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

And the Bride Wore...

Having spent most of my life strategically hiding at marriages to dodge unidentified flying bouquets (and having successfully managed to escape any risks of being even remotely hit…), I’m definitely not the best person to write about wedding gowns.

Yet today I’m justified to do so since in this post wedding gowns are connected with films.

An exhibition entitled "Marriage in the Movies", recently opened at the National Museum of Costume in Dumfries, is currently exploring the craftsmanship and style behind a few wedding dresses that appeared on the big screen.

Traditions and mores may have changed in our times, but wedding customs are still strong in numerous societies.

Indeed, wedding gowns are still charged with symbolic meanings, hopes and expectations: though they differ from culture to culture, according to many anthropologists, wedding dresses do have something in common and that's the fact that they embody a rite of passage.

Recent years have seen a renewed interest in wedding gowns: Disney schemed a Machiavellian plot creating a bridal line for all those little girls who, grown up on a staple diet of princesses and fairy tales, may want to live the plastic dream in full with a dress from the Disney Bridal line (offering the groom enough grounds for divorce, especially if you pick the Beauty and the Beast-inspired dress, indirectly implying that if you're Belle, the other half is the unpleasant beast...).

High street retailers answered to this romantic avalanche of saccharin with something plain, simple and, above all, cheaper: the affordable ready-made wedding dress (remember the Viktor & Rolf for H&M gown?).

Like a classic white wedding dress, "Marriage in the Movies" doesn’t transgress any traditional expectations as it mainly focuses on a precise period of time (from the mid-1700s to 1930), examining costumes and also including a selection of bridal accessories from the National Museum of Costume collection, chronicling the history of wedding traditions in Scotland.

The most interesting thing about this exhibition, from my personal point of view, is the craftsmanship behind the costumes used for the films and the research behind them.

The costume designers who made these creations closely adhered to the style and period the stories took place in.

Kenneth Branagh’s Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1994) featured for example beautiful costumes designed by James Acheson, nominated to multiple awards and winner of three Oscars for The Last Emperor (1987), Dangerous Liaisons (1988) and Restoration (1995).

The "Marriage in the Movies" exhibition includes the wedding dress worn by Helena Bonham Carter as Elizabeth, Victor Frankenstein’s fiancée.

The pale silk dress, divided in two pieces, featured quite beautiful embroidered details in metallic thread and was characterised by double ruffled sleeves and a closed-front bodice, very typical elements of dresses from the 1770s.

The gown designed by Andrea Galer for Fanny Price (Frances O'Connor) in Patricia Rozema’s Mansfield Park (1999), based on Jane Austen’s novel, reflected the style of the time but also the simplicity and strong nature of the main character.

The dress featured indeed a limited amount of decorative elements in lace and tulle.

The wedding costume created by Anthony Powell (who won an Oscar for this production) for actress Nastassja Kinski, starring as the main character in the 1980 adaptation of Thomas Hardy’s novel Tess of the d’Ubervilles directed by Roman Polanski, showed an in-depth knowledge of the main character.

The cream silk wedding gown in late 1800s style could be considered as a metaphor for Tess’ life.

The costume included parts characterised by a rather simple and linear style (the sleeves) and over-elaborate and decorated parts (the frills and ruffles decorating the tiered skirt), becoming a metaphor for the life of Hardy's heroine who turns from the daughter of a poor man to mistress, wife and victim of a cruel destiny.

Tess’ dress reflects in a way her life and, rather than being a transitional object that allows her to pass from an existence she would like to abandon to a new life with Angel, it becomes the pivotal element towards destruction, the final separator from Angel.     

Another famous wedding dress included in the exhibition is the cream gown with a silk bodice trimmed with lace designed by Jenny Beavan and John Bright that appeared in James Ivory’s Howard’s End (1992). 

The exhibition will be accompanied by a special event on 1st July, "A Day of Costume Drama", that will offer the chance to tour the exhibition, join an afternoon tea and then watch a special screening at the Robert Burns Centre Film Theatre of Saul Dibb’s The Duchess (2008).

As you may remember, the movie featured Keira Knightley wearing an elaborate gown created by costume designer Michael O'Connor (who won an Academy Award for the costumes in this film).

The wedding gown in this film featured gathered frills of silk on the front and a corset with elaborate embroideries in metal and fibre threads forming intricately dazzling patterns.

The film also has an interesting Italian connection since the Tirelli tailoring house contributed to some of its costumes. 

"Marriage in the Movies" is at the National Museum of Costume, Shambellie House, New Abbey, Dumfries, until 31 October 2010.

