VOGUE POLAND
Joanna Hawrot's project at EXPO 2025 in Osaka combines fashion, art and technology
Over the years, Joanna Hawrot has built a fashion brand that evokes two associations: fascination with traditional Japanese kimono and Polish contemporary art. Now these values are taking her directly to the prestigious Daimaru Center in Osaka, where the designer and artist will present an installation as part of Expo 2025.
The Daimaru Center in Osaka, where Joanna Hawrot will present her installation, is famous for its centuries-old tradition of producing and selling Japanese kimonos. For the Expo 2025 exhibition, the designer is placing 30 fashion works and artistic textiles here. She utilizes both the art gallery on the eighth floor and display windows across seven levels between floors. "Wearable Art – Unseen Threads" is an installation combining art, fashion, and new technologies. According to the organizers' estimates, it will be seen by a multi-million audience from up to 161 countries.
Fascination with textile, collaboration with Markul
"Textile has always been for me a carrier of history, a field of artistic intervention, a voice that instead of being silenced, reminds or even demands to be heard. Meanwhile, digital patterns don't follow the lines of the body, but allow it to redefine its presence in space," says Joanna Hawrot, citing inspiration from artists such as Magdalena Abakanowicz or Wojciech Sadley, whose approach to the textile medium proved revolutionary on a global scale. In the exhibition, highlighting the symbolic motif of thread, Hawrot also includes Angelika Markul's heart sculptures, defining "a trace of memory, tension and emotion."
Concrete city, a natural habitat
"Fashion is theater, and Japan is its master – from nō, through kabuki, to the street styles of Harajuku. Hawrot adds a new scene to this spectacle, where history intertwines with contemporaneity. She doesn't interpret Japanese tradition, she converses with it, sometimes questions it, filters it through her own sensitivity and builds a new, transcultural language of textile," emphasizes Dr. Paweł Pachciarek from the curatorial team. And photographer Zuza Krajewska follows this thought and portrays Joanna Hawrot's works between skyscrapers, somewhere in the backstage of life, between a parking lot and a warehouse. Gray concrete textures turn out to be as photogenic as gusts of wind and harsh sunlight reflecting off glass buildings.
Joanna Hawrot's project "Wearable Art – Unseen Threads" can be viewed from May 31 to June 24, 2025 at the Daimaru Center in Osaka. The project is being implemented as part of EXPO 2025 and the Art & Design Festival – it is the result of collaboration with the Adam Mickiewicz Institute.