Raiments is a minimalist furniture exhibition located in Copenhagen, Denmark, designed by Korso Studio for Innenkreis. The history of upholstery is fundamentally a history of concealment – fabric stretched taut, stapled into submission, forced to forget it was ever soft. Ryom’s practice inverts this centuries-old logic entirely. Rather than upholstering furniture, she dresses it, approaching each frame the way a tailor approaches a body: with respect for what the material wants to do on its own. The distinction is not merely semantic. It represents a foundational rethinking of the relationship between textile and structure, one where neither element dominates or disappears into the other.
The exhibition takes its name from an archaic term for garments, signaling from the outset that cloth here functions as clothing rather than cladding. For this body of work, Ryom has constructed garments from wool, hand-stitching each piece directly into the furniture’s construction. The textiles fold and settle over their frames, softening silhouettes rather than reinforcing them. Where conventional upholstery demands tension – pulling fabric tight to eliminate any trace of independent movement – Ryom’s method allows drape and character to persist. The frame becomes host rather than armature, offering structure and support while relinquishing the kind of total control that traditional techniques require.
This approach carries particular weight given Ryom’s formation within Danish functionalist modernism, a tradition that has long privileged structure as truth and treated textile as ornament. Her work operates as a quiet but deliberate corrective, insisting that softness carries the same substance as the skeleton it covers. The furniture dissolves the divide between construction and sensibility, positioning tactility, intimacy, and the body not as secondary considerations but as central to how objects generate meaning and presence in lived space.