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Being “A La Mode”

Trying to reinvent itself as a cool cosmopolitan European capital capable of attracting new (and possibly stylish) tourists, Glasgow forgot in the last few years that, sometimes, the best way to reinvent yourself is to look inward and rediscover your identity rather than trying to copy others.

Maybe Glasgow has finally understood the lesson: looking inside itself in its case meant to finally dig out of the local museum archives 40 prints taken from the 17 volumes of the French magazine Journal des Dames et des Modes and organise around them an exhibition (that opened two days ago), entitled “A La Mode”, at the Scotland Street School Museum.

Inspired by the 18th and 19th centuries journals, the seminal French magazine founded by Tom Antongini, secretary, friend and biographer of poet and writer Gabriele D'Annunzio, and published between 1912 and 1914 (the first issue appeared on 1 June 1912; the last on 1 August 1914) represents together with La Gazette du Bon Ton, founded and published by Lucien Vogel, and Modes et Manieres d'Aujourd'hui, issued by Corrard and Meynial, one of the most famous early examples of illustrated fashion and style publications.

The luxury magazine was aimed at an exclusive readership: it was indeed published in just 1,279 copies and came out three times a month.

The Journal des Dames et des Modes featured fashion notes, poetry and aphorisms written by Anatole France, Jean Cocteau and the Comtesse de Noailles among the others, plus one to five unbound coloured fashion plates per issue.

The plates were illustrated by artists such as George Barbier, Léon Bakst, Pierre Legrain, Etienne Drian, Victor Lheur, Gerda Wegener, Jan van Brock, Armand Vallee, Roger Broders and Umberto Brunelleschi.

The most important thing about the magazine was that, though inspired by contemporary fashion trends (such as Orientalism and the Ballets Russes's costumes), many illustrations included didn't show any specific garments by famous designers of those times.

Indeed, the outfits were in many cases created by the different illustrators working for the magazine who were granted complete freedom of expression.

The magazine became famous for establishing new canons in fashion illustration.

The publication recorded the changes women’s wear (and also men and children’s costumes) went through showing ladies engaged in different activities, from playing tennis to walking on a beach or relaxing in the house.

The fashion plates were vividly coloured using the ‘au pochoir’ printing process, a technique that was rather popular between the early 1900s until the middle of the 1930s in which up to thirty colour screens or stencils were employed to colour into the designs of the copper plate engravings.

Examples of such techniques can be admired in the magazine’s regular feature, the “Costumes Parisienes” section that showed the latest trends in Parisian fashion.

While Barbier remains one of my favourite fashion illustrators, there are two plates from the Journal that I’m totally in love with.

One shows the Paul Poiret-inspired “Pagode” illustrated by Etienne Drian and the other is “Arlequine” by Alberto Fabio Lorenzi, better known as Fabius.

The Italian painter, book illustrator and advertising artist who moved from Florence to Paris where he became a poster artist and where he contributed to French magazines Fantasio, Le Sourire and Femina and to the English journal's Eve and Pan.

I'm totally obsessed with Fabius' "Arlequine" since the lady portrayed looks like some kind of modern and strong superheroine and the design she wears seems to anticipate Schiaparelli’s Harlequin-inspired designs, fashion trends inspired by the Commedia dell’Arte, Vivienne Westwood’s 1989 iconic suit and other Harlequin designs previously explored.

I’m sure some of the illustrations featured in the Glasgow-based exhibition will offer some interesting inspiration to fashion, print and textile designers, but also to illustrators and photographers.

The event will also offer the chance to join different activities and take part in millinery and jewellery workshops.

The most interesting activities organised in conjunction with “A La Mode” are actually the lectures and talks that will focus on the illustrated history of fashion prints, fashion during the Belle Epoque and the collection of fashion prints and patterns of the Glasgow Museums.

I hope that in some ways this exhibition will make the visitors ponder a little bit more on the connections between fashion trends and society.

As Anatole France wrote in the first issue of the Journal: "It is impossible to understand a society if one does not know which fashions are governing it. I believe that any scholar of the revolution or Empire who has not leafed through enough fashion magazines to be extremely limited…”

“A La Mode” is at the Scotland Street School Museum, Glasgow, until 17th October 2010.

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Irenebrination Says Thanks

A blog can easily turn into a celebration of the self and I've never liked self-celebratory things.

Yet tomorrow is Irenebrination’s second anniversary and I feel the need to say thanks to all the people who passed by and stopped to read my (at times rambling and raging…) posts.

