“Strike a pose!”

Tourismus NRW and its partners are breaking new ground by supporting joint projects in the creative and digital industries under the urbanana brand. It stands for the state’s urban scenes, which also generate tourist appeal. For this reason, the association and its partners are supporting the fashion and art festival “Strike a pose” and are acting as destination partners with urbanana. The festival will take place in Düsseldorf from 23 – 25 July 2021.

“It is precisely such stagings of fashion, art and lifestyle that repeatedly weave the DNA for Düsseldorf’s radiance. For international guests, the festival is an excellent occasion to discover the art and creative scene of the entire metropolis, including Cologne and the Ruhr region, and thus set off for one of the most exciting cultural areas in Europe,” explains the managing director of Tourismus NRW, Dr. Heike Döll-König.

The “Strike a pose – Festival for Art, Fashion & Style” brings the regional and international art and fashion industry to Düsseldorf. 15 galleries from Düsseldorf, Cologne and Bonn will present trend-setting cooperations between fashion designers and artists in selected locations of the “fashion city”. Among the cooperating actors and labels are international stars such as Balenciaga, Marion Strehlow, Ikou Tschüss and Agnes Lux. The best cooperations will be awarded on Saturday in the festival centre of the Museum K21 of the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen in Düsseldorf. urbanana is involved in the selection of the winners as part of the jury.

Apart from the gallery programme, visitors can experience urbanana right at the beginning of the festival in the talk “The New Normal: Green Fashion Symposium”. NRW’s urban scenes are an ideal breeding ground for numerous creative and innovative founders. The importance of urban space as an inspiration for these players and how the themes of fashion and sustainability can also be marketed to tourists will be explained by the project in a keynote speech using various examples.

The Saturday of the festival is dedicated to the “Fashion Day”, on which various fashion labels from Düsseldorf and Cologne will present their designer pieces. Through the additional use of artistic installations, they will draw attention to critical issues in the fashion industry as well as to sustainable and innovative concepts.

During the festival, public tours of the participating galleries and K21 Kunstsammlung NRW will be offered. The festival was initiated by Ljiljana Radlovic and Robert Danch, who have already been organising the gallery weekend Düsseldorf Cologne Open Galleries for 14 years.

urbanana is the brand of the project “FLOW.NRW – Integrated Tourism and Location Marketing for the Creative and Digital Economy in NRW” by Tourismus NRW and its partners Düsseldorf Tourismus, KölnTourismus and Ruhr Tourismus. Geographically, urbanana summarises the urban scenes in North Rhine-Westphalia. Together with the imaginative and creative minds in the state, urbanana aims to make the metropolitan region internationally visible as an attractive travel and living space.

For more information on the festival, programme and participating actors, please visit: www.strikeaposefestival.de.
You can find out more about the FLOW.NRW project and its urbanana brand at: www.urbanana.de.

urbanana as well as “Strike a pose” are co-funded by the Ministry for Economic Affairs, Innovation, Digitalisation and Energy of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia.

Photo: Lanius