MONUMENTS
Designer
Thomas-Armin Mathes
Country
Germany
category
Fashion
Prize
Official Selection 2026
Short Description
Before it became fashion, volume was protection.
Hair, fur, and layered structures once served as shelter from an uncertain world. Over time, these necessities evolved into symbols of beauty, status, and power.
In MONUMENTS, this evolution is pushed beyond reason. An immense mass of hair surrounds the figure, transforming protection into spectacle and comfort into architecture. The form appears soft and inviting, yet its scale becomes almost impossible.
The work is rooted in the language of elegance, but gently challenges its conventions. What initially appears refined and luxurious gradually reveals itself as excessive, improbable, and quietly disruptive.
Created through AI-based image generation, MONUMENTS explores a timeless human desire: to feel protected, admired, and significant. It asks where elegance ends and monument begins—and whether the two were ever truly separate.
Process
MONUMENTS began with a simple question: what if hair could function like architecture?
My work often explores the space between fashion, sculpture, and portraiture. For this project, I was interested in transforming hair from a decorative element into a protective structure — something that could simultaneously suggest shelter, status, softness, and power.
The process involved extensive visual development through iterative prompting, image selection, and refinement. The greatest challenge was finding the balance between elegance and excess. The form needed to feel impossible in scale while remaining believable as hair. Too realistic, and the image lost its monumentality. Too exaggerated, and it became fantasy.
The final image emerged when those contradictions aligned: protection and display, comfort and spectacle, elegance and disruption.
What inspired the piece?
The inspiration came from the historical relationship between protection and status.
Throughout human history, hair, fur, and layered garments have served both practical and symbolic purposes. They provided warmth and security while also communicating beauty, power, and social standing.
I became interested in how those ideas continue to exist in contemporary culture. In a world where visibility and identity are constantly performed, the desire to feel protected often exists alongside the desire to be seen.
MONUMENTS imagines these impulses pushed to an extreme. The figure is surrounded by an immense structure of hair that functions as both shelter and ornament. What initially appears elegant gradually becomes excessive, inviting questions about where protection ends and spectacle begins.