I started Irenebrination inspired by the late Italian journalist Irene Brin, as a channel for my thoughts and obsessions, but also as a reaction to many other online publications that focused on more commercial aspects of fashion.

My main aim was and still is to show that fashion can be an art form and becomes even more intriguing when it’s connected with art, costume design, film, history, literature, photography, social issues and even politics.

I’m not sure I’ve always managed to do so, but I’m happy to know that I’ve been useful to some of you in your researches and investigations into art, fashion and style.

Some posts unexpectedly put me into contact with the artists, fashion designers or photographers mentioned or with their relatives who wrote to say hello. This would have never happened if I had written the same things on a printed magazine, so I guess this is the best thing this blog has done for me.

So special thanks to all the people who took their time to write me and encourage me, to all the fashion design lecturers and students who emailed me opening up an interesting dialogue about a few issues linked with our mutual obsessions, to all the Twitter users who retweeted me or marked me with the #FollowFriday tag. 

I'm much obliged to you all and I hope I’ll manage to stay true to my mission in future posts.

(PS The "Thanks" message in this post shows a project involving a lot of metal buckles that I will finish as soon as I regain enough strength in my hands…there's been too much typing and metal bending in the last few weeks in my life…).

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Inhabiting the Fashion Fiction in Hitchcockian Style

Fashion’s main purpose is that of creating a parallel world to the one we inhabit, a sort of fictitious universe or dimension made out of strong, powerful and evocative fantasies and desires.

This is why having a fervid imagination, a bright and bold vision and a sharp mind definitely help if you want to work in this industry.

In the last few years, though, there has been a tendency to focus only on the more visual aspects of fashion, with extremely beautiful photo shoots featuring glamorous and perfect models with amazing looks.

Digital photography and photo retouching programmes definitely helped creating daring editorials published in various magazines.

Yet, while hitting the retina, such beautiful images often didn’t hit any special chords in the readers' hearts.

The problem with the carefully studied beauty of such images is that it often leaves you cold and doesn’t seem to be able to transmit any kind of passion or inspire any powerful story that goes beyond the beautiful clothes and accessories portrayed.

I’ve recently been going through some images taken in the ‘60s by famous fashion photographers for a personal research and I stopped for a while to ponder on three images by Jeanloup Sieff.

The images in question are part of an iconic photo shoot taken in 1962 and published in the January 1963 issue of Harper’s Bazaar and feature Alfred Hitchcock ironically posing around the legendary Psycho house with model Ina Balke.

Despite his pledge to superficiality and frivolousness, French photographer Sieff had actually a special talent for going beyond the most obvious and superficial things.

Born in Paris to parents of Polish origin, Sieff started taking the first pictures as a teenager, in 1947, abandoning his passion for cinema, first attending the Vaugirard School of Photography in Paris and then moving to the Vevey School in Switzerland. He became a freelance reporter, and, in 1958, joined the Magnum Agency.

In the mid 50s he also started working for various magazines, including Esquire, Vogue and Harper's Bazaar, and moved to New York in 1961, returning to Paris five years after.

Sieff’s fashion shoots were particularly beautiful since the models featured had a life of their own, they weren’t just beautiful women in elegant clothes, but they were iconic protagonists of sensual and intriguing stories in shades of black and white.

Sieff also took unusual portraits of writers, actors and actresses and became more famous for his images of dancers and nudes.

The former had a special intensity about them since Sieff always managed to capture dancers in different stages of preparations while pursuing perfection: there is a photograph of a young boy in a Shanghai ballet school taken in 1987 that may easily inspire an entire novel for the piercing look the young dancer has in his eyes.

Far from being vulgar, Sieff’s nudes retained instead a special modern elegance thanks to the chiaroscuro effects the photographer employed in his studies of the female body.

What fascinates me about the three Hitchcock images is the style, the irony and the story behind them.

The photographs – taken with a Leica M3 camera mounted with a 21mm Super Angulon – are based on contrasts: the photographer and his subjects played with mystery and irony, fear and style, perfection and clumsiness (see the hand holding the sculpture of a bird appearing in a corner like a misplaced prop).

These unexpected combinations allowed the main characters to tell a story, inhabiting with their fiction a fashion fiction and turning the shoot into something memorable with a famous director playing a game that never reappeared in any modern magazines (can you think of another director featured in a fashion photo shoot that became so iconic?).

Scary but fun these images still evoke a parallel universe generated out of paradoxes and definitely show you there is something missing in the images relentlessly appearing in contemporary magazines. 

