Irenebrination: Notes on Architecture, Art, Fashion, Fashion Law, Science & Technology

Halloween Wishes: Twin Freaks

Being under 3 minute long, the mini horror shot by Amy Gwatkin in collaboration with fashion designer and embroiderer extraordinaire Scott Ramsay Kyle is probably the shortest film of its genre. Yet Twin Freaks is spooky enough to be on a par with Dario Argento’s films.

Half Suspiria, also thanks to Henry Law’s spellbinding soundtrack that evokes The Goblins, with enough Swarovski crystals to call to mind the title of another thriller directed by the Italian master of horror, The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, and plenty of kaleidoscopic effects à la Mario Bava, Twin Freaks is a brief vision about an unsettling and disturbing apparition hiding in a cupboard and it’s Gwatkin and Kyle’s present to their fans for Halloween.     

What prompted you to shoot a mini horror?
Amy Gwatkin: Any excuse to work with Scott! I love the fact that the nature of how Scott works means he’s not tied to seasons and fashion weeks.
Scott Ramsay Kyle: I was excited about Amy’s idea of using kaleidoscopes and layers and the mini horror came through as soon as she began to shoot.

Did any particular masters of horror films inspire you?
Amy Gwatkin: Dario Argento, deffo! Annalisa Dunn from Cooperative Designs introduced me to his work and I’ve been obsessed with the coloured light and melodrama ever since. Also Francis Ford Coppola’s Dracula, so not just horror, strictly speaking, but thoroughly over the top works, I just love it! Also Tales of the Unexpected - the TV show - and especially the dreamy, creepy fairground organ theme tune and credits...I think Henry unconsciously channelled it in his soundtrack!
Scott Ramsay Kyle: I love old vampire movies especially Hammer films with all their faux decadence and even Eerie, Indiana, I used to watch it after school as a kid. I’ve also watched Twilight something like 6 times, but no judgments thanks!

Where did you shoot it and what inspired the garments worn in the video?
Amy Gwatkin: We shot it in Scott’s cupboard under the stairs - I love the idea of the dark heart of suburbia, such a cliché, but with good reason.

Scott Ramsay Kyle: Yes, we shot it in my house in Bow – ‘the bowels of bow’ - and under our stairs which was fun. I like a lot the idea of documenting parts of your life through your practice. I recently worked with Hector Castro on a special project using a lot of Swarovski crystals and the leftover stones were used in the video.

You already collaborated together previously, do you think you may shoot a proper shortcut/film one of these days?
Amy Gwatkin: Would love to! We definitely have other plans for collaboration, and no doubt that will involve film. I’d love to get Scott involved in other film projects.
Scott Ramsay Kyle: Like Amy said, we are planning more projects soon and I’m also working on menswear pieces. I like hanging out with Amy and we tweet each other lots.

Is there an actor/actress you would like to appear in one of your future videos?

Amy Gwatkin: Gary Oldman! I love him. Might take some persuading though...
Scott Ramsay Kyle: Maybe Keanu Reeves? Just so versatile with his delivery…[Dude?] I loved him in Bram Stoker’s Dracula too!

After Halloween, can we hope in a Christmas short as well?
Amy Gwatkin: Yeah why not! I’m not a huge fan of Xmas, bit of an Ebeneezer Scrooge, so maybe “A Christmas Carol” is ripe for a fashion remake!
Scott Ramsay Kyle: We may work on a remake of Wham’s ‘Last Christmas’, I’ll get some highlights and we mince around in front of the camera...best not! Happy Hallowe’en!

Photograph from Twin Freaks taken from Amy Gwatkin's blog.

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Fashion’s big mistakes? Overproducing and revamping

As you may have heard by now, forecasting an 18.8% drop in 2009 sales to 273 million euros ($405.6 million) and an operating loss of 30 million euros ($44.6 million), Versace announced it will cut 350 jobs, roughly 25% of its workforce.

Apparently, this is the result of the current financial crisis and of the consequent decline in the demand of luxury goods.

Who knows if, come next year, Donatella’s dreams of living in a fantasyland à la Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland, one of the inspirations behind the fashion house's S/S 2010 collection, will really manage to restore the group to profitability by 2011 or if the brand will need more than Gianni’s safety pins reinvented by Christopher Kane to increase its sales.

I often think that the problem is not the decline in the demand of luxury goods, but the fact that there are too many clothes and accessories out there.

