The House of Viktor & Rolf

[2009]

Science TT502 EX2. With kind permission, Hugh Merrell, Merrell Publishers

London: Merrell

Fashion dolls have been used by European fashion designers and dressmakers for centuries. Made as miniature adults they were used to disseminate new fashions and promote particular dressmakers, yet few could match the bewitching creepiness achieved by Dutch conceptual fashion designers Viktor & Rolf. These two men are known as much for their surreal theatricality as for their masterful branding through self-portraiture. Channelling cultural anxieties in their 1999 collection ‘Atomic bomb’, they wondered if the world would end with the millennium. They thus created a fashion silhouette shaped like a mushroom cloud, which could be deflated.