KEUPR/van BENTM
In January of 1999, during the Paris Haute Couture, Michiel Keuper and Francisco Van Benthum, the designers behind Keupr/van Bentm, put on a fashion show. The program notes describe the runway looks. Black Hole (3 1/2 meters squared of black polyestertrippleslash, cut and folded on the backseam which is to be worn over a double-breasted twisterpantyhose); Chemical Insult (One-piece doublesided slap of grasshoppergreen polymorph-lush); Tribute to Leigh Bowery (Green on blue polka-dotted 2/3 pantalonium, attached to a paper-folded skeleton, standing about 1.90 meters measured from the shoulder. Light, multi-colored foam-stuffed back-piece completed with eleven meters of rhinestone trimminqs.). If all of this sounds incredible, that was the point. Invitations were sent out the day after the show was to take place. The show never happened. “It enabled us to do the impossible," they explain. Keuper and Van Benthum both graduated from the fashion department of the Arnhem Institute for the Arts, Keuper in 1993 and Van Benthum in 1995. They shared a studio space and soon discovered that they also shared a sense of the absurd. They made their debut as Keupr/van Bentm in 1997. In their work, wearable elements are broken down into bits and then thrown together again seemingly at random, a sartorial puzzle whose pieces don't quite fit. Keuper and Van Benthum refer to their presentations—the ones they actually produce as well as the imaginary ones—quite accurately as "Parades”: shoulders sprout spheres and explode out of holes in the backs of jackets; pants change their minds midstream and become skirts; corsets have collisions with coats; a ludicrously baroque man’s suit is composed from shards of a kilt, trousers, a scarf and a house plant. Then there are the accessories: opera-length kitchen mits, donkey masks, capes, top hats, tulle tutus, and a "pressing-egg" covered in rhinestones.They use their system of fragmentation and montage to turn garments on their ear and, they say, to do the same to our comprehension. "The viewer is confronted with what he or she already knows or can refer to, but this image is only the first layer. As soon as the model turns, garments are not what they seem to be," they wrote in the notes to their 1998 collection “Evil Wrapped in Beauty." "It's very hard to do something new these days," they say. "We never want to take things for granted.”
Alix Browne
From: Visionaire’s FASHION 2001, designers of the new avant-garde,
published by Universe Publishing, USA, 1999
