Viktor & Rolf is a Dutch avant-garde luxury fashion house founded in 1993 by Viktor Horsting and Rolf Snoeren. For more than twenty years, Viktor & Rolf have bridged the divide between fashion and art.
After graduating from the Arnhem Academy of Art and Design in 1993, fashion artists Viktor Horsting and Rolf Snoeren launched the avant-garde luxury fashion house Viktor&Rolf.
The house of Viktor&Rolf wants to produce astonishing beauty and surprising elegance through an unorthodox approach to fashion and is widely recognized and admired for its provocative Haute Couture and conceptual elegance.
Haute Couture collection
Viktor&Rolf works have created a rebellious mood infused with bizarre contrasts for almost twenty years during Paris Fashion Week, ever since the debut Haute Couture collection in Spring/Summer 1998. Viktor&Rolf's luxury wedding and eveningwear collections, Mariage and Soir, are an investigation of iconic features influenced by historical couture influences.
Viktor&Rolf's premium items include Viktor&Rolf Tulle, the unique eyewear line Viktor&Rolf Vision, and an irresistible fragrance collection that includes global bestsellers such as Flowerbomb, Spicebomb, Bonbon, and Magic.
Viktor Horsting and Rolf Snoeren graduated from the ArtEZ Institute of the Arts in Arnhem, the Netherlands, in 1992, and are known for their unique, art-centric, and often surreal approach to fashion. Following that, they began a creative relationship that would lead to remarkable success at Hyeres, the Festival International de Mode et de Photographie, just a year later. The brand Viktor & Rolf was created.
In January 1998, the team debuted its first couture collection, followed by its first ready-to-wear collection in 2000. The two became recognized for their thought-provoking concerts, some of which they even participated in as part of the performance.
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Babushka Fashion Show
Viktor & Rolf expanded their business with ready-to-wear and men's collections over the next few years, and a ten-year retrospective of their work was shown in the Fashion Museum in Paris in 2003.
Stephen Gan's Visionaire 2000 (1997) describes Viktor & Rolf as "fashion's biggest fans and its toughest critics." While their works celebrate detailed tailoring and consistently reference classic silhouettes from legendary couturiers Cristóbal Balenciaga, Coco Chanel, Christian Dior, and Yves Saint Laurent, they also critique the fashion industry of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, tackle fashion stereotypes, and expose its vulnerabilities to a runway audience.
The fashion media's fascination with Viktor & Rolf's exaggerated designs and remarkable runway performances has always played an important part in defining the brand name. With no advertising campaigns, no self-standing boutiques, and no mass-produced garments to sell, their early public engagement was entirely reliant on the generous quantities of newspaper coverage they received each season. Viktor & Rolf's media recognition as a leading avant-garde haute couture label was critical to the financial success of their ready-to-wear range. Upon its initial release in February 2000, their debut collection sold out in sixty retailers globally.
Flowerbomb
In 2005, Viktor & Rolf launched their first store in Milan and teamed with L'Oreal to develop their debut perfume, "Flowerbomb." In 2006, the couple achieved economic success by designing a capsule collection for H&M that included a bridal gown.
Renzo Rosso took over with a majority ownership in the company in 2008. Viktor & Rolf indicated that it was done to allow the company to expand with a broader range of items and outlets. The same year, an exhibition commemorating their 15th anniversary was displayed at the Barbican Art Gallery in London, with significant pieces from 1992 to 2008 transformed into miniatures on porcelain dolls, housed in a big doll home.
Viktor & Rolf have been noted for their glamour slender forms with additional flamboyance, love of couture, and complex draping, blurring the limits between fashion and art. The designers sent models down the runway wearing several "NO" declarations for their AW08 presentation. There were sequined messages with the word on them, as well as 3D representations sprouting from grey trench coats.
The phrase was even embroidered on opulent metallic gowns. Most significantly, it was beautifully painted on the models' faces, overlapping the eyes and nose and finishing just before the lips. The phrase "Dream On" was also applied to apparel in 3D shape and through embroidery for a whimsical touch that truly mirrored the visual messaging of the brand. The most severe and avant-garde component of this show was the intentional declaration of "No," and the multiple ways it emerged and evolved throughout the collection.
AW08
The AW08 show by Viktor&Rolf was a watershed moment in the brand's history since the visual very clearly conveyed the broader deeper philosophy in a sarcastic yet straightforward way. "When we were designing that season, we didn't really feel like making anything," Rolf explains. "The never-ending deadlines and the lack of time for us to truly reflect.
There were many unfavorable ideas. The letter 'NO' kept appearing in the sketches. We then decided to express ourselves by practically incorporating the word 'NO' into our artwork."
As a result, the outfits were designed with this in mind - not neatly stitched together, but supposed to appear stapled together, symbolizing the fashion system's never-ending haste to produce new collections. Later on, the designers would grow increasingly vocal about the fashion industry's frighteningly quick cycle, eventually abandoning their ready-to-wear shows just a few years later in 2010. The AW08 ready-to-wear show would be one of their final shows ever.
Atomic Bomb
Viktor&Rolf's response was to create a collection based on the silhouette of an atomic bomb's mushroom cloud. The outfits were inflated with silk padding, and the concept was further enhanced with tinsel, streamers, balloons, and pompoms.
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'Atomic Bomb' praised the twentieth century while welcoming the new millennium. Viktor&Rolf used old textiles by Chanel, Balenciaga, and Pucci from the Parisian producer René Véron.
Russian Doll
The historic presentation began with Maggie Rizer standing on the circular stage wearing a torn sackcloth minidress, her short blonde hair slicked back, and her eyes penciled with graphic liner before Horsting and Snoeren walked out and gingerly placed a pair of flat shoes on her feet. The entire display lasted just over 15 minutes, during which time the designers put ten extra layers on top of the original barebones garment until she towered in a thick cocoon-like coat with shoulders as high as the top of her head.
Each exquisitely produced garment, including sparkling metallic sequin-covered gowns, adorable patterned dresses with neat bows and micro ruffles, and robes made of lace, diamante, and crystals, read as a blend of homespun and royal, mimicking, in reality, the shapes of 15th-century Boyars. Rizer appeared to be unable to move by the end of the show because she was wearing so much clothing. Thus trapped in the fashion cycle, the designers exited the stage by wrapping a giant floral garland around her in a circle. The designers once stated of the industry's frenetic speed, "The demands will not change, so you just have to go with the flow."
The iconoclastic Dutch fashion design duo Viktor & Rolf have taken the fashion industry by storm in the last 15 years, thanks to their high-concept catwalk presentations and opulent collections.
