THE HAGUE.- A few years ago Marga Weimans (1970) became the first Dutchwoman to graduate from the prestigious Fashion Department of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp (Koninklijke Academie voor Schone Kunsten te Antwerpen). She won an important international award with her graduation collection, which created a fashion statement for the modern, black woman - strong and dynamic.

The Groninger Museum has her collection Debut on show, her first ever collection to be shown in Paris, in the spring of 2008. With this collection Weimans strived to create ‘sublime beauty’: breathtaking beauty bordering on extravagance and decadence, even on death and decay. Some of the pieces are so monumental that they incline towards architecture.

With her Debut collection, fashion designer Marga Weimans (1970) explores the concept of ‘sublime beauty’: beauty that borders on the overwhelming, on excess and on decadence, eventually leading to death and decay. The collection consists of nineteen outfits, nine of which seem to show a certain development, starting from a simple T-shirt and evolving into larger and more complex shapes, culminating in an outfit that resembles an architectonic construction rather than a wearable dress. Weimans was inspired by a classic basic dress form: the Four-Leaf Clover dress which American fashion designer Charles James created from four conical shapes in 1953.

In her latest collection, Weimans has used materials and techniques not commonly seen in the world of fashion. Some of her dresses are made from stiff polyester-reinforced glass fibre normally used in the construction sector. She has also used a variety of casting techniques to create intriguing, Rorschach-like teardrop shapes in materials such as tin and polyester. On the dress, these shapes resemble a spreading disease rather than decoration. Weimans has continued this theme by using coarse wool to embroider similar teardrop shapes that seem to encroach on the clover dresses. These elaborate dresses provide a stark contrast to her column dresses, the column being one of the most fundamental dress shapes. The photos printed on the white dresses tell the story of how the collection was created.

Much of Weimans’s work shows that even sublime beauty can become ugly, and that it is not possible for beauty to exist independently of ugliness. This collection reflects the designer’s love for, and fascination with, Haute Couture, and the techniques and skills used by the world of fashion in its quest for beauty. Debut excels in exaggerating these values, even parodying them, but also reflects Weimans’s boundless fascination for the archaic phenomenon that is Haute Couture.

In 2005, Weimans was the first Dutch fashion student to graduate from the Royal Academy of Art in Antwerp, and her final project won the ID Styling Award in that same year. Her academy collections all display a focus on creating a new, dignified and elegant role model for black women. With this, Weimans, whose roots lie in Surinam, has made her personal history the subject of her work. A number of these outfits have been acquired by the Groninger Museum. Representing a new phase, Debut is Marga Weimans’s exploration of universal themes like beauty and ugliness. The Groninger Museum has purchased the entire Debut collection.