Ode to Aynouk Tan | Ode to Aynouk Tan

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Dear Aynouk,
 

A while ago we stood together in the Amsterdam Museum, we were installing the outfit you put together that was given a place in the exhibition Unboxing: Fashion from the Archive. Among the fashion objects from the archive and creations by contemporary designers, you dressed the mannequin. With your carefully chosen garments that seem to have no relationship to one another, but through your hand form a new and distinct whole.
 

With infectious creativity, you move through the various items, props and fabrics. I look at the half-dressed mannequin, a doll with features attributed to the image of womanhood. A narrow waist, slender shoulders and arms and breasts. I wonder why these “feminine features” are so fixed in our gaze and why our society thinks so statically about gender and identity? Because can't I just look at this mannequin without labeling and judging it? Can't I see this mannequin as a human being? Can't gender mean more than just being female and male?

Slowly you layer the doll and it takes on a different meaning of its own. A bright pink princess dress with net stockings as sleeves, but with that comes a pouch shaped like a dick, shopping bags and plastic flowers. With a tower of crowns as the icing on the cake. This work pushes and pulls at the norm, seeking the stretch in the mold and showing that gender presents itself more in a spectrum than in two pigeonholes.
 

'Fashion is a dressing-up box, not a straitjacket,' you say, explaining your work to us. With this sentence, I am suddenly 7 years old again. A child who prefers to dive into a dressing-up box every day to bring to life all kinds of possible characters and fantasies. Dressing up allowed me to be whoever I wanted, without worrying about whether I would fit in among the rest or conform to what everyone expected of me. But now that I'm 35 years old, as soon as I hear that phrase I realize that I miss the freedom and fun of dressing up. I lost that carefree feeling somewhere along the way. I am rethinking what clothing can be: an extension of yourself, a tool to challenge gender norms, and a way to playfully, freely be our real selves.

As a writer, curator, and fashion activist, you constantly challenge us to rethink the social frameworks in which we experience fashion. You use clothing as protest, demonstrating against the white, straight and gender norms that imprison us. I admire your courage to constantly operate outside those established frameworks. In your creations, I see a limitlessness and a search for gender and identity that breaks open and critically questions the rules of the fashion industry. To me, your work symbolizes a unique vision in which fashion is much more than aesthetics - it is a social statement, a form of art, and even an invitation to reshape society.
 

I find your connection to Amsterdam as inspiring as it is fascinating. You move through the city with the same playfulness with which you approach fashion, and you show us that Amsterdam is more than just a backdrop for your creations - the city itself is given a central place in your work. You thereby give Amsterdam a special role; it becomes a living, breathing part of your expressions and activism. You wear the city as your coat, with stories from then and now in the pockets.
 

I want to thank you for the freedom you teach me and us to (re)discover; to play, to look differently and to reinvent ourselves through clothing. Seeing your work, in which boundaries do not exist and gender is only a fluid concept, gives me the courage to color outside the lines myself, to think and act differently. And to dress up again, to find my 7-year-old self again.
 

You say that this city has taught you everything, but I am convinced that this city can especially learn a lot from you.
 

In admiration and with kind regards,
 

Emma