Viktor & Rolf

   Viktor Horsting (1968) and Rolf Snoeren (1969) were born in southern Holland and met at the Arnhem Academy design school in 1988. Their first collection won the grand prize in the competition Salon européen des jeunes stylistes in Hyères, France, in 1993—their designs were conceptually oriented, with a focus on poking fun at fashion rather than creating wearable fashion. Their 1996 collection was shown entirely on Barbie-size dolls. In 1998, the Groniger Museum in northern Holland not only gave them an art show and funded their first couture show (inspired by the atomic bomb) but also launched a retrospective of their first five seasons. They were among an elite group of designers to be invited by the prestigious Fédération Française de la Couture to show their fall/winter 1999-2000 collection in France. Their fashion presentations often have been media hyped, such as their couture show in 1999, the Russian Doll Collection, where they placed a model on a turntable and dressed her in nine layers of crystal-studded clothes until she could not move. In 2000, they licensed their ready-to-wear, handbags, and footwear lines to Gibo, the Italian subsidiary of Japanese conglomerate Onward Kashiyama, and, in 2001, the duo was hired to design Kashiyama's bridge sportswear line, International Concept Brand (ICB).

   They exhibited a ten-year retrospective at the Museum of Fashion and Textiles at the Louvre in 2003, the same year that they launched their menswear line. In 2003, Viktor & Rolf initiated a creative collaboration with actress Tilda Swinton, who not only had become their muse but had also been featured in their runway presentation One Woman Show. In 2004, Viktor & Rolf partnered with L'Oreal and launched their first fragrance, Flowerbomb, which was packaged as a pink hand grenade. In 2005, they opened their first store in Milan with an upside-down concept: chandeliers came up from the floor and a floor of oak parquet was on the ceiling. In 2006, they signed with Allegri to design a line of men's and women's outerwear and with H&M to design a one-time line of menswear, womenswear, and accessories. They continue to explore the world of avant-garde fashion in their ready-to-wear and haute couture collections and are definitely on the radar screens of both the art and fashion worlds.