You Are a Beast · Balan Liviu

Brief

MoMu, the fashion museum in Antwerp, wanted a series of online stories, each about a different Belgian designer, to get people curious enough to visit. Each of us had to tell one designer’s story as an interactive one-page website. The interactions couldn’t just be “click this and something happens”. They had to be part of the story, teach you something and still be fun. The site also had to stay readable, fit MoMu’s identity while still having a look of its own, and work on a phone.

Process

Choosing a collection

I picked Walter Van Beirendonck. I started by going through his collections, looking for one I could picture a website for, with enough symbolism behind it to tell a story. I was torn between three and went with Lust Never Sleeps, partly because I really liked the designs.

Three Walter Van Beirendonck collections side by side: Lust Never Sleeps (masked men in patterned suits with canes and hats), Whabam (painted face masks and colourful jackets) and Fetish for Beauty (green and red masks and sculpted headpieces)

The three collections I was choosing between: Lust Never Sleeps, Whabam and Fetish for Beauty.

The collection is a face-off between masks: the painted masks of warriors in Papua New Guinea and voodoo priests in the Caribbean, against the leather masks worn in big-city fetish clubs.

The story

That gave me the idea for the website. Everyone is a beast hiding in a skin. Over time the skin starts to melt and your impulses push through, so you need a new one. At MoMu, six pedestals wait, one for each of the Antwerp Six, and you have to find the designer who can make it. That’s Walter. But the skin he makes doesn’t hide the beast, it shows it, because for him clothes should represent the spirit of the wearer, not the body.

The style

I wanted the style to be colourful and dull at the same time. Everything on the outside of the body, the skin you wear as a costume, is grey and dull. Everything inside is very colourful and monstrous: eyes, clocks, tentacles, anything I could think of that looks like a beast.

Style board: a palette of red, cyan, purple and yellow, Helvetica Neue and Playfair Display, and references of glitchy, collaged and surreal websites and posters

The style board.

I went through a lot of colour combinations for this project before landing on the final one. I tried the same screens in purple, in blue with red and green, in soft pastels, in bright pink and cyan, and even on a black background. Even my first colours on the website were pretty dull, and it took a lot of trying to get to the ones on the site now.

The same two screens of the first version repeated five times in different colours: purple and blue, blue with red and green, pastel yellow and lilac, bright pink and cyan, and yellow on a black background

Some of the colour versions I tried.

A grey man in a suit tearing open his shirt, with purple tentacles, eyes and a clock bursting out of his chest, next to the text: But slowly, over time, your beastly impulses begin pushing through

Grey outside, colourful inside.

Making it a story

My first version was a website, but not really a story. It was mostly text with images next to it, something you just scroll through, and at some points it didn’t even feel like it was about Walter. So I changed the layout and brought more of Walter into it, starting with his face on the very first screen.

The first version of the website next to the final one. The first opens on a collage of a woman with a mouth and eyes cut in, with big purple waves. The final opens on Walter's portrait with a painted hat and moustache, adds Ask Walter next to the text, and swaps the purple wave for a dark red one

First version (left) and final (right).

The pedestals

The first interaction. Each of the six pedestals holds an object that stands for one of the Antwerp Six, with their title and a quote of theirs. The part of the story below stays greyed out until you choose the right one, Walter’s.

Six pedestals, one for each of the Antwerp Six.

Create your new skin

The main interaction is a dress-up game. You get a grey silhouette and a set of pieces to drag onto it, and each piece has a short description. Some of what you need is missing on purpose, like the shirt and the mask. The suit in this look was inspired by the painted war shields of Papua New Guinea, combined with an ordinary suit, so you get a normal suit and a shield, and both descriptions hint that they belong together. Drag one onto the other and they become the Walter suit. The mask works the same way: a voodoo mask and a leather fetish hood become the Walter mask. There are also a few near-misses, like a striped mask and a cane for the wrong hand.

I wanted the game to show what he was inspired by and how the outfit came together, so you learn how the clothes were made while you play.

Building the new skin.

Building it

I coded the whole site myself with Vite and GSAP: ScrollTrigger for the scroll animations through the story, and Draggable for the dress-up game, where two pieces fuse when you drop one close enough to the other.

On a phone

Dragging pieces around a big box doesn’t work on a small screen, so on a phone the pieces sit in a drawer you pull up, and you drag them from there onto the silhouette.

Mobile: the hero with Walter's portrait and the title You are a BEAST in a skin

Mobile: the tentacle man and the text about your beastly impulses

Mobile: one pedestal at a time, with arrows and dots to switch between the six designers

Mobile: the Create your new skin game with the grey silhouette

Mobile: The New You, with the finished outfits side by side

The same story on a phone.

Result

The whole website, start to finish.

The New You: three finished outfits, collaged from the collection, each with a coloured shadow in red, yellow and cyan

The end of the story: every beast in a new skin.

It’s not my favourite project. In the final hour I broke something and had to redo a lot of the code, so a few parts look slightly off. Still, I think the dress-up game fits the brief well: you learn how the outfit was made while you’re playing with it.