Maartje  Dijkstra is a Dutch fashion designer based in Rotterdam NL. She studied at ARTEZ/HKA Arnhem The Netherlands, where she graduated as a Bachelor in Fashion Design in 2006. In 2005 she did an internship at the company of Alexander McQueen in London, where her interests in High fashion developed. In 2007 she started her own High fashion/couture label, where she designs and creates individualistic, sculptural, progressive, hand-crafted fashion collections, accessories and fashion/tech pieces. The designs of her (small) spherical collections are all handcrafted, unique, high fashion pieces, designed with the future in mind, made by her only. Imagination, electronic music, progressiveness and individuality are a big source of inspiration for her.  For many years now she is combining fashion with technology creating interactive performance pieces for the runway like -Denzipfaden (2012), Obstruction (2012), Hard Core Vein (2014), Braindrain (2016), Surface Distortion (2016), 3DDD( 2017) and her latest piece TranSwarm Entities (2007).

At Gogbot she will present 3 pieces as 1 total fashion performance-

Maartje Dijkstra is a fashion designer who effortlessly combines high-end fashion and manual craftsmanship, that stands for individualism and uniqueness, with  technology.

Surface Distortion is a bombastic and progressive fashion piece that is focused on an all-encompassing experience in which fashion, technology, music and architecture merge together.

Integrated into the dress are the many blue light/ EL panels with 3D/moire effect, programmed by LIN (NL), that refers to the movement of water. Both EL panels and surrounding lights were programmed to respond and interact with the beats and melodies of the music to merge everything together. The black and dark gray metallic parts of the dress are manual 3D printed/illustrated into structures and layers that are inspired by chitin, the building material of exoskeletons like insects, all finished by hand with polyester wires.

Optic Traces– is her latest bombastic fashion piece,( specially created for Gogbot 2017) that combines high fashion with special manual 3D printing techniques, electronic music and interaction of analogue surrounding lights.

She developed the therm ‘Manual 3D printing’, witch means using a 3D printer pen as progressive tool to construct illustrative lines, structures and surfaces. Inspiration that leaded to this spherical and bold piece are influences and details from the Baroque period,‘dead nature’ like ivory and melancholic, industrial sounds/ music.

The light sculptural dress is build up totally out of different shades of white leather patterns and manual 3D printed elements that contains traces of squared mirrored surfaces. The many special grey blades are printed in 2 layers witch turned into an almost icy/frozen color effect. The white and grey crystals in between form traces of simmering light and will break the light into different eagles during the performance.

The surrounding light design will be done by CO2RO (NL), that will use different analogue ways of creating a space like smoke machines, lasers, stroboscopes and old school overhead projectors to create structures, revering to the 3D printed parts of the dress, building a spherical ambiance.

The performance also included a very special composed dark and melancholic music track by music producer Newk (NL), that used sounds like sonar, sci-fi movie samples and hardcore beats.