Please note that with "too many" I don't mean to refer to the wide choice brands and fashion houses offer their customers, but to the actual numbers of things they produce.

Quite a few brands tend indeed to overproduce garments they will never sell or will eventually sell a few seasons after at outlet stores. In fact I think that in Italy genuine designer clothes have found back their market in huge outlets located outside the city centres, such as Prada's, located in Montevarchi, outside Arezzo.

It’s not only the overproduction aspect of fashion that I hate, though. There is another hateful trend that I can’t stand, resurrecting, revamping and revomiting dead brands.

In a world that manages to produce more fashion designer graduates than it can actually employ, I’m amazed that somebody still wants to resurrect dead labels.

The Schiaparelli house is for example still in a limbo after Della Valle bought it a few years ago, but what will happen if it ever gets revamped? 

I dread to think about the consequences, but I recently had what I could define as a traumatic fashion experience. I saw in quite a few Italian shops and department stores bags and small accessories by Galitzine.

The first question that came to my mind was “wasn’t she dead?”, then I remembered that a while back the brand had been bought.

For those of you who don’t remember her name, Princess Irene Galitzine was an aristocratic woman of Russian descent. She was born in 1916 in Tiflis (Tbilisi), Georgia, from a Russian princess, Nina Lazareff and an officer of the Tsar Guards, Boris Galitzine.

The Galitzine family moved to Rome when the October Revolution broke out and young Irene first entered the world of fashion working as a model and PR agent for the Fontana Sisters in Rome. 

In the late 40s she opened her own atelier and boutique and became famous for designing in the early 60s the "pyjama" or "palazzo" pants, a silky pair of trousers very similar in their cut to pyjamas, characterised by very wide legs.

In the years that followed, Galitzine launched crease resistant lingerie, designed a futuristic collection inspired to kaleidoscopes and also worked on costumes for films such as Luchino Visconti’s Le vaghe stelle dell’Orsa (Sandra of a Thousand Delights) and Berry Gordy’s Mahogany.

As many other Italian designers at the time, Galitzine became a friend of many high profile international politicians, stars, celebrities and actresses, from  the Kennedys to Elizabeth Taylor,  Audrey Hepburn, Greta Garbo, Sofia Loren and Claudia Cardinale, and also won numerous fashion awards.

In the early 90s the company was bought by Xines and, since then, the latter tried to revamp and revive the brand. Luckily for her, Galitzine died in October 2006, otherwise she would have died of heart attack after seeing what is currently produced under her name. The products branded Galitzine include outerwear, knitwear, accessories and even household linens.

The problem with all the stuff on the market at the moment under Galitzine’s name is that it is third rate stuff, for its design, materials employed and execution.

Most of the bags, gloves or belts look exactly like the umpteenth bag, pair of gloves or belt produced by one of the many factories based in Asia.

If none of the stuff produced looks beautiful, covetable or extremely modern, why producing it? Why even bothering revamping a brand? To make money? I honestly think the only reason why you would produce such things is because you have huge sums of dirty money at your disposal that you want to recycle and make sure they disappear as soon as possible, though this hypothesis would be rather unlikely in this case. 

While I hope Galitzine's name will still be remembered in connection with her palazzo pants and not with a bad quality handbag, I also hope that fashion houses and companies out there will seriously start considering the damages overproduction and bad investments have so far caused and take more considerate steps while planning their future strategies. 

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What was fashionable today?

The end of the year is near and calendar mania is, as usual, predictably rife.

I quite like notebooks, but I have a sort of personal aversion for calendars and diaries as I see them as constrictive tools that try to organise one's space and life (while it's so much more creative living surrounded by chaos...).

Anyway there is a calendar or a diary which I would definitely buy though for the time being it only exists in my imagination.

It's a calendar that could tell me what was fashionable on a precise day of the year fifty, sixty or even eighty years ago.      

Since such a thing is not available at the moment, I often leaf through old magazines trying to rediscover forgotten designs that were popular decades ago.

Apart from teaching you quite a bit about the history of fashion design, leafing through vintage magazines can also make you realise how specific designs are still trendy today or, if slightly updated, could be definitely re-launched.

Today I picked the 29th October 1961 issue of Italian weekly Oggi and rediscovered through the main fashion feature published in its pages what was fashionable at the time.

