During Amsterdam Fashion Week, the Amsterdam Museum brings two timely conversations to ODE (Melkweg Café), exploring the stories, materials and communities that have shaped Amsterdam’s fashion culture. From the contested history of animal materials to the rise of local streetwear, the talks ask how fashion can be understood, preserved and passed on as part of the city’s cultural heritage.
Fashion & Fauna: Heritage, Taboo or Second Life?
How do we look at a 19th-century fur muff today — as valuable heritage, a symbol of class, or a material we now reject? Fashion & Fauna: Heritage, Taboo or Second Life? explores the changing attitudes towards animal materials in fashion, from museum collections to contemporary vintage.
Drawing on the Amsterdam Museum’s extensive fashion and textile collection, the talk brings together three perspectives on a material that continues to divide opinion. Roberto Luis Martins, curator of Fashion and Popular Culture at the Amsterdam Museum, focuses on researching, collecting and exhibiting fashion and popular culture from a social-political perspective. His curatorial work includes Continue This Thread, exploring the power of handicraft, and Grand March, which highlighted the artistic voices of the ballroom house House of Vineyard.
Joining him is Marieke Eyskoot, sustainable fashion and lifestyle expert, presenter and author of Dit is een goede gids – voor een duurzame lifestyle. Known for her work on greenwashing, overconsumption and the impact of consumer culture on people, the planet and animals, Eyskoot brings a critical perspective to the ways we think about materials, consumption and sustainability.
The conversation is completed by Myscha, manager and curator at Amsterdam vintage boutique Penny Lane, which specialises in high-end, designer and distinctive vintage pieces. Alongside her work in vintage, Myscha is an artist working across photography and painting, bringing a perspective grounded in the continued life and value of fashion beyond its original context.
Dymhpie Braun moderates the conversation, bringing the different perspectives together and opening up the discussion to the audience.
Saturday 5 September | 13:00–14:30
ODE (Melkweg Café)
Amsterdam Streetwear: In Conversation With Masta Lee
The afternoon continues with a look at one of Amsterdam’s most influential fashion cultures. In Amsterdam Streetwear: In Conversation With Masta Lee, Randy Soewarno, Strategic Director at GOWTU, speaks with Masta Lee (Peter Lee), former designer and Media Director at Patta.
Using objects from Lee’s personal collection, the conversation traces the city’s streetwear history from the skate and hip-hop scenes of the 1980s through the growth of local retailers and international collaborations, while reflecting on the communities and diaspora that shaped it. The talk also asks what role the Amsterdam Museum could play in preserving streetwear as an important part of the city’s cultural heritage.
Rather than looking at streetwear solely through the lens of fashion, the conversation considers it as a living part of Amsterdam’s social and cultural history — one shaped by the people, places and communities that continue to give the city its distinctive character.
Saturday 5 September | 16:00–18:00
ODE (Melkweg Café)
Both talks are open to the public and form part of the Amsterdam Fashion Week programme. Amsterdam Streetwear: In Conversation With Masta Lee is featured on the official AFW26 schedule, while Fashion & Fauna: Heritage, Taboo or Second Life? is included in the AFW26 event schedule. Tickets for both talks are available via the Amsterdam Museum website.