Play Trend pays homage to the Bauhaus movement

Berlin is at present celebrating the Bauhaus with a special exhibition at the Martin-Gropius-Bau exhibition hall.

Entitled “Bauhaus: A Conceptual Model” the event promises to be one of the biggest-ever Bauhaus retrospectives and it also ties in with the 90th anniversary of the movement.

Italy recently celebrated the Bauhaus with an international fashion competition.

Entitled “Play Trend”, the competition was promoted by the Textile Museum in Prato. The idea behind Play Trend was creating a graphic project for three outfits inspired by the Bauhaus movement and by its theories.

A panel of judges comprising designers, textile experts, fashion critics and journalists, among them also Monica Faliero Sarti from the Faliero Sarti textile company, picked up ten finalists among the 500 young designers who entered the project.

The finalists all come from different countries – Italy, Germany, Finland, Hungary and the UK – and studied at famous academies and fashion institutions all over Europe.

All of them were offered the chance to spend a week in Prato during the month of July to take part in a workshop at the Prato Textile Museum and to visit local companies.

During this intense week they also picked the fabrics to be used for their three outfits that will have to be send to the Prato Textile Museum in November.

The final winner will be announced in December and while waiting for it we might as well go through the finalists' projects.

Different aspects of the Bauhaus inspired the finalists: Eleonora Bardelli created outfits that have a sort of double aim, as they can be worn separately or as a complete set; Margherita Cascino mainly focused on prints, the designer deconstructed the work of Paul Klee, blowing it up to pixel size and printing it on tops; Marina D’Antino opted for what she dubbed as a "dress-accessory", a special item of clothing that unifies in itself various art disciplines and various functions while Christine Wolf was inspired by craftsmanship and uniqueness creating coats and skirts characterised by origami-like three-dimensional motifs.

I found particularly interesting Nina Sophie Gekeler’s work.

The German designer has been working since 2008 for the costume department of the Deutsche Oper Berlin and in a way her passion for costume designing influenced the creations she made for the contest.

Inspired by the weaving techniques of the Bauhaus and by Gunta Stoltz's abstract motifs, she designed a sort of reconfiguring dress that can assume a different look by simply changing the vertical strips of textiles or belts that decorate it.

Cristina Guarnieri developed a similar concept coming up with a mini-dress with appliquéd patchwork motifs that can be reversed and moved around, changing entirely the look of the dress, while she also experimented with different textiles, mixing tweed, satin and organza with more experimental materials such as vinyl and metallic yarns.

References to architecture and interior design aren’t missing thanks to Andrea Huszti’s outfits based on geometrical elements and Leena Muley’s project. Muley created a sort of flat packed dress inspired by pieces of furniture that can be literally deconstructed into sheets.

Susanna Skytte mixed Anni Albers’ “DR XX” (1974) with Georg Muche’s works, designing a jacket formed by hundreds of white and red triangles. The same geometric shapes, filtered through Johannes Itten’s colour theories, were used by Lena Vuotta for her light and almost weightless creations.

I'm looking forward to seeing not only the very final results of this arty competition, but also what each single design will look like once it is produced with the fabrics that have recently been chosen.

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