A final note for fans of fashion photography: Jeanloup Sieff’s daughter, Sonia, has definitely inherited her father’s talent for images, but also some Hitchcockian irony. After shooting last year the campaign for the Juliette Has a Gun perfume featuring Lou Doillon, Sonia Sieff also shot a while back an advert for a fictitious fragrance called “Orgy” (featuring Lou Doillon, Caroline de Maigret, Misia Navarro and Jeremy Barrois), complete of chicken eating scene evoking Hitchock's trailer for The Birds.

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Reinventing Menswear Fabrics: from Brioni to Margo Selby & The Old Curiosity Shop

Let’s continue today the menswear thread I started yesterday focusing this time on menswear fabrics and textiles.

In Italy there was a real boom in the 60s for what regarded the choice of special summery fabrics for men’s suits.

Many tailors at the time started experimenting with lighter fabrics.

Often described as “tropical” or “cool textiles”, they mainly consisted in gabardine, linen, luxurious woollen and silk blends or opaque and shiny shantung fabrics.

For the Spring/Summer 1962 season Brioni presented in Florence a collection including classic suits, but also more casual jackets characterised by dynamic cuts.

Among the most interesting pieces of that collection there was also a series of evening jackets in printed silk, with colourful damasked or geometrical motifs.

I have managed to find in my personal archive of images one photograph of that collection and, though it’s in black and white, the more I look at it, the more it makes me think about the recent collaboration between British textile weaver Margo Selby and London-based The Old Curiosity Shop.

Selby trained at the Chelsea College of Art and later on pursued an MA at the Royal College of Art.

After carrying out further researches on woven textiles at the Ann Sutton Foundation, where she also mixed her knowledge of hand-woven techniques with industrial machinery creating unique 3-dimensional fabrics, Selby launched her first collection in 2003.

Four years later, she opened a shop-cum-gallery and studio in London.

A recipient of many textile and design awards, Selby’s fabrics are distinctively recognisable, thanks to their bold colour combinations and geometric patterns.

Her works, designed on a handloom and then produced at specialist mills, display a great research for what regards fibre combination and structure.

Selby employed her fabric for a number of interior design objects, but also for small accessories including bags, purses and ties.

So far she has collaborated with various partners developing products for Habitat, People Will Always Need Plates and museums such as London’s museums and galleries including Tate, The British Museum, The National Gallery and The Hayward Gallery.

The new collaboration started after Selby and Daita Kimura, creative director of The Old Curiosity Shop, met: Selby developed with the shop a range of fashion items including shoes and boots, made using her distinctive woven fabrics, and a range of unisex jackets dedicated to all the people who love colour and patterns (available through the Oki-Ni website).

I find this interpretation of Selby's fabrics rather interesting as it may open new channels and lead to further collaborations between textile designers using traditional techniques in their work and also focusing on interior design projects, and fashion designers.

It will be interesting to see if such experiments will develop a new fashion narrative in menswear, reinventing and invigorating traditional fabrics through intriguing experiments with modern synthetic textiles.

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The Venetian Tailoring School: Galletti and Cecconi

A while back a young Italian director who was working on a research about the Neapolitan tailoring school for a documentary contacted me.

He mainly wrote to say he had found my post on Neapolitan tailors somehow inspirational and I know that he recently started shooting his documentary.

I’d like to dedicate today's post to him and to all those people, fashion design students in particular, interested in tailoring.

As promised in a previous post, today I will mainly focus on the Venetian tailoring school and in particular on two tailors based in Venice.

The Doge had established that all his councillors had to wear rich robes, but also that tailors were allowed to wear special garments so that people could have recognised these esteemed citizens. 

During the 1800s and under the Austrian occupation, decadence was rife in Venice and tailors somehow lost the respect they used to have.  

Things got better in the 1900s when tailoring houses started working again.

At the time Calimani’s La Ville de Paris was considered as the best tailoring houses in Italy, both for quality and quantity.

Indeed Calimani was able to produce around 4,000 high quality suits a year.

Among other famous tailors there were Zanini, Dinardo and Leonelli. The latter  had started as cutter at the tailoring house owned by Barbaro, considered as the tailor of the aristocracy.

In Venice, Galletti and Miatto’s tailoring house was considered as the best one. Galletti was originally from Novara, while Miatto was from Venice.

When Miatto died the tailoring house passed to Gaudenzio Galletti, who had a young son, Alberto.

Gaudenzio's son was very passionate about menswear and started following his father's work already as a child.

As soon as he grew up, he began acquiring tailoring manuals from France, Great Britain and Germany.

