On Saturday 23 April, Centraal Museum opened the exhibition From Pattern to Polygon. The show is curated and created by Studio PMS, an Utrecht-based fashion collective composed by Puck Martens, Merle Kroezen and Suzanne Mulder; they developed the project to demonstrate how we can approach fashion heritage in a new way, and how digital techniques can help us breathing ‘new life’ into the museum’s historical fashion collections.

From Pattern to Polygon consists of three themes: The Workshop, focused on going behind the scene and unveiling the design process; The Archive, a non-hierarchical digital catwalk concentrated on the Museum’s collection, rendered in digital form in order to put on display the rarest and most fragile examples alongside contemporary pieces; and finally The Domain, developed in collaboration with a new generation of designers: here contemporary makers reconstruct an item of clothing from the museum’s fashion collection, adding their own interpretation and in this way creating new art works and a museum NFT (non-fungible token).

Fashion curator Ninke Bloemberg commented:

‘What makes this exhibition unique is not only that it fuses the physical and digital worlds, but that these worlds also prove to enhance each other. It’s absolutely enchanting, for example, how Studio PMS transforms a number of clothing items from the collection, which are now too fragile to wear, into digital catwalk models!’