I hate awards and awarding ceremonies. My hate comes from the fact that when I was a teenager my fave bands/actors/directors never won anything at the various awards they were nominated for. It was usually the ones I couldn’t stand who went home with all the main awards, leaving me frustrated and angry. A new trend has spawned in recent years: style and fashion related awards. I do hate most of them as they are absolutely irrelevant and fake with well-established designers, models and celebrities running away with underserved awards.
Yet there is an award I still have a great respect for, the Swiss Textiles Award. I respect it because it offers young and talented designers the chance to win a substantial financial support (100,000 Euros in the form of reimbursement for business costs). To be nominated the designers must have been present in the market for four seasons, must have shown their collections during major prêt-à-porter fashion weeks and be on sale in leading stores.
This year the six finalists featured some amazing names, Rodarte, Richard Nicoll, Cathy Pill, TOGA, Louise Goldin and Jean-Pierre Braganza. Each of these young designers/labels has got a particular talent, but an international panel of experts elected Rodarte as the winner.
Sisters Laura and Kate Mulleavy, originally from Pasadena, Southern California, have produced in the last few years internationally acclaimed collections. What I like about this American design duo is that Kate studied history of art and Laura studied English literature, so the girls are entirely self-taught when it comes to fashion.
The sisters launched their first collection from their parents’ house in California and since 2005 they have been showing at New York Fashion Week. Their collections often feature outfits inspired by the stories and visions that haunt their minds, dreams and nightmares turned by the sisters into something extremely wearable. Their soft abstractions, the signature ruffles of fabric that decorated their first dresses have been transformed in more recent years into slightly aggressive and punkish details. Their latest collections were influenced by Japanese culture, horror films and mangas, and their Spring/Summer 09 creations feature web-like knits and one shoulder dresses decorated with leather elements and chains. In a way experimenting is the key word to understand this duo and their designs.
While Rodarte won the Swiss Textile Awards, Swiss fashion designer Judith Klingenfeld was presented during the Stella Fashion Night with the Annabelle Award that will allow her to do a one year internship at Missoni.
Until the end of November, designer pieces by Swiss Textiles Award finalists from previous collections can be viewed and purchased at the Globus branch on Bahnhofstrasse in Zurich.
So, well done to the winners, I’m looking forward to seeing what the sisters and the other finalists will do with the vouchers they received to buy Swiss fabrics. I’m sure it will be something extraordinarily beautiful.
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