The main fashion spread is about Germana Marucelli, an Italian designer I have mentioned here and there in this blog for her connection with the art world.

According to Milan-based Marucelli, the trend for the Autumn/Winter 1961-62 season favoured soft lines.

Dresses featured asymmetrical motifs (and asymmetrical prints) or wrap over details; tartan and plaid coats were characterised by simple lines and silhouettes while skirt suits featured pleated or panelled skirts matched with short or cropped jackets.

Marucelli opted for soft and warm fabrics to make these designs, choosing a type of fabric that was called at the time “Fiesta”.

The latter was a wool and terital (a polyester based fabric) blend created by the Marzotto Group that was supposed to be as soft as flannel and as resistant as terital and was available in different shades, from green to bronze, charcoal grey, deep sea blue and eggplant violet.

This fabric was available also in its pleated version and that was one of the main reasons why it was favoured by women who didn't have great dressmaking skills, since it allowed to easily create skirts and dresses.

There is a skirt Marucelli designed and that was featured in this photoshoot (worn by the model on the right in the third picture in this post) that featured two different types of "Fiesta", the pleated one and the smooth one.

Marucelli used the two fabrics to create a sort of pannier like skirt with a frontal panel characterised by a geometrical and almost architectural motif that seemed to jut out around the hip area.

While looking at this image I thought it was a rather unusual design.

The picture made me wonder in which ways this motif could be recreated in contemporary fashion.

Then I thought about Acne's well defined and precisely cut strapless denim dress with an architectural wrap around panel and realised that, maybe, what was fashionable almost 50 years ago can still be fashionable today.

I guess the secret is just looking at old designs with a more experimental and cutting edge vision.

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Tout Terriblement, but so très chic

If there is one thing that makes me totally jealous about French and German TV viewers is the Franco-German ARTE network and the books and DVD produced by the ARTE group.

Being Italian I don't usually watch a lot of TV (thanks to Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, only 1% of the Italian TV programmes can indeed be watched without puking or without standing up and shouting swearwords to the TV screen...).

ARTE has the power to restore your faith in intelligent TV programmes since it usually broadcasts a mish-mash of documentaries, films, informative programmes and features about different themes and topics, from art to fashion, music, theatre and history.

I honestly think ARTE TV is probably the only channel that nowadays has the guts to broadcast a clever documentary about modern design or a moving history of the Armenian genocide.

One of my first introduction to ARTE's DVDs actually happened on a rainy Glasgow evening when, while flicking through TV channels, I stumbled upon Loïc Prigent's Signé Chanel.

I thought it was a great documentary about fashion since it showed all the people who work behind the scenes and not just a bunch of pretentious designers enjoying themselves at parties.

After watching Prigent's documentary I went online to see if I could find its DVD and discovered it was available from ARTE Boutique.

If you're obsessed about ARTE as much as I am, you will be happy to know that it recently released in DVD the documentary "Yves Saint Laurent - Tout Terriblement", by Jérôme de Missolz and Armelle Brusq.

Shot in 1994, between Paris, Marrakech and Deauville, while Yves Saint Laurent was preparing a haute couture collection, the documentary is a homage to one of the most important designers in the history of contemporary fashion, but also helps the viewer to discover his world and ambitions.

The video includes exclusive footage accompanied by Jeanne Moreau's voice and also a 24 page booklet with the full script of the film with a preface by Marguerite Duras. The DVD has been available at Colette from early October, but you're still perfectly on time to add it to your personal Christmas present wishlist.

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Genuine "Made in England"

The surnames Foale and Tuffin are often mentioned in association with popular labels from the "Swinging London" scene such as Mary Quant, Gerald McCann, John Bates's Jean Varon, Ossie Clark, John Stephen and Barbara Hulanicki.

All these labels and designers operated a genuine fashion revolution, that "youthquake" that had sociocultural implications and was analysed in many volumes and essays out there.  

Deciding they didn't want to go and work for a fashion company that didn't put its heart into its business, after graduating from Walthamstow Art School and studying at the Royal College of Art under Janey Ironside, Marion Foale and Sally Tuffin set up their own business in 1961.

The two friends first started selling the dresses, tops and skirts they made in their South Kensington flat in department stores, and, in 1962, borrowed a small sum of money (£200) and opened their own boutique on Carnaby Street, attracted by the low rents and West End location.

The boutique was a sort of small showroom entirely dedicated to young people, a cultural space in which music, style and fashion met.

