Red fabric sweeps across the floor, every arm movement resembles a flapping of wings. Veronika Grundl, 26, embroidered feathers on the sleeves of the dress. Veronika wants to tell stories, so she doesn’t use words – just material. “I want to enchant with my clothes,” she says. In her almost ten square meter room, she sews unusual clothes. Or gives old shoes new life.
“As a child, I played fashion shows with my friends,” says Veronika. The selection was rather limited, her parents were “real ecos”. She herself felt like a princess. When she then discovered Bollywood films for herself, she was enthusiastic about the extravagant outfits. In her hometown there were no such clothes. “So I had to learn how to make them myself.”
However, Veronika seems to be a bit eco-friendly, and she often uses old fabrics for her creations. “Often I get inspired because I see clothes and wonder how they could be made more beautiful,” she says. “I just like to romanticize my life.” And that works quite well with glitter and feathers. The rubbish bin decorated with rhinestones and mirrors is symbolic of this.
Veronika has just finished her studies in fashion management. In her master’s thesis, she developed a business concept that aims to reduce overproduction in the fashion industry. She learned to sew during her training as a tailor, which she broke off. “I knew the basics, I taught myself a lot,” she says.
Veronika likes to capture her creative process in Tik-Tok or Instagram videos. “I think it’s nice to show other people how simple some things can be and thus awaken their creative spirit,” she says. She started making videos during the lockdown. “In that sense I’m grateful for the lockdown because I had a lot of time and resources to create,” says Veronika.
“It’s very meditative, I can work on a piece for hours and even forget to eat anything,” says Veronika. She finds inspiration in her everyday life. Then she asks herself, for example, how she can imitate a reflection of the water surface on a piece of clothing. “Often I can’t sleep until I’ve turned an idea into a sketch,” says Veronika and smiles.