Marta Veinberga, Laima Juča
Fashion collection “Collective Blanket”
18 looks (10 female; 8 male)
The collection “Collective Blanket” is collaboration between fashion artist Laima Jurča and painter Marta Veinberga. The collection’s graphical identity is based on Marta’s paintings that are made of a material well recognizable to anybody in Baltics (and beyond) – prize stickers issued by supermarkets, gas stations and convenience stores (www.martaveinberga.com ). In short, these paintings polemicize on mass aesthetics, remains of the soviet visual culture in the contemporary environment and excessive shopping as a short-term remedy and fake solution to our desires – themes that has an equally strong presence in the earlier creative work of Laima Jurča (see, for example, her collection “Piecgades ģenerālmēģinājums” https://www.laimajurca.com/collection/piecgades-generalmeginajums ).
The central theme of the “Collective Blanket” is a contradictory thinking of two epochs. On one hand, the constant overproduction and excess of goods in the market economy makes people buy cheap and unnecessary things thus the value system of and individual is being deformed. On the other hand, the overall deficiency of goods and lack of choice characteristic to a generally ill-fated soviet planned economy were, in its turn, encouraging for individual creation. The visual language of the “Collective Blanket” joins these two epochs in somewhat utopian way: the collection carries both the advertisement-like colour palette of prize stickers with slogans, popular brand logos and pop-culture heroes and, at the same time, brings forth some familiar silhouettes from the soviet era. This counterpoint aims at the importance of an individual will to create, to dream, to flirt with the system or evade it.