For Amsterdam Fashion Week, AICHE presented Seeing Sounds, a collection exploring the ways music, routine and small rituals can offer an escape from an increasingly overstimulated world. Four separate scenes unfolded across this fragmented cityscape, each featuring characters absorbed in their own rhythm and creating moments of stillness through seemingly ordinary gestures.
A woman sits quietly in a lounge chair, a red light therapy mask covering her face as she reads a magazine. Nearby, two others walk side by side on treadmills, EarPods in and seemingly elsewhere. At an office table, laptops fill the surface as office workers stare at their screens, while across the room, an intimate dinner is interrupted as two guests reach for their phones. Together, the scenes form a fragmented portrait of life in a city that never seems to switch off.
That sense of individuality continued in the collection. Models walked with headphones on, listening to music and retreating into their own personal soundtracks. One model carried an appropriately AICHE-branded bike over his shoulder, turning an everyday object into part of the choreography and adding to the distinctly urban character of this debut show.
The clothes similarly played with recognisable pieces and unexpected interventions. A mini dress with a cut-out around the waist came finished with an out-of-proportion fur-trimmed hood, while a classic baby-blue dress shirt was tucked into matching cotton boxers and finished with a brown denim. Elsewhere, small square fabric patches were layered into textured surfaces, appearing across a lime-yellow dress and on the back of a pinstripe jacket.
Classic tailoring was given a sharper, more experimental treatment. A loose grey suit was punctuated with razor-sharp pieces of silver mirror, scattered across the fabric like fragments. Knitwear took on a more sculptural quality, with a black long-sleeved top featuring a spiderweb-like opening across the back, paired with an exaggerated skirt. One version took the form of an oversized bubble silhouette; another built volume through layers of lacquered black fabric.
The collection’s most playful pieces pushed this sense of transformation even further. Skirts constructed from dozens of shiny ties were layered on top of a crinoline structure. Familiar objects, fabrics and wardrobe staples were repeatedly taken out of context and rebuilt into something more unexpected.
Presented in collaboration with Escentric Molecules, Seeing Sounds brought AICHE’s world of fashion, music and everyday culture into focus. Its characters remained immersed in their own worlds throughout the presentation, whether through music, work, movement or ritual. In the middle of all that noise, AICHE found its moments of stillness, before the quiet was interrupted by a cheering crowd as the team stepped into the space among their characters, taking up the room for their final bow.
Image by SHOTBYSE7EN