COMBINAT
In the northwest corner of the Vienna Museumsquartier, near the entrance from Burggasse, surprised visitors will come upon a room filled with a unique selection of fashion, handbags, jewelry and accessories – the Combinat:
A welcome and refreshing Combination of lifestyle-pieces from several designer labels. A creative interplay of choice Designer-Soft-Wear. An assortment which can confidently hold its own, with museum-quality ambience achieved through a mass of creativity emerging out of the successful collaboration of several designers from various countries.
_A Combination of Creativities
For visitors who have frequented the spot since its opening in April of 2005, the most important aspect of the picturesque and charismatic room (which was once apparently directly below a tack room for K & K Hofstallungen, the horse stables of the Habsburgs) is that 5 inter/national designer labels – Pitour, meYoTa, Artista, km/a, Claudia Güdel – use the space as an ever-evolving showplace for their creative abilities.
The designers’ offerings distinguish themselves as a perfectly-formed variety, made up of a wide spectrum of high-quality, hand-made, unique products produced in low volume: from female and male fashions to collections of functional handbags to the latest designs in footwear, jewelry, accessories, etc. Here one can surely find what an urban aesthete could wear on his way to a hip museum – or countless other trendy sites.
_A Combination of Disciplines
Because one cannot escape the open, cultural ambiance of the Museumsquartier within Quartier21/MQ, visitors to the Combinat will not settle for lauding the cultivation of an exclusive ideal. The personnel that work in the room are much more concerned with understanding everyday urban culture and creating designs with this in mind – designs that function in everyday situations or even act as a reflection of these situations.
Thus, every month, the Combinat opens its doors to offer the opportunity for young artists to put their creativity on display on the walls of the room, in the form of photographs, paintings, or illustrated works.
It is no accident, then, that designers of the Combinat host vernissages more often than fashion shows, and it is also no coincidence that just this kind of dynamic creative enthusiasm is easy to see within their unique individual works.
For the creative minds of the Combinat, art is more than merely a buzzword. It is a symbiotic duty and persuasion. From these multiple interconnections within the discipline, an independent style emerges, which the Combinat employs in creating a space of its own - a space with a charisma that not only stretches past the borders of its Shop-in-Shop-Concept, but also reaches far beyond the walls of the Museumsquartier.
_A Combination of Strengths
After Maria Oberfrank (pitour) and Irene Schenk (meYoTa) came up with the initial idea of scheduling a regular meeting (jour-fixe) for designers in Vienna and increasing the popularity of creative designer labels through strategic cooperation and agglomeration of individual strengths, the decision was made to provide the group of collaborators with a common goal. A huge step in this process was locating a suitable space for the group, in Quartier21 of Vienna’s Museumsquartier.
Not just a place to sell the group’s creative designs, the space also functions as a showcase room, a workplace, and an art exhibit all in one. Indeed, the room provides a dynamic atmosphere for creativity. What was at the beginning merely a group of designers with mutual interests has become an experienced and accomplished collective, having yielded 5 labels which have continually surprised and impressed the most fastidious of critics with ever-evolving ideas and new and diverse offerings.
|
