I had the pleasure of speaking to young Italian designer Karisia Paponi in August when I interviewed her for Zoot Magazine.
The feature came out on Zoot’s Autumn/Winter 2009 issue accompanied by a photo shoot featuring Karisia’s creations by Laetitia Bica.
The photo shoot was particularly beautiful as it included pictures taken in the fable-like Damme, a charming Flemish village near Bruges.
At the time, when I asked Karisia what were her future plans she told me about the chance of doing an artist-in-residency at Vienna’s quartier21, a permanent space dedicated to art, design and fashion and that’s actually where I found her last week.
In Vienna Karisia has been working on her new collection and preparing her showcase for the exhibition “50 ± Anni di Moda Italiana” (± 50 Years of Italian Fashion) that opened last week.
You can read more about her experience as artist-in-residence at quartier21 and the exhibition in Vienna in my interview with her on Dazed Digital.
In this post I’d like to focus more on Karisia’s graduate collection inspired by porcelain, entitled "It's Four O'Clock".
Though considered as beautiful and even sensuous, porcelain is also the most difficult and capricious ceramic material to work with. Indeed, it requires sensitivity, skill, attention and care at every stage of production. Yet it remains for its extraordinary qualities – purity, translucency, strength and fineness – one of the most fascinating materials around.
Spellbound by porcelain and intrigued by the volume Fragiles: Porcelain, Ceramics and Glass that she saw during a visit at Stockholm’s Moderna Museet, Karisia created a collection comprising 12 pieces inspired by this sophisticated material.
“I started thinking about the applications of porcelain after seeing this book,” Karisia recounted to me a while back. “I loved the idea of being able to reproduce the aesthetic qualities of porcelain in my fashion designs using contemporary materials, so first I made wooden shapes and silhouettes, and then I moulded upon them a material called Evaform on which I applied my printed textiles.” Evaform is a thermo-reactive material, so it remains in the desired shape it was moulded in once put in an oven and left to cool down. This is why Karisia’s skirts and tops look rather rigid, though they are not supported by crinolines or whalebone sticks underneath.
Karisia’s research didn’t stop here: like Johann Gregorius Höroldt, the famous porcelain painter who developed new enamel colours and innovative decorations, she coated her designs with vinyl to endow them with the same translucency of porcelain and added some Rococo-like prints, combining in this way modern and classic influences.
“I could say that my work is characterised by these two different aspects, a passion for contemporary and linear designs and a love for decorative elements, as my Rococo prints inspired by the flowery decorations and golden swirls of Sèvres porcelains also prove,” the young designer told me. “I love experimenting with different materials, like architects or sculptors do. It can be a long process to try and understand who you are or what’s your style like, but the more I go on with my work, the more it becomes clear to me that my pieces often look like sculptures. Yet, if you carefully analyse them, you realise that all my dresses and coats are actually very simple and based on a circular shape, which is sometimes revised or folded in two or four parts.”
While it’s easy to spot in Karisia’s skirts and coats circular shaped objects, such as an overturned teacup or a porcelain plate with golden floral borders that can be modelled on the body and easily change shape, there are also pieces based on more experimental silhouettes.
“One jacket was based on a flattened cardboard gift box,” Karisia explained me, “the sleeves aren’t sewn in as they would be in traditional full fashioned armholes and this produces a rather striking effect. I developed this collection while studying at the Antwerp Royal Academy of Fine Arts and this helped me a lot because I was able to freely experiment without thinking about the needs of specific clients or commercial partners. Producing the collection was a long and complicated process, but it was very stimulating to work like this, since I had the impression I was an artist rather than just a fashion designer.”
Karisia’s educational background has somehow influenced her work: the designer comes from a family of shoemakers hailing from the Marche region and she first studied footwear.
Later on she decided to enrol at Milan’s Marangoni Institute but then opted to move to Antwerp where she found a much more stimulatingly competitive environment.
“There was no age limit at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts, so you would find yourself following courses with students as young as 22 or with more mature ones who were over 30,“ she explained me, “I also had the chance of taking part in different fashion competitions such as Mittelmoda and ITS#8 while studying, and won the ‘A Shaded View on Fashion Award’ at the Royal Academy Show with my latest collection. These competitions were interesting since they gave me the chance to understand how things work in real life. At the moment I’m torn up between working for a fashion house or for myself, as going solo scares me a little bit, but I always had a passion for knowledge, research and independence, so I guess I will have to muster up my courage, run some risks and prepare to put myself on the line.”
Porcelain can be fragile, but it’s also renown for its strength, hardness and durability, three qualities that, judging from her work and inspirations, also Karisia Paponi seems to have.
“50 ± Anni di Moda Italiana” is at quartier21, Vienna, until 20th January 2010.
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