Being a Dutchie I might be a bit biased when saying that Viktor & Rolf are fantastic designers, but they really just are. Viktor Horsting and Rolf Snoeren both studied Fashion Design at ArtEZ in Arnhem, after which they went to Paris and set up their own fashion house in 1993. Since then they have created numerous spectacular collections.

I think my favourite show is still their Spring 2010 show, in which the designer duo used a lot of tulle and literally cut holes in some of the ball gowns inspired by the fact that the credit crunch made everyone cut back at the time. And what I especially liked, is how they let variations on these designs return in their collaboration with the Dutch National Ballet for the show Dutch Doubles in spring earlier this year.

Dutch Doubles was not the first time that Viktor & Rolf worked together with the Dutch National Ballet. For their Spring 2014 couture show, at the end of which they launched their new perfume 'bonbon', they used dancers of the Dutch company as models for their collection.

I feel like V&R never cease to surprise their audience, which they definitely did with their latest Fall 2014 collection for which they made dresses not necessarily for (the), but from red carpet. All pieces were made of red fabric which the designers folded, knotted and tied into fabulous dresses. Some decorated with voluminous bows, others with hand crafted animal print.

Finally, what I admire about Viktor and Rolf is that even though they are world famous fashion designers they are still quite down to earth. I experienced this myself when I was about to cycle home from the fantastic Dutch Double performance by the Dutch National ballet. A lot of people where coming out of the theater walking towards their cars and bikes and amongst them where Viktor and Rolf themselves. Just like me, they got on their bikes and rode home through the rain.

I wanted to show you some of the designs of the shows I just mentioned in a special way. The New York Times used a gorgeous visualisation technique for some of the fashion shows of 2013 and I used this technique to make two small visualisations myself. The results can be seen here: The visualisations were made using the Javascript library D3.js. I used the code from the New York Times and changed a couple of lines in order to be able to show the pictures from the Viktor & Rolf shows. First of all, I added new instance to the collection class. As you can see in the code below I added the data-slug for the Fall 2014 show, which is needed later on to access the right pictures. The data-bucket was not in the orignal code but I needed it because I uploaded the images to photobucket and photobucket makes a random url path for each image you upload. The data-size indicates how many pictures of the show will be displayed. I also made a new annotation instance where I added the annotations I wanted you to see underneath some of the designs.

In the following code snippet you can see where it is decided which pictures are shown. I got the images from www.style.com. The standard url path for slideshows from all fashion shows is "http://www.style.com/fashionshows/complete/slideshow/" then the data-slug is needed in order to find the exact fashion show you want to display, in this case Fall 2014 Couture Viktor & Rolf, for which the url code is F2014CTR-VIKROLF.

Changing the code to display the Viktor & Rolf shows was not too hard, but I did struggle quite a bit with finding the right size for the images. At first either the height was too small or the width was too wide, so the models all looked really strange. In the end I found the right imageWidth to be 50 and the right imageHeight to be 225. But I must confess I found this by trial and error and not by some clever calculation.