Katharina Spitz
Fashion Design BA
Berlin University of the Arts
Graduates: 2021
Specialisms: / Formal/Couture / Textile Innovation/Textile Art
My location: Amsterdam, Netherlands
Katharina Spitz
First Name: Katharina
Last Name: Spitz
University / College: Berlin University of the Arts
Course / Program: Fashion Design BA
Graduates: 2021
Specialisms: / Formal/Couture / Textile Innovation/Textile Art
My Location: Amsterdam, Netherlands
Website: Click To See Website
About
Katharina Spitz is an Amsterdam based Designer and Dressmaker. She has a great passion for hourlong handiwork, contemplating the human body, and the knitting and untangling of the social fabric in matter, form and spirit.In 2013 she made her rite de passage into the world of dressmaking as an apprentice at Pio O'kan Couture in Düsseldorf; after which she emancipated herself as an autonomous fashion designer at the Berlin University of the Arts (UdK) where she graduated at the Institute for experimental Textile and Fashion Design in October 2021.Her passion for crafting and dressmaking remains a key component within her artistic practice. Fashion is for her first of all a way of being in the world: it interprets and shapes our social networks and ultimately our position in space and time. Through critical intellectual, personal and material engagement with the world around her she seeks ways in which her designs, performances and dressmaking can open up new perspectives and ways of being in a world that is suffering from pollution, misogyny, inequality and deep-seated alienation.
Memory cultures show us how societies represent themselves and how they want to be remembered. Forget Me Not asks with which intention and what sort of objects a culture shapes its own memory and legacy. The body of work consists of textile works with unusual material properties: ceramic body parts that appear to be knitted, crochet textiles and softly knitted wool fabrics. ‘Forget Me Not’ reveals differences between how objects cultivate our memory. There are, for example, personal objects, like a knotted hair brooch to commemorate a loved one. But also objects that express the memory cultures of societies that try to overcome their own mortality through static self-representation. This tension is used by Spitz as a starting point for her own fashion designs, in which she explores the possibility of a transformative memory culture. Transience should, according to Spitz, no longer be conceived of a threat. She invites us to reflect upon existing memory cultures from a feminist and material-oriented perspective.