No.4: Learning Within, Learning Without

Werkplaats Typografie presents a catalog of Works from the Collection of Holly van Houten. Spanning multiple decades and personally selected from around the world, the collection includes over a thousand items that memorialize the life of this candidly private, bohemian connoisseur. Carefully examined by our specialists, a curated selection of rarities, antiquities, oddities, and works of art is available in this catalog, which accompanied an exclusive auction held during Printed Matter’s LA Art Book Fair in May 2025 in Los Angeles, Van Houten’s beloved city.

Project by: WT Year 25 & Year 26 for LA PMABF led by Hannes Drißner, Lisa Lagova, Nuno Beijinho

Designer: Hannes Drißner, Lisa Lagova, Nuno Beijinho. Objects photographed by Augustinas Milkus and Jordi de Vetten

The very first issue of Viscose tackles the expansive notion of “style”. Both a noun and a verb, style can be understood as the most basic unit or currency of fashion. Style names the very movement of aesthetics in society, and thus holds an important place in the critique of art and visual culture more broadly.

As a verb, it connotes a tactic: a dynamic tool for persuasion and communication through the bricolage of signifiers. It also relates directly to the contemporary profession of “styling”; a practice native to the fashion industry, but increasingly prevalent across the arts, media, consumerism, and politics. Thiss issue of Viscose sets out to critically gesture to all of these connotations and their potential intermingling through concrete case studies and cross disciplinary philosophical speculation.

with contributions by:
Shanzhai Lyric, David Lieske, Bakri Bakhit, Dena Yago, Matthew Linde, Burke Battelle & Ada O’Higgins, Davide Stucchi, Taylore Scarabelli, Mahoro Seward, Jordan Richman, Giorgi Gago Gagoshidze, Hito Steyerl, & Milos Trakilović, Laura Gardner, Avena Gallagher, Alex Esculapio, Elise by Olsen and Jeppe Ugelvig

Issue 2 inverts issue 1’s focus on the immaterial notion of style to instead explore the most material of fashion’s building blocks: clothes Clothes are literally everywhere and cite complicated systems of production, distribution, and exchange on their paths around the world. Still, they never fully reveal their journey or destination, and may often signify little else than their own commodity status, the total genericness of the fashion product.

Bringing together a wide range of artists, thinkers, and writers, the issue sets out to explore clothes as a signifier at once empty and over-burdened: as expressions of desires, people and places, as palimpsests for capitalist production cycles and histories of dressed bodies, and even, as nondescript material debris. While not necessarily foregoing an analysis of the fashion system, we hope to develop a form of fashion criticism that begins – and perhaps ends – with the single garment, that takes the everyday use of clothing objects as an intellectual starting point.

What knowledge can we gather from the studying of fashion objects, be they material or immaterial? What is the difference between clothes and fashion? And to which extent is even “fashion” ever successfully signified by things?

with contributions by:
Shanzhai Lyric, David Lieske, Bakri Bakhit, Dena Yago, Matthew Linde, Burke Battelle & Ada O’Higgins, Davide Stucchi, Taylore Scarabelli, Mahoro Seward, Jordan Richman, Giorgi Gago Gagoshidze, Hito Steyerl, & Milos Trakilović, Laura Gardner, Avena Gallagher, Alex Esculapio, Elise by Olsen and Jeppe Ugelvig