In partnership with Fashion Scout, the Slovak Fashion Council held a solo fashion show to spotlight Mata Durikovic’s MADbyMAD, an emerging Slovak fashion brand. The ‘Pink Matrix‘ collection was unveiled during London Fashion Week. Mata Durikovic is an LVHM Green Trail Award nominee as well as the recipient of numerous awards, including the ITS Media Award for the Plastform Contest in 2022, the Slovak Fashion Council’s Best Fashion Graduate Award, and Fashion Live! in 2022 for a sustainability prize from the Copenhagen Fashion Summit in 2019. Mata majored in womenswear at Central Saint Martins and graduated in 2022.
Mata Durikovic has vast knowledge and experience of working in textile design and the luxury womenswear market. She is presently based in Paris, where she works as a textile designer for Chanel Maison’s textile design research team. Mata’s bio-luxury brand MADbyMAD focuses on sustainable luxury fashion. Her work is driven by her credo, “Be Crazy! Be Bioluxury!” and uses bioplastic as a leather substitute, bioplastic crystal leather with 3D embroidery, recycled Swarovski crystal trash, and zero-waste techniques like knitting and crochet.
This is the story of Mata Durikovic’s PINK MATRIX
In her “Pink Matrix” collection, Mata strives for fully sustainable luxury pieces that are easily recyclable and degradable into separate materials. The motivation stems from her childhood recollections and relationship with her grandma who practised many sustainable techniques at home. One of them was conserving potato starch water and then using it to irrigate plants for improved nutrition. This starch ingredient is the foundation for the bioplastic material with which she began experimenting and which became the foundation for the MADbyMAD collection. Her grandma also repurposed discarded clothes into new outfits for her to dress as different characters when they played teleportation games and travelled across galaxies.
Mata Durikovic aspires to recreate the universe shown in the film “The Pink Matrix.”
She intends to recreate the “Pink Matrix” universe, which played a key part in her childhood, with all its characters from different galaxies: the “Crystal Galaxy,” the “Flower Crystal Galaxy,” and the “Strawberry Galaxy.” Each galaxy represents a distinct aspect of her grandmother’s apartment; the things that used to transport her into all these fantasies, such as her grandmother’s display case full of crystal brooches, the kitchen full of candy and strawberries, and her entire apartment full of approximately 150 varieties of flowers.
Mata Durikovic’s Grandma’s Sustainability Technique
In order to create an edible fabric dubbed “Bioplastic Crystal Leather,” Mata Durikovic has been experimenting with bioplastic materials including starch/fruit and jelly-based bioplastic. This fabric has a leather-like quality and can be prepared at home using ingredients like water and jelly. Depending on the environment’s humidity level, it can be stacked into a moist texture after cooking, which air-dries in 2 to 3 days. Once it has dried, it is prepared to be peeled off and turned into a product. She exclusively uses items that her grandmother possessed at home, such as her grandmother’s brooches, recycled knitting yarns, safety pins, starch-water bioplastic material, and crystals that she used to charge at full moon to transform into healing portals. Hey! You almost missed Part II: The Environment begins at home.
Cook it! Wear it! Eat it! Vitalise plants with it!
Additionally, the collection includes clothing that, when charged under a full moon, is said to transform into healing portals that envelop their wearers in a “protecting shield.” Mata Durikovic employs “upcycling” elements in addition to the bioplastic, such as discarded crystals donated by Swarovski or recycled knitting yarns donated by the UPW. Mata successfully created a material that resembles a transparent “leather substance” that can be made at home as part of her experiment with bioplastic materials. She dubbed it “Bioplastic Crystal Leather.” Then, it can be used as a 3D alternative to conventional embroidery with a so-called “puff” effect, embroided with an embroidery machine, printed with UV digital printing, etc. The outcome is a selection of “crystal clothing” that may be prepared at home, are fully decomposable in the garden, and once they “die,” provide additional nutrition to the plants.
