2019

MINNA PALMQVIST “NEVER ENDING”

“Never Ending” is part of a larger project entitled “No Body”, through which Minna Palmqvist addresses some of the basic questions of contemporary fashion design. 
She starts where most fashion designers start: from the tailor’s bust, in the real sense of the word. She deconstructs and reconstructs that slender and static body form, which has been one of a fashion designer’s most basic tools. Its idealised proportions and perfect shape have influenced fashionable silhouettes for centuries. Moreover, they greatly determined the very notion of our self-image and yearn to conform to fashion’s body-imperatives. 

For Minna Palmqvist and her homonymous fashion label, the main motto is: the female body is not yours to judge! 
With this bold, provocative, yet highly emancipatory position, Minna Palmqvist challenges fashion and its pretensions to conform us to artificial and capricious ideals of beauty and novelty. 
No matter how hard one tries, it’s impossible to fit into what is constantly launched and relaunched as a perfect look or perfect fit. 
To comment upon this, Minna created “Never Ending”: a twelve-piece puzzle made of the parts of both male and female mannequins. All these pieces can be assembled into various combinations, but they will never get “right”. In a humorous, playful way, this work poses a question: Is our pursuit of perfection useless? At the same time, she also raises the question of who has the right to define what a female or a male body is. 
Most of all, who has the right to define what a beautiful body is? 

Minna Palmqvist’s work has its starting point in the somewhat complicated clashes between the socially accepted female body and the real, physical bodies we actually inhabit. It can be read as a conflict between what we wish for and what we are trying to hide. No matter whether the end result is a ready-to-wear collection or an art installation, the roots of the work are always found in the problematic around the female body being seen as an object there to please others, in the world of fashion as well as in society at large.
https://www.minnapalmqvist.com/