RRRIPP!! Paper Fashion

Vasilis Zidianakis (Ed.)

The fad for throw away paper dresses constituted a brief but explosive moment in the history of fashion. These dresses appeared in America in 1966 for the first time, to promote the products of a large paper manufacturing company and soon passed into the hands of designers and fashion houses, creating a new fashion fully expressive of the sixties Pop culture.

The non profit ATOPOS has over one hundred authentic paper dresses of the time in its collections, having managed to collect and preserve the largest number of these fragile garments existing today in a museum collection.

This collection became a source of inspiration for new creations: the curator of the exhibition and director of ATOPOS, Vassilis Zidianakis, asked new fashion designers and artists to create something of their own inspired by the dresses in the collection. Next to the authentic sixties paper dresses, creations by, among others, Sophia Kokosalaki, Michael Cepress, Yiorgos Eleftheriades, Johanna Trudzinski, Bas Kosters, Angelos Bratis, Deux Hommes, Marcus Tomlinson etc., as well as a white paper dress painted by the internationally renowned stage designer Bob Wilson, shall also be exhibited.

At the same time, the exhibition has extended its scope to the study and comprehension of the unknown use of paper in the history of garments and modern fashion and shall be presenting a broad range of paper garments from the ATOPOS collection and other entities: from paper kimonos of the Edo period in Japan to garments for hygienic and industrial use, as well as, of course, characteristic samples of paper creations by well known designers, such as John Galliano, Issey Miyake, A.F. Vandevorst, Hussein Chalayan, Kosuke Tsumura, Walter Van Beirendonck, Ann Demeulemeester and others.