Charlie Koolhaas’ wearable photographs transfer the streets, surfaces, and textures of global cities onto the body, turning the wearer into a mirrored building in Dubai, an alleyway in Guangzhou, or the epicenter of a London warehouse rave – as if a living collage.
Streetwear in its most literal sense, this series draws on photographs taken from Charlie Koolhaas’s book City Lust, which is an intimate portrait of five diverse cities, the progression of globalization and how it connects us. When worn as clothes, photographs that document a turbulent and unglamorous world become beautiful sensual objects – a recycling dump in Lagos, or a bucket of scorpions sold in a market in China, challenge us to reconsider beauty and use fashion to disturb the social order rather than confirm it.
Theses six unisex jackets made from three different materials, hand-made by bespoke tailors in Rotterdam, Netherlands.
Theses six unisex jackets made from three different materials, hand-made by bespoke tailors in Rotterdam, Netherlands.
Since 2012 Charlie has been avoiding the potential flatness of photography by bending and folding her photographs into three dimensional spaces or stages. Her sculptures are more like recreations than representations, more ‘crop’ than image. She calls them ‘Lo-fi hyper-realities’.
