Introducing ourselves

Krijnie (l), Christa (r).
 

The Azolla.
The ship we were born on.

Crossing borders

Krijnie (Vreeswijk, 1939, Virgo) and Christa (Amsterdam, 1958, Pisces). We were born in the same Dutch bargemaster-family; De Leeuw Van Weenen, out of 10 children. One of our grandfathers was a tailor, the other was a sailor, so creativity and love for nature's elements are in our genes.

When we teamed up in 1997, we already had lived many traveling adventures, marriages, children and other careers before our rubber recycle adventure started!
From Mother Nature we received our talents, in rubber design we are autodidactic. You can taste the traveling impressions in Krijnie's designs. We like crossing borders, spiritually and physically, and it shows in our collection. There are many artpieces which can be worn by both male and female. So that's up to your own taste and size!

More about us

We are mother earth loving, for her and therefore our sake we recycle waste; rubber bicycle innertubes. Recycling is our tribute, the way mother earth teaches us: evolving!
Every piece of art is made with love and is original and unique! Even when we try to make a copy the tubes just won't let us! Because every tube, a piece of waste, is different. They may be the same when they're new, but every tube-life follows different ways, just as our life, isn't it?

Thanx to mother earth, we have this life to live; to the max!
If you are curious to the way we think, you can read more about the tribal affairs of the Witches of Herderewich.
In fact, the witches were the attractors in this story, because when we grouped together, in 1992, in our monthly full moon circle, everything stopped, became chaos and after some time there occured the new patterns in our horizon!

Sisters

Although we difference in age almost 20 years, we both were very conscious about the environment all our lifes, and nature is our inspiration. Recycling is a way of life for us.
In the sixties Krijnie lived in a community and got her daughter, Corina. When Corina was about 12 years old, Krijnie and her husband made a trip on bike (!) from The Netherlands to Morocco, which took a year.
Although I was very young at that time, I was really attracted to this 'hippy' culture; the music, the freedom, the way of life.
At this time, Krijnie divorced her husband and all our lives went separate ways. A 15 year time to travel for Krijnie, a time for raising a family for Christa; I got married, and at the age of 25, I had a son, Gilian, and 3 years later I received a daughter, Monique.

When Krijnie came back to The Netherlands in 1994, we met all over again as adult woman, and we immediately liked each other very much!
In the spring of 1997, when I went to a symposium about art and rubber, the recycling idea began to sprout because I really needed something creative to do, and as soon as I made my first top and skirt, Krijnie began to 'see' all kind of hats popping up in her brain and she joined. That same year, November, we had our first Zuss Fashion Show.

We never went to art-school or design-school but in our own intuitive, organic and chaotic way, we created a new fragmented order: Zuss Fashion Design.
Sometimes you will find a sticker on our designs; we see them as scars and we believe that scars are stories and worthwhile to remember, just like in our lives.
Special effects are provided by the valves which we involve in our artwork sometimes. On strategic places...

Zuss

We are sisters, and in Dutch 'sister' is 'zus', so we decided to bend our language a little bit. Two sisters; so let us add an 'S' to it and that's how we found 'ZUSS'.

For us 'Zuss' stands for sisterhood; because we believe women or sisters should work together in this world instead of being competitors and since we did this in our recycling adventure and offer this waste a second life in the spotlights and bringing it back into the world, we thought Zuss was a nice name and we trusted it would sound cool in many languages around the world. Zuss is pronounced like 'us'. With a Z in front of it...

Have fun browsing our site,

Krijnie and Christa