Tuffin and Foale became known for curtain lace dress suits, bicycle dresses, prints inspired by Pop and Op art, but also Art Deco, and for their slim fitted trouser suits that, sold for as little as 19 guineas, appealed to both young and mature customers, becoming an iconic key piece in the wardrobe of many women.

TV shows and films had an enormous impact on fashion at the time: fashion icon and trendsetter Cathy McGowan once presented the show Ready, Steady, Go, in a Foale and Tuffin design, favouring it over Biba's, and the two designers and friends collaborated on several films, among them also Jack Smight's Kaleidoscope (1966), designing coats and suits for actress Susannah York, starring in the role of Angel McGinnis.

The history of Foale and Tuffin is currently being rediscovered thanks to an exhibition that opened last weekend.

The retrospective event "Foale and Tuffin - Made in England" currently on at the London-based Fashion and Textile Museum (FTM) traces back the history of the two fashion designers from their early start in 1962 until 1972, recreating in the museum rooms the design duo's boutique, showroom and studio.

Apart from being an interesting introduction to the world of these two designers, the exhibition also makes you ponder a bit about the state of fashion (and creativity) nowadays.

Foale and Tuffin are indeed still in the creative business: the former is a knitwear designer, while the latter is a ceramicist.

To mark the exhibition the designers created a series of products - among them small accessories, T-shirts and vases - available only from the FTM shop.

The exhibition is also accompanied by a volume by Iain R. Webb that allows passionate fashion readers to rediscover the history of this seminal design duo.

"Foale and Tuffin" will be on until February 2010, so you have plenty of time to visit it, or maybe plan your personal rediscovery of 'Made in England' fashion over the Christmas holidays. 

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Measuring tips from the past

A while back I had to enlist the help of a friend of mine to take the exact measurements of my body to have a jacket made.

There are two main and very simple reasons why I had to ask my friend to give me a hand: I don't trust my judgment and it's awkward to take measurements, especially around the shoulder area.

The very simple process of having my measures taken made me think about the importance of the human body in fashion.

Each century, or rather each decade, created its own vision of the human body.

As beauty canons changed from one century to another, skinny women replaced curvaceous goddesses and garments changed their shapes and silhouettes accordingly to highlight specific parts of the body or hide and reshape others.

The history of fashion is therefore also the history of tailoring, pattern cutting and, obviously, measuring. In the 30s a Rome-based tailor, Luigi Branchini, patented an innovative measuring technique consisting in a sort of metal structure that was applied to the body. By tightening the screws along the metallic cage in the picture (taken from a tailor's manual), a tailor could have taken precise measurements and saved also the fabrics needed to make a garment.

This patented method wasn't that successful and proof of its existence only remains in old books, specialist texts and essays. Yet it's interesting to rediscover it also in the light of the changes clothing charts have gone through in the last few years. I must admit though that, even if I had Branchini's cage, I would still enlist my friend's help to take my body measures (I'm sure I would just get trapped in the cage...). So, for the time being, I guess I'll just stick to ordinary measuring tape!

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Breaking the fashion boundaries

In a way it was only natural that Rotterdam’s Boijmans Van Beuningen Museum became the chosen destination for “The Art of Fashion: Installing Allusions”, a new exhibition exploring the work of designers who have broken in their work the boundaries between art and fashion.

In the last few years, Dutch academies turned into hotbeds for talented designers, but local museums also helped spreading the interest in fashion, organising cross-disciplinary exhibitions, acquiring new pieces and starting partnerships with art collectors such as Han Nefkens who proved instrumental with his H + F Fashion on the Edge Foundation in supporting work by innovative and avant-garde designers such as Viktor & Rolf and Hussein Chalayan.

“The Art of Fashion” exhibition is particularly important since it features five brand new pieces specifically commissioned to five designers, Anna-Nicole Ziesche, Hussein Chalayan, Naomi Filmer, Viktor & Rolf and Walter Van Beirendonck.

The works are exhibited alongside pieces by international designers, from Elsa Schiaparelli and Jana Sterbak to Martin Margiela, Comme des Garçons, Louise Bourgeois and the newest generation of more avant-garde artists including Charlie Le Mindu with his surrealistically oversized wigs and Nick Cave with two examples of his richly embroidered audio-tactile “soundsuits”.

