Slovak Fashion Council in cooperation with Fashion Scout hosting a solo fashion show to present a young Slovak fashion brand MADbyMAD created by Mata Durikovic. The collection ‘Pink Matrix’ was presented during London Fashion Week.
Mata Durikovic is an LVHM Green Trail Award nominee and a winner of multiple awards including the Media Award by ITS: Platform Contest in 2022, Best Fashion Graduate by Slovak Fashion Council and Fashion Live! in 2022 for a sustainability price from the Copenhagen Fashion Summit in 2019. Mata focused on womenswear at Central Saint Martin’s graduating in 2022. She has a rich experience and history working in textile design and the womenswear luxury industry. Mata is currently based in Paris where she works as a textile designer as part of the textile design research team at Chanel Maison.
Mata focuses on sustainable luxury fashion at her bio-luxury brand MADbyMAD. Her motto “be MAD! be Bioluxury!” transforms into her work using bioplastic as a leather replacement bioplastic crystal leather with 3D embroidery in combination with recycled Swarovski crystal waste and using zero waste techniques such as knitwear and crochet.
PINK MATRIX Concept
In her collection ‘Pink Matrix’, she aims for fully sustainable luxury pieces made to be degradable into separate materials and easily recyclable. The inspiration comes from her childhood memories and relationship with her grandmother who used various sustainable practices at home. One of them was saving the starch water from potatoes and later watering the plants with it for better nutrition. This starch material is the basis for the bioplastic material that she started to experiment with and that became the basis for the collection. Her grandmother also used to repurpose old clothes into new garments for her to dress as different characters when they played games where they were teleporting and traveling between galaxies.
She aims to recreate the “Pink Matrix” universe, which played a significant role in her childhood with all its characters from different galaxies: the “Crystal Galaxy”, the “Flower Crystal Galaxy” and the “Strawberry Galaxy”. Each of the galaxies represents a specific aspect of her grandmother’s apartment; the things that used to transport her into all these fantasies such as her grandmother’s display case with crystal brooches, the kitchen full of candy and strawberries, and her entire apartment full of approximately 150 flowers of all different kinds.
She has been exploring bioplastic materials such as starch/fruit and jelly-based bioplastic, which she has developed into an edible fabric called a “Bioplastic Crystal Leather” – a leather-like consistency easily cookable at home from ingredients such as water and jelly. After being cooked, it can be layered into a wet texture that airdries within the next 2-3 days depending on the humidity of the environment. After it has dried, it is ready to be peeled off and made into a product. She only uses materials that her grandmother had access to at home such as her brooches, recycled knitting yarns, safety pins, starch water–bioplastic material, as well as crystals she used to charge at full moon, so they become healing portals.
The collection also consists of garments that are supposed to become healing portals after being charged at full moon bringing the wearer under their “protective shield”. In combination with the bioplastic material, she uses ‘upcycling’ materials such as recycled crystals donated by Swarovski or recycled knitting yarns donated by the UPW. As part of the bioplastic material experiment, she successfully managed to develop a material that takes the form of a transparent ‘leather substance’ that she calls a ‘Bioplastic Crystal Leather’ and that can be produced at home. Subsequently, it can be embroidered with an embroidery machine, printed using UV digital printing, and used as a 3D replacement of traditional embroidery with a so-called ‘puff’ effect. The result is a collection of “crystal garments” that can be cooked at home, are edible, and fully compostable in the garden, where they further nourish the plants after they “die”.
“Cook it! Wear it! Eat it! Vitalise plants with it!”
Photographer Jarka Crepova