The fashion festival of Hyères dedicates the Finnish designer Jenny Hytönen, for her collection under the sign of BDSM.
The 37th edition of the International Festival of Fashion, Fashion Accessories and Photography of Hyères ended yesterday with the awards ceremony at the Villa Noailles. This year’s competition focused on ecology, with significant manual work and research on materials. The Grand Prize of the Première Vision jury, presided over by Glenn Martens, artistic director of Y/Project and Diesel, and including Eugénie Trochu, Head of Editorial Content at Vogue France, and Christa Bösch and Cosima Gadient, the duo behind Ottolinger, was won by Finnish designer Jenny Hytönen. She was also awarded the Public Prize of the City of Hyères.
Originally from Helsinki and a graduate of Aalto University, Jenny Hytönen, a 25-year-old designer, has worked on the contrast between armor and glamour, with leather garments spiked with metallic spikes or transparent mesh adorned with glass beads. In an assumed BDSM (bondage-discipline-sado-masochism) spirit, the vests open in the back with a set of buckled belts, associated with translucent beaded skirts worn over black leather briefs. The skin is revealed in a game of transparency and studded accessories.
The young designer’s collection was seductive because of its great strength, not only visual, but conceptual, managing to mix two opposing worlds, as well as its incredible technical mastery. “Each bead is placed by hand in the knitting” she explains. “It’s also a time-consuming way of working that emphasizes the value of craftsmanship and the importance of manual execution techniques.”
In the Fashion category, the Festival also honored Valentin Lessner, who not only received the “le 19M des Métiers d’Art” award introduced by Chanel in 2019, but also the Mercedes-Benz Eco Collection Award. Originally from Munich and a graduate of the Academy of Fine Arts in Düsseldorf, the young designer made a name for himself with his collection mixing streetwear and tailoring.
The Grand Jury Prize for Fashion Accessories went to Joshua Cannone for his powerful collection of unusual and sometimes even disturbing pieces. The Accessories People’s Choice Award saluted the work of Lola Mossino, trained at the École nationale supérieure des arts appliqués et des métiers d’art in Paris, and Indra Eudaric, who went through the École supérieure d’art et design de Saint-Étienne, who launched her jewelry brand as a self-taught artist in 2015. The two teamed up to work on a joint project around a collection of jewelry with an erotic-playful spirit. Thanks to their model “La Cavalière”, the duo also won the Hermès Fashion Accessories Prize, initiated by the saddler in 2020, and whose theme this year was the belt,. For the photography part, the prize was awarded to the South Korean Rala Choi, who also won the Public Prize.
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Featured photo : © Vanni Bassetti
