In the opening scene of Anselm, the film Wim Wenders made about the German artist Anselm Kiefer, we see a number of large, white casts of long dresses on pedestals in a forest. They stand there dead still among the rustling trees. They could be wedding dresses, because of the colour and their shape. Or 19th-century ball gowns, because, with their constricted waists and long skirts, they look the same. Arranged like this among those trees, on a rocky ground, they seem to evoke memories of a distant past, a war perhaps, in which soldiers died leaving lonely brides behind. That meaning is reinforced by what you hear: "We may be the nameless and the forgotten, but we forget nothing," women's voices whisper. The empty dresses evoke the women who wore them. For a moment, they are back from the underworld. 'Frauen der Antike' Kiefer called them, when he made this work in 2006. With their tall white figures, as if, bleached by time in Greek temples, they represent the nameless women who have played a role in history since ancient times.
Clothes make a person. You have to see them on a body that moves. Folded flat, rolled up in a drawer or hanging in a wardrobe, protected by a black cover, they are a wrapped piece of fabric. Only when they are worn do we see something of the meaning they had for whoever included the clothes in her wardrobe.
All worn clothes evoke past lives. This is especially true of clothes that were discarded not because they were redundant or too old, but because the body that wore them is no longer there. In clothes of dead people, those who wore them live on, especially if there was no possibility to say goodbye and the clothes could not be worn down to rags. This is also why it is so difficult to part with them when it comes to a loved one. Longer than books or household goods, clothes continue to long for the corporeal survival of a loved one who has died. When the clothes briefly reappear from a wardrobe or sleeve - accidentally or deliberately - the fabric, mixed with the own scent of whoever wore them, sometimes mixed with a hint of perfume - immediately evokes the man or woman who was once dressed in them. For a moment, their lives become tangible, noticeable, present again. Beloved pieces from a wardrobe are therefore cherished by relatives.
Since women often have more clothes than men, with which they accentuate their bodies in many ways, it is even more true for them that that bodily presence remains in their clothes long after they are no longer there themselves. They have chosen those clothes with care to play a role in the whole of their wardrobe. They were meant to show in the theatre of everyday life. An elaborate wardrobe can be a life's work, a work of art to be exhibited. Sophie Calle did just that in 2023 at the Musée Picasso. In 'A toi de faire, ma mignonne', she exhibited her entire interior, including a wardrobe, as what it will become after her death: a series of lots at auction house Drouot.
Adelheid Feryn was no Sophie Calle, nor was she at all concerned with death when it overtook her. She lived against the odds, despite her lung condition and the heavy medication she took for it. She did collect clothes as if they were works of art. She was a walking shop window for the Belgian designers who became known as 'The Six of Antwerp' in 1986. Adelheid was proud of their growing fame, being Flemish, and bought a dress, a skirt, a coat, a scarf or a pair of shoes from every collection presented since then. She wore them everywhere: at home in Leiden, on the streets and at work, in the many positions she held in The Hague and Amsterdam. She always stood out. On 20 April 2019, she went to see Kirill Serebrennikov's film Leto in the evening, with her husband, Andries van Helden. Afterwards, she got off her bike on Leidse Aalmarkt and put it on the stand. She said she couldn't go on for a while. She died on the spot. She had turned 65.
Two years later, Andries contacted me. We knew each other. But it had been more than 50 years since I was his younger brother's girlfriend and visited them. His first message immediately evoked memories of shelves full of antiquarian books and the old china used to set the table in their childhood home. In that crowded upstairs flat of a classicist, rector at our Rotterdam lyceum, the past was never far away. Andries was the eldest son there. He studied Slavic languages in Leiden, leading an intellectual existence there that was far removed from our school occupations, self-crocheted clothes and comic book collections.
During the thirty-six years that Andries and Adelheid Feryn lived together, she had introduced him, reflective book man, to another world: the colourful, artisanal and also practical realm of fabrics, patterns, skirts, blouses and scarves. And of shoes. Lots and lots of shoes. One hundred and thirty pairs he counted when, after a while, he had decided to take stock of her entire costume collection together with the same brother. After the first exploratory messages, he sent me the results. A hefty Excel file, in which all the dresses, coats, skirts, trousers, jumpers, blouses ánd matching accessories were meticulously described with academic precision. A lofty labour of love. After the brothers had 'retrained' themselves in fashion, they gave each piece its own code, linking it to a designer, with collection details, sizes, colours and salient features. There were hundreds of them, and they were only a (first) part of the 1,000-plus pieces that made up Adelheid Feryn's wardrobe. She turned out to be a devoted buyer of Ann Demeulemeester, Martin Margiela, Dries Van Noten, Dirk Bikkembergs, Dirk Van Saene, Sofie D'Hoore, A.F. Vandevorst and Veronique Branquinho. Also lovingly included in this Flemish fashion family were Yohji Yamamoto, an early Viktor & Rolf and an occasional Dolce & Gabbana, Romeo Gigli, Missoni and Alexander McQueen.
We decided to at least have a photo series of them, and commissioned Annabel Oosteweeghel to realize the project. The model became Lize Feryn, a niece of Adelheid.
She walks out here in the old Hortus in Leiden, for a moment a character in our own version of Nicholas Roeg's Don't look now....
(This is the introduction to a publication on this project to be published later this year).