Monthly Archives: January 2016

Let's close the textile pattern thread that started on Friday with Valentino's Haute Couture S/S 2016 collection and continued yesterday with a focus on floral designs with a brief look at Josef Hoffmann and Koloman Moser's geometrical patterns. The co-founders of … Continue reading →

In yesterday's post we analysed a contemporary Haute Couture collection that incoporates in some of its designs patterns and motifs borrowed from the early decades of the 1900s, plus a palette and techniques linked to Mariano Fortuny.  Fashion design students … Continue reading →

"She was enveloped in one of those long, Oriental gauze scarves that the alchemist dyer Mariano Fortuny submerges in the mysterious potions of his caldrons, stirring them with a wooden stick, first like a sylph, then like a gnome, where … Continue reading →

In a previous post we looked at the potential of paper as a Haute Couture material in connection with sets and hairstyles and mentioned Stephen Foster's relief figure workshops at Glasgow's Museum/Research Centre The World Through Wooden Eyes. As Foster … Continue reading →

"Eco-friendly" has been the key word in the architectural field for quite a few years now. Recent developments by modern firms included sustainable projects such as the buckle-shaped eco-school complex "Groupe Scolaire Paulette Deblock" in Sin le Noble, in north-eastern … Continue reading →

There is something verging towards the disturbing in Les Dîners de Gala, a cookbook conceived and illustrated by Salvador Dalí in 1973. The result of a collaboration between Dalí, his wife Gala, and a secret chef (that is a team … Continue reading →

The fashion industry has the terrible habit of launching a designer, claiming they are a genius and then discarding them to move onto the next big thing. Yet it is always more interesting to give a designer the time to … Continue reading →

As seen in a few previous posts this week there have been attempts on the menswear runways to comment about some of the main issues currently worrying our society. Though Maison Kitsuné wasn't trying to make a literal comment about wars and … Continue reading →

Words are elements, little tools, that, combined and recombined, can help us putting together sentences and coming up with a message. Images can be employed in the same way, even though, in our digital world, visual messages seem to have … Continue reading →

There are different ways to comment and react about key issues bothering our world: analysing specific problems through exhibitions is not a solution but may provide new perspectives on global predicaments, in the same way as a poignant photograph, cartoon, … Continue reading →