Sleeps Well For Once
Operating as Baby Reni, Irene Ha (1997) grapples with the unresolved contradictions of the contemporary era while challenging the accepted standards of the modern fashion system. She is not concerned with the impolite rules of how to make a collection. By presenting her clothes in a more interdisciplinary context, she collaborates to find connections in the creative universe she has built. baby reni can be seen as a strategic use of "cuteness" as an aesthetic category, where power lies in unthreatening appearances.
Ha currently lives and works in Amsterdam, where she graduated from the Fashion Department of the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in 2020.
Baby Reni's BLISS (2022) collection doubles down on the fascination with exhibitionist domesticity. An embarrassing moment becomes a luxury item - a glass nose ring resembling a snot bubble. More lounge than streetwear (and too deliberately white for reckless inner-city posturing anyway), luxury is now found in rest and relaxation.
On the Goi Om set:
"A sausage pillow/bolster is a type of cushion found in every Vietnamese bedroom: because of its long ellipsoidal shape and the nature of the object it shares the bed with, it is often mistaken for the modern waifu pillow, which shares the ellipsoidal shape but prints two-dimensional fantasies of women on its surface. To make this gesture of 'filling out' the body of the pillow clear, there are no more imaginary leaps to be made, this is a woman in a dress. The ellipsoid shape then fully submits itself to being subjugated, questioning the nature of women's clothing and who gets to own it".
