145 Bethnal Green Road: Kraftchenko’s REJECT is unleashed upon the gatherers in all its emblazoned glory: pvc transparencies, asymmetrical belted suits and her indisputable red aprons to unveil a collection that both refuses and embodies our socio-political climate. It is a collection that aims to go against the grain and be resistant to consumerist society to create a new form of aestheticism based on the reappropriation and renewal of discarded clothing or objects.
Here, behind the glass windows of a shop, stand the wrapped bodies of three women. A crowd gathers. The women begin to unwrap their prized bodies, an allude and, at the same time, a middle finger to the objectification and customary nature of the commercial fashion industry where bodies become mannequins and mannequins desires. I picture the dynamic of the woman’s body served as a gift to the hoards of lurking spectators waiting to bite into the flesh of unadulterated desire, in a scene reminiscent of Aronofsky’s ‘Mother!’ but what I get is the opposite, the negation of it - a rejection.
The three women, each modelling the pieces from Kraftchenko’s pre-SS19 collection transcend the role of the model, the ‘Deuxieme Sexe’, and that of the nurturing provider. In this durational performance piece, they nonchalantly take their clothes off and hang them on butcher hooks, loiter outside their ‘glass menagerie’ smoking cigarettes and, like black widow spiders, snatch unsuspecting spectators and drag them inside. Each woman embodies their own personality and performs it through the different garments, infusing each piece with doses of eroticism, innocence and dominance. They are in control of their bodies, and love to show that. The non-gendered garments in Kraftchenko’s REJECT collection embody this attitude: the body is a performative sleeve each of us are born into with exactly the same rights and agency upon, it is up to the individual to dress it or undress it as they please without having to be constrained by their sexuality, attitude or beliefs.
Kraftchenko shows women in control: in control of their bodies, their wants and desires. A power that can be displayed by allowing the body to be dominant as well as submissive. A body in turmoil as well as a body in peace. Here, the role of the fashion designer, performer and artist blur and implode into one: the designer becomes the practitioner of their own bodily performativity, the artist of their own desires and the master of their own identity. Kraftchenko’s REJECT collection is for the body as agency.