All the pieces are connected one to the other through fine metal structures devised by Judith Clark, guest curator of this exhibition together with José Teunissen.

“I wanted to get away from traditional fashion exhibitions in which the items are displayed on plinths and divided by themes,” Clark explains, “so I opted for low but heavy bases on which mannequins are exhibited, surrounded by these sort of metal constellations that connect different pieces.”

Clark’s exhibition design is very effective: visitors are first introduced to Anna-Nicole Ziesche’s film Childhood Storage, a video of her reconstructed childhood bedroom used to evoke past experiences and memories, then they are allowed to draw comparisons between Jana Sterbak’s Remote Control I (1989) and Hussein Chalayan’s more recent remote controlled or mechanical dresses and the latter’s Micro-Geography: a Cross Section, an entirely new piece consisting of a rotating mannequin immersed in a sort of aquarium and surrounded by air, earth and water with cameras installed at various points around the dress that help understanding how there are different ways of looking at clothes and fashion.

While Christophe Coppens’ Deer Cape (2005) explores the tailored spaces around the body, jewellery designer Naomi Filmer’s four Breathing Volume sculptures, explore “uncelebrated” spaces such as the mouth, chin and neck areas.

Filmer’s work is related to Helen Chadwick’s seminal Body Cushions (1973-74) while Walter Van Beirendonck’s 2357 - The Sequel, a brightly coloured 6 metre-high temple carrying all his symbols - bears, suns, moons and ejaculating penises - in which the designer imagined people will find his sarcophagus (the latter was originally created for the Paris-based Galerie Polaris a few months ago), brings into the exhibition an imaginary world suspended between comic book and fable.

Comme des Garçons’s anti-perfumes Series 6 Synthetic (2004) and Schiaparelli’s Le Roy Soleil (1946) and Snuff (1945) focus on the power of the senses and on smell in particular, a theme that culminates in Viktor & Rolf’s Alternative No. 1, a perfume bottle formed by several different bottles, all bearing the V&R logo, accompanied by a very conceptual and slightly disturbing advertising campaign, an image taken by Inez van Lamsweerde and Vinoodh Matadin portraying a girl with a half-opened rose in her mouth that looks like a vagina.

“We curated this exhibition in the dark since, when we started researching it, the big five commission pieces didn’t exist yet,” Clark explains, “but I think that this aspect made the conversation much more exciting and, once the pieces were unveiled everything came into focus. The results of the exhibition are amazing because they show what happens when people who are already part of a conceptual conversation in fashion are given a budget to do something even more conceptual.”

Walking around the museum galleries and watching pieces by Dai Rees, Sandra Backlund, Robert Gober and Freddie Robins, visitors will discover that fashion is definitely a form of performance art and that it has also transformed throughout the years, assuming subtler messages and turning into a powerful media that can help expressing specific cultural messages and even tackle identity issues.

“There are designers who make installation pieces and designers who work as artists,“ adds José Teunissen, “but I feel that, nowadays, there are even more fashion designers intrigued by the boundaries between fashion and art and I would urge visitors to come and see this exhibition since it will allow them to see new and exclusive work, while sharpening their vision and making them ponder about the relationship between the body and the environment surrounding us.”

"The Art of Fashion - Installing Allusions" is at the Boijmans Van Beuningen Museum, Rotterdam, until 10th January 2010.

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Notes on anarchist styles: Sacco and Vanzetti

Last Saturday I pondered a bit on political plays and on Jim Allen’s Perdition.

Today I feel like shedding some brief notes on one of my favourite political films, Giuliano Montaldo’s Sacco and Vanzetti (1971) and on the story of anarchist Italian immigrants Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, interpreted in the film by Riccardo Cucciolla and the great Gian Maria Volonté.

I still remember watching this film many years ago during the Flaiano Film Festival in my hometown, Pescara, in a theatre room full of people.

Gian Maria Volontè’s speech (see extracts from YouTube in this post - sorry but I only found it in Italian) moved us to tears, but by the time we heard Joan Baez singing "Here’s to You", on Morricone’s music, we were all clapping and crying.

Over 80 years after their deaths, historians are still discussing about whether Sacco and Vanzetti were guilty or innocent of the murders of two men shot in 1920 in South Braintree, Massachusetts, during a payroll robbery. 

One thing is certain and that’s the fact that their trial was riddled by anti-immigrant prejudice that was ripe at the time, especially against foreigners with anarchic, communist or socialist affiliations.

