I wish I knew what dress to wear. Fashion transforms. Fashion thrives on turning everything created in its name into a performance.

It showcases what can be combined on the body through fabrics, colors, and shapes, and through novel combinations, it takes on an unfamiliar cut. It is this ongoing transformation of the body image that blurs the line between the familiar and the unfamiliar and represents an adventure for the senses—for seeing and feeling, for showing and being seen. Anyone fortunate enough to be able to develop their ideas along the lines of the body into images of the well-dressed, to unfold their imagination in designs of bodily appearance, would be well advised to engage first and foremost with bodies. Fashion may be a product of artifice, but it thrives on free design that reshapes the body and, with it, life. The students in the Fashion program at the Department of Design at Bielefeld University of Applied Sciences have oriented themselves toward these principles. This magazine features artifacts: sewn, glued, or riveted; light-reflecting or light-absorbing; cotton cloth, linen, or silk combined with metal, wood, plastic, and mirrored glass.

What could be interpreted and contemplated are individuals in retreat, wrapped in monochromatic fabrics, whose refuge in an aesthetic world may be a response to the overwhelming outside world. But the designs equally reveal a space for self-expression, a person seeking community, and clothing that transcends age differences. Masculine gestures transform into feminine ones; genders shift. Elements borrowed from the visual arts, from the conceptual thinking of Pop and Concept Art, are transformed into combinable readymades made of recycled fabrics, in which sustainability and a wealth of variations meet. One finds reactions to the visual onslaught of digital networks; technology is coaxed into revealing its playful and combinatorial potential rather than its functional tasks.