SALON OPEN Fashion
designer Zusi Rongen
(create July 2004)
Salon Open captures the unique connection between contemporary art, fashion and design in a single experience. A collection of one-off clothing, art objects and product designs, Salon Open is a fusion of all of these.
All products are inspired by a common theme reflects both the immediacy of popular and graphic culture and the organism of nature. This is clothing with a story, a translation of traveling mind and memories from places and reflections of past time, manifestations of new visions and spontaneous solutions, answers on questions in everyday life, reflections on the environment and spaces in which we chose to live our lives.
"Imagine clothes as paintings worn on the body, dressing as an everyday performance where the small, transient but unique memory of a moment captured by the designer is brought to life by the wearer. A spiritual process drawn from being in a place at a specific time with the emotional awareness of being part of it.
Each design and garment produced is a very limited edition and variations of fabric, print, pattern, cutting and shaping produce a unique piece, emphasising the range as fashion as part of contemporary art.
Zusi Rongen’s new fashion-installation-performance "WALKING BOOK CHAPTERS" draw inspirations from the nature, science, philosophy, landscape, flora and fauna, sea and rocks, as abstracted motifs within a range of prints on organic cottons. She manipulates hare photographs and collages the images to produce print patterns that contrast and interact with images from the urban landscape of east London. These images all reflect journeys made and heightened in chapters from hare biographical " Music Book" travel experiences of places and spaces.
* Fashion-performance-installation at Safe Place exhibition event , August 2011, London Red Gallery space.
Hare fashion installation collection " MADE IN LONDON" (2008) make direct connection to the situation of fashion market with have moved the almost whole fashion production to Chine. This have make situation as fashion designer base in UK and the clothing production a hard to realise subject as the prices are raising high and real hand made work disappeared from the job segment.
* Fashion Performance installation, July 2008 London
Previously.... in Nu-Ology (2009) sci-fi models performed intergalactic and international operations. Models inhabited an imaginary mindscape, where not only dream and reality infused each other, but the fashions themselves operated within a brain-centre scenario of the imagination. In the retro-future, ancient-manga-nature-robots at the nerve centre reached out to international fashion sensors - are these masked models for real? Salon Zusi’s Nu collection and way of showing, asked questions, you – the viewer, the wearer - provide the answers.
At the same time, Rongen’s designs are handmade and retain a localised design sensibility and production. Each ‘autonomous’ t-shirt and outfit encapsulates a real or fantastic story that could provoke an exhibition or performance (or both?) of their own. As her motif global balloon design disappears into outer space it reappears and comes sharply into focus in the imagination of the viewer and materialised on an object as everyday as a t-shirt. Each piece a fragment of the story of a performance collection.
* Fashion performance London 2009, Rythmatic Egg Club,
* Fashion performance Nederland 2008 Theatre Festival
