Trained as a fashion designer, Anna-Sophie Berger’s work considers the role of the body within design. Berger often approaches the body as an unlikely and defenseless object that can be imaginatively and symbolically stretched, altered, modified, adorned, replicated, or destroyed through its designed environment. Like its sister work "Cloak", "Machiavelli" was developed in response to research into historical sumptuary laws (laws that try to regulate consumption for moral reasons, often in relation to fashion and style) and the so-called Hemline Index, a theory developed in the 1920s by economist George Taylor that posited that skirt length (hemlines) rise or fall along with stock prices and the economy. In this proposed interdependent logic between body, finance, subjectivity, and clothing design, Berger proposes a velvet manteau with hemlines so long that it swallows the wearer whole, effectively obscuring the entire body under a tent-like structure, draped, nonetheless, in a fashionable manner. Rather than clothing objects staging the body, Berger’s "Machiavelli" works closer to a kind of storage unit that can contain and protect the body along with one’s possessions.

(Text: Jeppe Ugelvig)

photography: courtesy of the artist and Layr