Doing Fashion by HGK Basel FHNW Seen by Jerome Luginbühl
Photography Jerome Luginbühl
Show Doing Fashion by HGK Basel FHNW Graduates
Graduates Blanca Bianchi, Alec Schwendemann, Camila Martin Barla, Nicola Maurizio Reisch, Jennifer Lynn Farmer, Noëmi Sophia Henkel, Marta Biert, Sagil Ilyas Md. Amin, Aino, Bada Mirjam Künzi, Romeo Eros Staub, Hannah Christina Maywald, Julien Gfeller, Greta Sofie Engelhardt, Jérôme Spira & Shawna Christen, Sofiia Shymanska, Josef Alüscher
Flute Juli (Xueqing) Wang
Voice Ethan
Sound Golce Kummer
Fashion has long exceeded the limits of the garment. As a medium of cultural production, it shapes how we dress, how we inhabit, how we perform and understand ourselves within the social fabric of culture. As seen in the Doing Fashion Graduate 2026 Performances by the Basel Academy of Art and Design FHNW (HGK Basel), the emphasis lies on the act of “doing”, on the practice and gestures themselves involved in the creation of the fashion spectacle. Doing fashion thus emerges from an all-encompassing experience that allows students to develop their own design language and, in turn, speak back to fashion’s interlocutors.
Within this terrain, digital skills and techniques have gained particular momentum, becoming an essential component of a new generation of designers. Seventeen of these designers' works were featured across the two performances on the evening of 3 October, carried along by the current of fashion week. I could hardly think of a more fitting venue for the evening’s two performances than the Centre Culturel Suisse, which served as an embryonic space from which the works could unfold and ripple outwards. Moving between analogue and digital design methods, the HGK Basel approach finds its through-line in the body. As the site through which garments produce movement and acquire meaning in relation to the world. The body becomes a point of departure and a means of inquiry. In this project, young designers were invited to position themselves, or rather their work, against a broader backdrop of shifting cultural and technological conditions.
