Shaping Serendipity
What happens when fashion design relinquishes control and leaves room for chance? Artist, fash-ion designer, and costume designer Michiel Keuper writes for tanzraumberlin about design pro-cesses between fashion, costume, and dance. Based on craftsmanship, collaborative working methods, and choreographed unpredictability, he describes design as an open system in which movement, improvisation, and context help shape appearance. A personal insight into a practice that understands fashion not as a finished image, but as a living process.
Michiel Keuper
Artist, fashion designer, costume designer
From when I was seven years old, I overwhelmed my mother—a dedicated home sewer—with my ever-increasing sartorial demands and very specific instructions. When I was about nine, it reached the point that she dropped the needle and said, “If you know so well what you want, you do it yourself!” From then on, the sewing machine was mine, and no curtain or bed sheet in our house escaped my self-expression.
So, when I enrolled in art school at eighteen to study fashion, I knew how to cut and sew—yet I didn’t know much about designing. I didn’t know much about fashion either. This was before social media, and fashion was not yet in fashion and not as omnipresent as it is now. Gradually, I learnt to distinguish between technique—which is about craft—and fashion, which is ultimately about image-making and storytelling.
Fashion is very much about context, too. After graduating, I started a label with a friend. The first thing we asked ourselves was “What does fashion currently need?” In our opinion, fashion at the time—we’re talking late 1990s—was becoming too commercially driven: fast fashion was gearing up, and more and more of the same was being produced. We wanted to introduce a new perspective on fashion by returning to the origins of couture—as a free place for experiment, a laboratory of ideas.
Now, when I design costumes for dance, beyond a thematic starting point and functionality, my main guideline during the process still is: What does the piece want? What does it need? It’s not just about making “nice” things. Often, I end up with something completely opposite to what I initially imagined.
Back then, one of our approaches was to challenge ourselves and invite serendipity into our design process to forgo our designer egos. Resonating with John Cage’s compositional methods, we would set an alarm clock and continue each other’s sketches every time it rang. In a way we took control by giving up control.
I still incorporate principles of serendipity into my current work. For instance, with my company Cranky Bodies a/company, I place the costumes on a clothing rack—visibly onstage—and the dancers are invited to assemble and change their outfits freely during the performance. I do control the content: I make choices about style, fabric, fit, and color. But I deliberately surrender control over how—and which—items will come together and create a story onstage. My design process is about anticipating all these potential possibilities. My mood board often resembles a giant puzzle. I know I have solved it when, as is the case with improvisation, no potential combination is “wrong”.
With my label, we were once selected for a renowned design competition, yet restricted to showing a collection in only three outfits. In a rebellious streak, we therefore decided to put at least six outfits into one. Our hybrid designs aimed to challenge both viewer and wearer by merging different iconic shapes—say, a coat dissolving into a dress, into a skirt, into a trouser. The outfits were designed to be seen in motion: they revealed different garments depending on the angle from which they were viewed.
Needless to say, we didn’t win. Back then, people didn’t know what to make of our hybrid, walking 3D collages—yet it catapulted us onto the international fashion scene. Vogue dubbed our work “cartoon couture”. Eventually, it ended up in the permanent collection of the Centraal Museum in Utrecht.
Recently I used a similar approach for the costumes I designed for TOIL by Sheena McGrandles, presented December 2025 at HAU2. The five dancers move in ever-changing constellations, continuously as a group. Inspired by workwear, the costumes—made to measure for each performer—underline the individual, yet aesthetically they also form a collective. The color blocking works according to a Rubik’s-cube principle; the dancing sets in motion an ongoing dialogue of colors and shapes correlating in a rapid ever-changing kaleidoscopic complexity, making the sum greater than its parts.
Working between fashion design, costume, and dance, I often feel close to those early moments at the sewing machine—when making was driven by curiosity rather than certainty. What guides my practice today is the same impulse: relying on my craft while simultaneously creating conditions for the unexpected—and allowing visual magic, or fashion, to emerge.
www.keuprvanbentm.blogspot.com
Instagram @michielkeuper, @cranky_bodies_a_company