Despite the case happened so long ago, Sacco and Vanzetti’s lives and deaths still matter: they represent a story of immigration and remind us of the hostility generated anytime there is a new flow of immigrants to a country, but it’s also a story of political and radical ideals conceived while bomb attacks were carried out against U.S. government officials and the police forces were answering back with retaliatory raids.

Think about what’s going on nowadays in the world and you will find similar situations to the one Sacco and Vanzetti lived in, but in different contexts.

The rise of anti-immigration feelings, fear of terrorism and radicalism, shooting of suspected terrorists, miscarriages of justice and the denial of workers’ rights, sadly play a larger role every day in our lives.

Even the Italian government's threatened legal action and investigations against the “Let's Kill Berlusconi” Facebook page – now renamed “Berlusconi Go Away” – made me think about Sacco and Vanzetti (it's highly unlikely you could reform an extremist terrorist group via Facebook, don’t you think so?, yet everything is useful when you want to distract the attention from more important matters...).

This is why Sacco and Vanzetti’s story may still teach us something and why we should treasure their sufferings, sorrows, mistakes, defeats, passion for future battles and for the great emancipation - to paraphrase one of their last letters.

I want to leave you with something inspirational for this weekend, an extract from Nicola Sacco’s heartfelt letter to his son, written before being executed: “…remember always, Dante, in the play of happiness, don’t you use all for yourself only, but down yourself just one step (…) help the weak ones that cry for help, help the prosecuted and the victim, because they are your better friends (…) in this struggle of life you will find more love and you will be loved.”

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Momaboma’s Rags of Wonder

Elsa Schiaparelli may have used fabric with prints of newspaper articles for her avant-garde designs, but Italian designer Maurizio Longati decided that only original articles and iconic Italian adverts from the ‘50s and ‘60s would have done for his accessories.

A casual encounter in India with a soaking wet concrete bag, inspired him a series of small accessories made with vintage magazines and, after further experiments, he developed more avant-garde designs based on two principles, quality and affordability, using tailor’s measuring tapes, ’50s Navy rucksacks and parachutes.

In just five years Longati’s Momaboma project turned into a successful venture that produces in its Italian laboratories over 20,000 pieces a year and has even become the subject of courses, workshops and exams at fashion institutes across Italy.

What inspired you to start producing bags and accessories with such unusual materials?
Maurizio Longati: In 2004 I spent almost a year working in India. One day I was at a factory specialised in embroideries and outside there was a terrible monsoon. It was raining very heavily and I stumbled in a concrete sack that was lying on the ground. These sacks usually feature an internal polypropylene net that protects concrete from humidity. I picked it up and realised the sack hadn’t broken, so I took it inside the factory and decided to fashion a bag out of it for my partner Claudia. I did something very basic, a tube-shaped bag, so I just cut a rectangle out of the sack, added two circles and a couple of handles and sewed it all together. When Claudia saw it she thought it was beautiful since she felt the bag had a sort of emotional value and contained in itself all the suffering of the people in India. We started designing further bags, producing them all in Italy and eventually got the first orders from a popular Bologna-based shop. 

Do you feel that the materials used for the Momaboma accessories give them a sort of ‘added value’?
Maurizio Longati: Yes, I do. Even though I designed bags using old concrete sacks and even air chambers of used tires, recycling wasn’t the main point. My main aim was indeed doing something emotionally important. I guess that selecting old pages from vintage newspapers and magazines and reusing them could maybe be defined as “romantic recycling”. You can’t really reprint or use photocopies of fashion magazines or comics from the 50s as they wouldn’t communicate the same emotions original pages can communicate. Besides, I’ve always admired Italian illustrator, cartoonist and graphic designer Armando Testa and the Pop Art-like ripped posters made by Italian artist Mimmo Rotella and felt inspired by their works. I liked the idea of creating something from papers and rags, assorted materials that people usually throw away as I wanted my final design to incorporate little pieces of history and emotions inside. For example, we recently employed for our bags marked tests of children from a Sicilian secondary school, because we felt they expressed a wide range of anxieties and emotions. We sort of applied the same concept also to our jewels that were born out of a personal passion I share with my partner Claudia. Amber inspired our jewels: this resin traps insects and freezes time back to million of years ago, and we decided to incorporate pieces of newspapers in plastic pieces so that in fifty year’s time people will still be able to own a bangle or a necklace with a little piece of history inside. 
 
