Exhibits Are Us could be the motto of the Hollein household this May. In the span of nine days, architect turned designer Nina Hollein attended the Met Gala in a dress of her own design with her husband the CEO and director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Max Hollein; was the subject, with Elfie Semotan, of an exhibition in New York; and headed to Linz to set up a retrospective show of her work in her native Austria.
It took Hollein, who had always sewn her own clothes, 15 years to get to this point. Passionate about ballet in her youth (its influence is present in her fashion work), she studied architecture and worked in the field in the ’90s in New York. She returned to her needles and threads when taking a pause from her career to raise her family. “I needed to have something to compensate,” she said at a preview. [To show] “that I’m working and that I’m creative and that I produce something.”
Hollein’s approach was to start close to home in more ways than one. Her first designs were for children, and her chosen fabrics (tablecloth and apron checks among them) were traditional Austrian home textiles from mills she had personal relationships with, that were repurposed for fashion. When the Holleins moved from Germany to San Francisco in 2016, Nina closed up shop and adapted to her new environment. In the U.S., she said, “I really started to work on more glamorous dresses because especially in San Francisco, they have all these galas and evenings and everyone is dressing up all the time. So I figured this is a niche that women are interested in, and it works pretty well actually here in New York where in our circle of friends, there are many women who really want to have something that nobody else has and that you can wear in the evening.”
And so Hollein added to her repertoire and materials. Today she works with a transparent Austrian tulle that she cuts into a tube dress with drawstring ties that the wearer can transform into something more cloud-like. “My idea was really to encourage the woman to really define what she wants to do with [the dress]. To get active and not just be the passive customer, but [be] little more involved with what is her individual style.” This is an asset that the designer tries to work into her work as much as possible; in the New York exhibition there’s a miniskirt, for example, that can be worn as a cape; similarly easy and elegant evening dresses can be worn belted or loose.
In the context of Hollein’s heritage, one could make a connection with the loose body-freeing “reform dress” proposed by the Wiener Werkstätte in the 1910s, though Hollein is focused on being forward-looking. She attributes her interest in comfort and movement to her dance training. “I always wear dresses that are really comfortable because that’s important for me,” she said. “To be able to move, to see how the dress moves with you, but also to have this feeling, to be able to raise your arms and legs and show this off; this just is more attractive to me, not only to wear, but sometimes also to see and to watch in other women.”