ABOUT
ZWISCHENFORM is an independent design practice founded in Berlin in late 2025, with clothing as its primary medium.
Form is shaped by its conditions.
ZWISCHENFORM
The name brings together the German zwischen — between — and Form.
The practice begins with states of in-between, looking at how form is shaped by bodies, materials and environments, and how it continues to develop through the relationships between them.
Finishing a garment does not bring its form to an end. The body, wear, use and time continue to act upon it. In turn, the garment becomes another condition, affecting the body and its relationship with its surroundings.
ZWISCHENFORM makes room for this ongoing change, allowing the wearer to take part in how a garment’s form develops through use.
FORM & FORMING
“The world doesn’t need more clothes.”
This was one of the first questions I had to confront when I began making clothes again.
Borrowing a concept from fluid mechanics, we seem to be living in a time of high viscosity: new ideas and values continually emerge, while existing structures remain difficult to shift.
Fashion makes this particularly visible.
Silhouettes, materials and visual languages change rapidly, while the structures behind them — production, display, consumption, and many of our conventions around clothing and the body — remain relatively stable.
New forms keep appearing, only to be quickly absorbed back into the system.
This led me to wonder:
If “newness” itself has become part of what keeps this system moving, does design still need to begin by producing another new Form?
My attention gradually shifted from Form to Forming.
Finishing a garment marks a point in its making, but it does not fix its form.
Bodies, postures, materials, environments, use and time continue to act upon it. Form can therefore be understood as provisional: emerging through an encounter between different conditions, then shifting as those conditions change.
Nor is a garment simply the outcome of these forces.
Once worn, it becomes a condition in itself. It affects posture and movement, altering how the body encounters its surroundings.
Forming, then, is not a straight line from design to completion.
The environment acts upon the body; the body alters the garment; the garment returns to the body and its environment, where another process of change begins.
ZWISCHENFORM is concerned with this ongoing process.
Rather than searching for a final form, the practice asks:
How does form take shape between conditions?
IMPOSED
“Our bodies are continually shaped by their surroundings.”
The height of a chair determines the angle at which we sit. The dimensions of a staircase alter the way we walk.
These ordinary objects quietly guide how the body bends and moves, and where it places its weight.
IMPOSED begins with this relationship between body and environment.
The project observes postures produced in specific surroundings and translates them into garment structures.
When the body leaves the original position, the garment retains its traces — bends, inclinations, tensions and shifts in the centre of gravity.
The environment is no longer physically present, yet remains on the body in another form.
These traces, however, are not intended to preserve a posture indefinitely.
Once the garment is worn again, a form produced through one encounter between body and environment enters another body and another environment. Movement, use and time begin acting upon it again, allowing the form to continue changing.
The garment becomes both a record of one relationship and a condition for the next.
IMPOSED therefore asks:
How much of the posture we take for granted is chosen, and how much is a response to the environments around us?
FOUNDER
ZWISCHENFORM was founded by Wang Wei-Jen in Berlin in late 2025.
After working in footwear design in Germany, she established her studio in the courtyard of Potsdamer Straße 70.
Situated between the ground and first floors, the studio is close to the street yet partially concealed within a residential building.
This ambiguous position brought her back to zwischen — between — and to what it might mean to work from an in-between state.
Living and working in Berlin, she encountered a city where history and the contemporary, established systems and experimentation, and different backgrounds and ways of living continually coexist. She also began to recognise a similar condition within her own practice: one that has always moved between different contexts.
People, objects, bodies, spaces and time meet, and the forms that emerge between them begin to shift.
ZWISCHENFORM starts from this space in between.
The studio remains open to where the next question might lead.
WANG WEI-JEN Founder / DesignerBerlin
zwischenform@gmail.com