Fredrik Tjærandsen: Inflated Realities and the Poetics of Pressure

09/02/2024

by NOCTURA Magazine

When Fredrik Tjærandsen’s graduate collection went viral in 2019—featuring models encased in giant, air-filled latex bubbles that slowly deflated into sculptural garments—fashion collectively held its breath. The Central Saint Martins graduate was not merely designing clothes; he was sculpting atmosphere, performance, and psychology into wearable form.

Born in Norway, Tjærandsen merges the disciplines of fashion, sculpture, and conceptual performance. His designs feel less like garments and more like living organisms—unfolding in real time, transforming from restriction to release. Each look is both theatrical and meditative: latex spheres that obscure the body like a womb or a membrane, then collapse to reveal it. It is clothing that breathes, contracts, and evolves.

At the heart of Tjærandsen’s practice is an exploration of memory and mental states. The inflatable forms function metaphorically—as pressure chambers, as cocoons of identity, as shields and soft cages. He has described the act of deflation as a symbolic release: of tension, of trauma, of self. In this way, fashion becomes not just adornment, but ritual.

What sets Tjærandsen apart is not just his visual audacity but his conceptual rigor. His collections are driven by questions: How do we inhabit our emotions? Can clothing contain a state of mind? What does it mean to wear your history, your fear, your breath?

Materially, his use of biodegradable latex and technical craftsmanship also speaks to a deeper environmental and philosophical consciousness. The clothing exists in flux—never fully stable, never fixed. It resists being captured in a still image, much like the experiences it seeks to embody.

Though still early in his career, Tjærandsen represents a new kind of fashion thinker—one who prioritizes sensation over spectacle, slowness over consumption, and internal narrative over external trend. His work challenges the very structure of a runway show, demanding time, space, and patience.

In a cultural landscape saturated with immediacy and noise, Fredrik Tjærandsen offers silence, breath, and introspection. His inflatables are not just designs—they are moments of suspension. Fashion, in his hands, becomes something closer to cinema or dream logic: a poetic interface between the seen and the felt.