ERKI Moeshow 2014
The Team:
ERKI Fashion Show 2014 project lead: Piret Mägi
Graphic design: Lauri Tõnisson, Allan Appelberg
Motion graphics: Lauri Tõnisson
Website: Gert Gutmann
ERKI Fashion Show:
ERKI Fashion Show is historical fashion event that took place for the first time at the Assembly Hall of Estonian National Institute of Arts (Estonian abbreviation ‘ERKI’) in 1982. It started out as a demonstration of the eighties’ art students but by the nineties it had become the main stage to show the avant-garde apparel creations. Now, by the 21st century, the annual ERKI Fashion Show has become one of the biggest, most intriguing and most important fashion shows in Estonia.
It’s a non-profit student fashion show organized by volunteers and sponsored by various companies.
ERKI Fashion Show 2014 concept:
ERKI sees You. Your every step is being monitored, your every action is being saved. Your conversations, your ideas, your childrens’ birthday party images, your shopping list from last tuesday, are all stored away somewhere in the depths of databases. Alltogether this information crafts a detailed persona of you: your patterns of behaviour, ideals, hopes and expectations towards the society, everything is known. Once the information is out there, it’s irrecoverable. Leaks, aswell as someone taking advantage of this information is inevitable.
Challenges:
To create a viusal identity that could be applied to a variety of mediums. In addition to traditional graphic design elements, the identity had to be able to commix motion graphics and sound design. The design had to reflect the progressive state of the identity starting with the call for entries in February to the event intself in May, followed by the Pop-Up shop in late May.
Whilist creating the identity, one of the most difficult challenges was to incorporate the graphical elements of various sponsors to keep the integrity of the design.
Solution:
The central inmage became a faceless profile picture, that in everyday situation looks like a meaningless annonymous mask, behind which we try to hide ourselves but which is in-fact impossible. We leave behind bits and pieces of information, often unknowingly, that when combined, could paint an incredibly detailed image about us. Even those who carefully try to craft their self-image, are naked in this world full of information. Over time various data about a person will accumulate which will reveal the actual identity behind the mask.
The visual identityt developed over 4 months in consideration with the media plan to form the annonymous face. Due to the scarce amount of preliminary information released in February, notifying that ‘ERKI is coming’, the earliest designs were quite modest and featured only one main sponsor. According to the concept, this is the part where the information gathering starts, thus the modesty of the design. By May, the ‘mask’ had been established and the conceptual ‘annonymous’ face was taking shape. Conceptually, ‘information was still being gathered’ up until the fashion show itself, when the final ‘Facade’ was presented.
The robust and obtrusive typography served the objective of a patronizing undertone to bring forward the totalitarian overall impression. Due to the same reason multiple colors were dropped and only a black and white color scheme was adopted.
Since ERKI Fashion Show is an unconventional event due to it’s themes and non-profit agend, the white boxes around content and sponsors is to reflect the independence of the show, while still reminding us of the monetary influences which it’s still depending. Thus ironically the ‘spam’ boxes were incorporated.
The lines in the design were generated through a web based script and afterwards manually traced into a vector format so that they could be used as part of the design. The images used was a template 3d render of a human head. The only time actual images of a person were used were for the business cards.
