German born Claudia Hill started her clothing line and costume design work in the New York of the Nineties. Having had a dance background, she always maintained a passionate engagement with the performance art.
She presented her collections in form of multi-media events during New York Fashion Week, collaborating on installations, conceptual performances, videos and presentations with a wide range of artists such as Ariko Inaoka, the musician Skúli Sverrisson and the innovative Asymptote Architecture.
Now based in Berlin, she worked on performances and textile sculptures with the Israeli installation and video artist, Nelly Agassi, with whom she formed an enduring collaborative partnership.
Her collection has been distributed in Japan, at Barney’s New York and boutiques around the world.
Claudia was commissioned to design costumes for the choreographer William Forsythe and for the New York based ensemble The Wooster Group.
She currently works on her collection of limited edition clothing, which she presents outside of the fashion system. Her latest collaboration is a short film, directed by the choreographer Meg Stuart.
Claudia continues to work and develop her ideas in costume and non- fashion design, which to her, are a rich and challenging whole.
Claudia Hill brings to clothing design a dancer’s detailed awareness of the physical self in the physical world, the body’s relationship to space through movement, and the way emotion and meaning are expressed within that relationship.
Hill has experimented with manipulating textiles, fabricating new materials, and deconstructing and re-fabricating old ones. Once, in an act worthy of Raymond Roussel, she shredded a man’s suit, then knitted it into a woman’s cocktail dress, preserving an analogical relationship between the two garments even as one was being destroyed to create the other. Her approach is typically playful, iconoclastic, sensual but aesthetically refined, intellectually elegant. Experimentation is always balanced by a scrupulous clarity of purpose, so that each detail is justified, and the whole is graced with dignity and integrity.
She remains committed to the exploration of clothing design not only as fashion and costume, but, in a radical sense, as an experimental art of its own.
//Leora Barish