Eighty wine glasses had to find their place in one of Fruzsina Nagy’s costumes. In an earlier Deszkavízió interview, she explained that the glasses’ different centres of gravity disrupted the intended effect, so she balanced them with fishing weights. The solution worked, but made the skirt considerably heavier. This small workshop story contains an entire design philosophy: an unusual form only truly exists once its physical problems have been solved.
From printed textiles to the stage
According to the Goethe-Institut’s artist biography, Nagy was born in Budapest, studied in London and graduated in textile design from the Hungarian University of Applied Arts. She received her doctorate at the University of Theatre and Film Arts in 2014. These different workshops ask different questions of the same material: how its surface is made, what it expresses around the body, and how it changes during performance.
In Papp Tímea’s interview published by Kultura.hu on November 8, 2022, the designer recalled entering the textile-printing department after her years in London. In retrospect, she described an environment that encouraged experimentation. She was already involved in alternative theatre while at university. Her beginnings did not follow a single, straight fashion-industry route: she also considered the choice between masks and costumes.
For this portrait, listing detours is not the point. Printed textiles, masks and stage clothes are read from different distances. A surface may fascinate close up but disappear from the back of an auditorium; a headdress may draw a strong shape yet behave differently in motion. Nagy’s work is therefore best considered not simply as imagery but as a sequence of interacting material decisions.
When a choir takes to the runway
Trafó’s archived page for September 9, 2016 documents Taboo Collection, the fashion concert created by Fruzsina Nagy and Dóra Halas. In the world designed for the twenty-five-member Soharóza choir, taboos involving bodies, gender roles, fear and illness provided the costumes’ themes. The clothes were not a shop’s promise for the following season, but both the instruments and protagonists of a scene.
The organiser describes almost a hundred individual costumes and props, three-dimensional printing, LED lighting and projections. Media artist Ákos Kiss and sound designer Márk Bartha contributed to the visual and electronic layers. The term “instrument garment” is therefore more than poetic decoration: it signals that the object must be understood through sound and movement.
For today’s fashion viewer, this suggests an unfamiliar pace. Selecting the most spectacular still and naming its shape is not enough. Watch what the singing body does, how much space the costume needs and when its outline changes. The boundary between runway and theatre does not disappear here; it becomes a working surface.
A costume is tested not on a hanger, but on a moving body.
A centre of gravity is a design decision
Deszkavízió’s interview with the creators of Songs from the Pantry preserves another side of workshop practice. Zsófi Mautner contributed as consultant to the food-themed production, whose ideas also drew on changing eating habits. When practical teaching became difficult, Nagy involved scenography students: they designed and made headdresses for some of her costumes.
The wine-glass skirt acquires its precise professional meaning here. A weight is not invisible magic but a compromise: it corrects a visual problem while increasing the mass to be worn. That does not justify a general judgement about the comfort of every costume in the production. It does clearly show that stage proportions and construction change together.
For a young Hungarian designer, the useful lesson is the importance of a prototype. If an object hangs, turns or moves away from its intended position, a drawing alone cannot explain why. Testing with the material and performer produces information that the finished image conceals. This is our editorial takeaway, not a teaching method attributed to Nagy.
The garment does not speak alone
The 2022 Kultura.hu interview also addresses international co-design in connection with Eastern Bloc. Nagy described not simply collections by different authors placed alongside one another, but collaboration that could happen within a single garment. Meanwhile, the critics’ awards listed in the Goethe-Institut biography relate to several different productions, rather than one recurring visual trick.
For our In the Workshop series, this career reveals how many people and areas of expertise can inhabit a silhouette. We are not presenting earlier productions as current premieres, nor inferring a present-day programme from old interviews. What is worth taking to the next show is a direction of attention: behind the unusual garment, look for collaboration, a technical solution and the moment when a body finally sets it in motion.
Related reading: In the workshop: Tamás Király
