to me as a source of both material and creativity. The exclusive use of deadstock and patterns must not mean limitation but forces me to think out of the box. By developing a design method based on chance, individuality and innovation are increased and consumers encouraged to participate in the process. Numbers were assigned to the elaborate archived and vectorized old paper cuts. The ‘Gambler’ (accessible through website) generates random number sequences that define new pattern sets of the key pieces, that are draped in digital and analogue space.

The collection aspires to create a new understanding of luxury and values, that is made tangible on an emotional level, through the renewal and appreciation of what already exists, the realization of references, and the fusion of craft, technology and design.

Hi, I am Sophie (she/her), MA graduate in Fashion Design @HTW Berlin, focusing on new technologies as well as on traditional craftsmanship. Whilst exploring how things work and how the existing can be put into new contexts, I love to work with my hands and engage with tech. Sometimes I feel torn between innovation and tradition, so I try to fuse both in my designs and processes. I consider myself as a designer, as a maker, as a craftswoman, you could say as a swiss-knife, always keen on learning & exploring. And as someone recently pointed out, sustainability is already part of my makeup.