When considering what it means to share a visual “reality” with other people, clothing has always struck me as a medium that’s especially divisive—everyone has unique tastes that they get attached to in regard to the way they want themselves and the people around them to look, and clothing that offends that taste can feel more repellent than any other medium. Is there any potential for a shared reality based on aesthetic consensus in such a polarizing sector of the creative world? Does there need to be in order for fashion to be impactful and facilitate relationships based on shared understandings?

Designer and clothes maker Louise Lyngh Bjerregaard has an alternative take—she craves the simulated experience created by her removal from the experience of someone wearing her clothes.

‍Em Seely-Katz: What kind of experience do you want people to have wearing your clothes?

Louise Lyngh Bjerregaard: In the past years, I’ve created very covered-up silhouettes. I think I’ve been sort of obsessed with the idea of showing how you can form a strong, sexy silhouette while being fully covered, draped in layers of heavy textiles.

So you almost can’t see where the borders are on the body in terms of the transition from one garment to the next.

I always have hats that create this almost incognito, distant relationship to the models when they wear them.

Some of the experiences I’ve been able to facilitate through these silhouettes are that whoever wears them, no matter what the garments are, the common ground is that everybody feels so powerful, and very rounded in their own self. You feel like you can go in the street and just take on whatever.

In a sense, it’s a powerful medium with which to create a conversation about reality or simulation—I think it’s interesting when a simulation forms a reality.

‍E: Oh, that’s really interesting, it’s like clothing-as-simulation of a body, and then the body kind of changes to fit the clothing?

L: It’s more like clothing is the link, maybe, between simulation and reality. It starts off as, maybe, asking questions or a purely imaginative approach in search of a vessel for a narrative, because I think once you start forming a 3D outcome—which clothing is, centered around the body—it’s always a blur.

I don’t know where I’m heading in my practice, just that there’s a narrative I want to explore with the body as a medium. At some point, the work becomes real—other people take it into reality.

For me, that still looks like a simulation—it’s never “real,” because I never really get to see it up front, even at shows I’m backstage looking at a screen, so it might as well be a simulation!

What’s so wild is that the clothing creates emotions in people—they form a new narrative based on what the clothing feeds them, so in that sense I think it’s hyper-interesting, what clothing can do if you use it as sort of a communication tool.

‍E: What would make the clothing feel real to you?

L: I’m not sure it ever will, and I think that’s the fun part. I love to stay in a simulation that becomes a reality for other people, but for me, I love the fantasy element… When you see someone on the subway, for example, wearing a really incredible piece, you see it as a whole, and that has a meaning to you as a viewer, but the wearer probably knows a detail on the inside—a stitch, or whatever it is, that only the wearer sees.

The meaning changes because the perspective changes, and I think that duality of clothing forms different realities—the same thing is completely different in the worlds of the wearer versus the observer.

‍E: Also, the fact that the wearer knows where it came from, maybe knows who made it, how much it cost, the provenance—that’s a whole ‘nother layer.

L: It’s, in a way, a parallel world—by creating clothing, you create distinct relationships between the piece and wearer or observer, essentially revealing parallel worlds.