Fruzsina Nagy
Costume Designer, Visual Theatre Maker
Costume designer and visual theatre maker from Budapest, Hungary. She has directed several individual performances using her costumes as the “main characters” on stage. She is interested in the relationship between the human body and its surroundings, and has created many experimental costumes using unusual technologies, such as sound-sensitive LED lights, built-in fans and 3D-printed elements.
Besides designing for theatre, film, ballet, concerts and dance shows, she teaches at the Hungarian University of Fine Arts and the Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design. She organises interdisciplinary visual projects with her students reflecting on sensitive topics, such as domestic violence or taboos. She has won many international prizes over the past decade (iSTAN 2018, PQ 2019, WSD 2022) and is the vice-chair of an OISTAT sub-commission.
Presentation: “A New Genre: Catwalk Concert – Where Performance and Fashion Meet Through Music and Costumes”
15 October 2026, 11:15–11:30, Online Session. Symposium Agenda
Abstract
What happens when a fashion show becomes a concert, costumes become storytellers, and the catwalk transforms into a space for social commentary and artistic experimentation?
In this presentation, I introduce Catwalk Concert, a new interdisciplinary performance genre that I originated, bringing together experimental choral music, fashion, costume design, electronic sound, theatrical performance, and digital technologies.
Developed through my long-term collaboration with the experimental choir Soharóza and their leader Dóra Halas, Catwalk Concerts feature singing performers wearing unconventional, narrative-driven costumes on a catwalk-like stage, accompanied by electronic music and video projections. Rather than serving as decorative elements, the costumes become active dramaturgical agents, communicating emotions, constructing narratives, challenging conventions, and provoking audiences through visual metaphors, transformation, and black humour.
My performances explore sensitive and often taboo subjects, including gender, sexuality, nudity, masculinity, violence, mental health, and the complexities of urban life. They also reflect on collective memory, the legacy of growing up under a repressive communist regime, and the social and psychological consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic. Through these themes, deeply personal experiences become part of a wider social dialogue.
Experimentation is central to my artistic practice. By integrating live cameras, green-screen technologies, wearable digital screens, and projections onto performers’ bodies, I continuously challenge the boundaries between physical and virtual performance, the human body and its costume, and the possible and seemingly impossible.
Through selected examples from my artistic work, this 20-minute presentation will reveal how Catwalk Concerts redefine the relationship between music, fashion, and performance, proposing a new artistic language in which costumes do not simply dress performers but become the protagonists of the performance.