You have recently launched a special project entitled MyMomaboma that allows customers to send you and your team of designers and craftsmen their favourite magazines, photographs, sketches and notebooks and see them turned into emotionally fashionable bags and small accessories. What has been the best feedback you have ever received about a MyMomaboma bag you created?
Maurizio Longati: The MyMomaboma project allows me to turn into the personal designer of a customer’s emotions because it’s the customer who tells us what to use, from love letters to plane, museum or concert tickets. We usually get very moving feedback when we do these projects: a while back we made a bag for a girl who was getting married using pages from old diaries that belonged to her friends and on which she had scribbled and sketched away as a teenager, and she was really moved by it. 

Have you recently been working on any particular project using unusual materials?
Maurizio Longati: I have been working on a series of bags using newspapers with images of Presidents of the United States, from Abraham Lincoln to Barack Obama. I was in the States when Obama was elected and I brought back home 250 newspapers, published on the 4th and 5th of November, from The New York Times and USA Today to The Wall Street Journal. I felt I brought back home Obama’s winds of change and wanted to inject a bit of American history into our accessories. These bags won’t be on sale, though, but they will be part of a sort of art project. I’m also working on a line of bags dedicated to music, a sort of tribute to Richard Curtis' The Boat That Rocked, using vintage images from the 60s-70s. 

What are your future plans for Momaboma?

Maurizio Longati: Momaboma is a sort of lifestyle and I would like to apply the same concept behind the bags also to shoes and glass frames. My background is in architecture, though, so I’m planning to maybe employ the Momaboma philosophy to interior design and further customisation projects.

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Serious style in serious sound

Innovative brand Audio Chi has just launched a range of technologically advanced headphones.

I recently asked a few questions about the headphones to one of the brand’s in-house designers, Jili Allen.

Allen studied Product Design at Edinburgh Napier University, but always had an insatiable love for fashion that prompted her to create an entire shoe collection when she completed her degree.

When Allen moved to Paris and worked in the local bureau of Vogue USA, fashion design became a more prominent obsession in her life and the local fashion weeks only ended up increasing Allen’s addiction.

Back in the UK Allen decided to mix her passion for fashion with her love for art, design and music.

Collaborating with a team of experts at Audio Chi, Allen worked on a range of headphones. Dubbed the W-Series, the range features headphones in different colour combinations and a Chanel-style quilted headband.

The look is not all though: the W-Series offers professional studio sound quality thanks to Audio Chi’s Flawless Sound™ Technology and features woven cables – so that they don’t tangle in the wearer’s hair – and a detachable connection. To celebrate the W-Series fashion connection, Audio Chi organised a photo shoot at Glasgow’s SWG3 Studio Warehouse.

What fascinates you about product design?
Jili Allen: Product Design gives me a different foundation to just fashion; it’s not just the way something looks that excites me, it’s also the way it works. The team that worked on the Audio Chi headphones comprises specialists in fashion, marketing, journalism and obviously sound engineers. This is exactly what I love about product design, it offers the chance of meeting real people who find their inspiration in the most untoward places.

How did you get involved with the Audio Chi project?
Jili Allen: I met the Audio Chi team while I was designing and creating hand-made shoes. We got talking and their passion was infectious. I instantly fell in love with the idea and felt that working on such a product was a natural progression for me. 

What inspired the design/colour combination for the Audio Chi headphones? 
Jili Allen: Our inspiration comes from one simple question: why does there always have to be a compromise between fashion and performance? We didn’t want to sacrifice technology for design; we wanted to tick all the boxes and bring quality headphones to the forefront – accessible for all. I guess we managed to reach our objectives: the W-Series design stands out but so do its sound, size and comfort. Traditionally, headphones of this sound quality are ridiculously huge but we changed all that.
 
What’s your favourite colour combination?
Jili Allen: Black with pink polka-dots; the colours go with all imaginable outfits, and, like other accessories, can make the most tired look interesting again. In fact I wore them around my neck the other night just as a statement. 

Will you develop further accessories along these lines in future? 
Jili Allen: Yes! Watch this space.

Photography by Brian Sweeney. Member of the Boxxet Network of Blogs, Videos and Photos Member of the Boxxet Network of Blogs, Videos and Photos Add to Technorati Favorites Lijit Search