Tina Gorkič represents the young Slovenian fashion designers’ scene, focusing on women’s clothing and recently also on women’s accessories. Throughout her student years at the NTF, with her first collection Aisha as well as with the collection from 2016 named Impressia, Tina has outlined the key features of her work – experimentation with textures, silhouettes, materials, patterns and different techniques, including knitting, all the way to the use of modern technology. Impressia in particular, dealing with everyday impressions together with Impressionism in general, announced her further conceptual approach. With the latter collection Tina has opened a new chapter, not only by winning an award at Ljubljana Fashion Week in April 2016, but also with a twist on perceiving clothes as a kind of a shelter, embodying all our emotions, feelings and thoughts.

Maybe the best symbolic example of human shelter is a coat, the only kind of garment in the Expressia collection, which won the faculty’s Prešeren award in 2018 as a master’s thesis mentored by prof. Marija Jenko. Although the collection only includes coats, we are not deprived of  complexity. With a variety of different textures, techniques and a palette of avant-garde white, there is one feature that makes this collection truly unique – its multifunctionality. Each coat can be transformed into textile interiors (curtains, carpet, decorative pillow, blanket or seat), but also the human body together with the voluminous coats works as a sculpture in the space we occupy. This negation of the human body reminds us of the 80’s and the deconstruction of fashion by Japanese designers in Paris, with a twist of Rick Owens’s modernity. The complex concept, drawing on anthropological and psychological theory, sees each coat representing the relationships among everyday emotions, individual senses and space, ending up as a cohesive whole.

As a kind of escape from working on Expressia, Tina started experimenting with beads. As a result she launched her first collection of handmade accessories, including brooches, beaded earrings and woven purses a month ago. ‘Threading beads onto a chain and lying on grass are my favourite childhood memories’ said Tina. As a designer of sports uniforms’ for rhythmic gymnastics and twirling, beads are an important part of Tina’s creative tool. Different combinations of strong to pastel colours, and a variety of shapes and sizes of beaded insects bring us back to key characteristic of Tina’s work – finding new ways of experimentation.

The first brooches and earrings are already available at Saloon Concept Store in Ljubljana.

You can find Tina on Instagram @tina.gorkic or email her at tina.gorkic@gmail.com.

 

/ text: Tajda Hlačar