Mundi – A Surreal Fashion Story from the North
Despite his young age, Guðmundur Hallgrímsson, better known as Mundi, is no rookie in the fashion industry. After having started his career in fashion as a pure accident involving the Icelandic phone book, he has been crossing boundaries, creating amazement and managing to stay an artist while pursuing a career in fashion. Barely 25 years old, he is one of Iceland’s most well-known designers and artists.
The young and somewhat avant-garde designers often get under the loupe with the discussion “Artist or designer, fashion or art?” In the case of Mundi there is no real need for discussion. He is not just a designer with an artistic angle to it, or an artist turned designer, more than he is an artist who also designs – and makes the whole discussion damn interesting. Ever since that first knit, which was made to be printed as the cover of the Icelandic phone book, also turned to be a sweater, he has managed to produce seasonal collections as a fashion designer while taking part in major art projects. His art collective MoMs has travelled the world, exhibiting and performing, and among the more famous projects you find collaborations with the Austrian, worldwide known group of artists, Gelitin. As a designer his skills in graphics as well as the Icelandic knits have become parts of the brand’s foundation and his understanding for art has become the way he presents it.
For not only does Mundi know how to put on a runway show or excite the audience of an art exhibition, he has also proved to master the art of fashion film. His first short, The Rabbit Hole, was launched during Paris Fashion Week 2010 and received tons of attention. Mundi himself was though strict on pointing out that the film wasn’t one in the category of fashion. In an interview with Dazed Digital he said: “If you focus too much on the fashion, the main subject falls apart. I only look at fashion in terms of extreme costumes that help to create the characters. If you are making a film it has to be more focused on a story, a character, a plot… I think in some cases ‘fashion films’ are nothing more than a long dramatic commercial. They come to life when a lost photographer realises his new Canon 5D Mark II has a video option, so instead of taking photos he makes a terrible video of skinny models jumping around in slow-motion!”
Despite this, the film amazed its audience, being like a seventeen minutes long surreal fashion editorial showcasing Mundi’s eccentric designs in the surroundings of the Icelandic highlands.
For the AW 12/13 collection, Mundi presented The Journey, another short film, but this time with the goal to create a pre-story for the runway where the characters would finally come to life. The Journey turned out to be far away from a long, dramatic commercial featuring skinny models, and even though we dare to say it’s a fashion film, it still has that Mundi ‘surrealness’ about it. The collection is shown in its full, from the distorted graphics to the careful details in the shirts, knits and accessories and was the perfect parallel to the later put on runway show.
Mundi seem to have a penchant for the futuristic side of things but the charm of his predilection is that it takes shape in something that could as easily be taken for an inspiration from the past. With a strong base in his Icelandic heritage, this is an artist slash designer who has already impressed the international fashion crowd and might be one of the stronger reasons for the industry audience to travel all the way to Reykjavík, even though the two last collections have been premiered during Paris Fashion Week. For SS13 Mundi will be showing his 13th official collection and by looking at the evolvement of his designs in the retrospective we can just guess that his graphic knits will take another turn, yet again.