Though he couldn't speak any foreign languages Alberto studied those manuals, trying to understand which were the main differences between the most popular cuts in these countries, making comparisons with the Italian traditions and developing his own style.

When his father died in 1911, Alberto Galletti was 26 years old, but he was already considered as the first and best tailor in Venice.

He made suits for the local aristocracy, kept up with the new developments in the art of tailoring and was also the first tailor to open his own workshop.

In those years all Venetian tailors worked together with a cutter and a trainee who dealt with little changes and corrections, but the main work was assigned to people who worked from home, most of them were "carnielli", that is farmers from the Carnia region, who worked in Autumn and Winter in Venice helping tailors and who went back in the Summer to their region to till the soil.

The war interrupted Alberto’s work: enlisted as a soldier, he first moved to Genoa, then to Milan, where he started working for the Treccani tailoring house in Via Pattari.

Nostalgia brought him back to Venice and, in 1919, he reopened his tailoring house in Campo San Moisè, finding old and new customers.

Alberto became well known for his perfectly cut suits: in 1925 he designed a tuxedo with short tails characterised by a rather ample armhole and a curved shoulder (second image in this post). 

Alberto’s jackets were characterised by three main key points: ample chest, marked waistline and a flat back.

These three points - that with the time became Alberto's trademarks - contributed to raise the shoulders a little bit, hiding any eventual imperfections in the wearer's posture.

Alberto also developed a coat for himself that didn’t follow any classic pattern or taste, but was characterised by extremely ample sleeves (see the fifth and sixth image in this post) and clearly anticipated more modern creations by contemporary menswear designers.

Alberto Galletti’s tailoring house grew, also thanks to his son Mario who joined in. In the meantime, between the two World Wars new tailoring houses opened in Venice such as Bencetti’s and Vastola’s (the latter was originally from Abruzzo and had been a trainee with Caraceni and at the Ville de Paris).

A new tailor, Bruno Cecconi, arrived in Venice. Born in 1893 in Bibbiena, Cecconi had moved to Rome with his family as a young child.

His father sent him to Vittorio Ottolenghi’s tailoring house where Domenico Caraceni was working as a cutter.

Cecconi worked side by side with Caraceni and, when the latter opened his own tailoring house first in Via Condotti and, after the war, in Corso Umberto, Cecconi followed him together with his brother Emo.

Bruno and Emo first opened a tailoring house in 1921, and, ten years later, Bruno moved to Venice where he started working for Luppi's tailoring house (directed by Vastola).

In 1934 Cecconi became the co-owner of Luppi's tailoring house and, six years later, he bought it.

Cecconi’s style was derived from Domenico Caraceni's, but it was a sort of modern version of it, characterised by softer lines and a very special elegance.

Soon also Bruno’s son Giorgio started working for his father. 

Business thrived for the Venetian tailoring houses for one main reason: in Venice there are no cars, people usually walk a lot and their clothes become as a consequence very important. 

Further tailoring houses were established throughout the years, but Galletti and Cecconi's remained the most important ones at least until the end of the 60s, when most Italian tailoring houses closed down after ready-to-wear became more popular.

While there aren't at the moment in Venice too many tailoring houses producing menswear, apart from Franco Puppato's, the city preserves and continues its tailoring traditions mainly in the more traditional houses working for the opera, ballet, theatre and cinema, but also among those costume designers producing extremely modern creations for avant-garde performances.   

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Extreme Forms and Innovative Silhouettes: R&Sie(n) Vs Yiqing Yin

If you like modern architecture you’re probably familiar with French architectural practice R&Sie(n) (pronounced as “heresy” in French).

Founded in 1989 by François Roche and Stéphanie Lavaux, the practice has been pushing the boundaries of architecture, experimenting with modern forms and shapes.

To keep up to date with the changes in design, its founders based it on a sort of chameleon strategy: according to it the company will change its name every few years to allow it to preserve a fresh and radical approach to the dynamic transformations design goes through.

What’s interesting about this revolutionary practice is that it bases its principles on a very simple concept, the destruction of any constraint and the subversion of conventions.

Moving from extreme aspects of nature and human psychology, R&Sie(n) developed in the last twenty years organic, biological and critical work, attempting a mutation of geographic landscapes through technological experiments.

While the buildings and structures created by this practice are strongly related to the environment, the latter is also transformed through the futuristic shapes and materials of the architectures.

Some of the practice’s best projects are based on opposites such as machine Vs nature, threats Vs safety and purity Vs corruption that help developing scenarios that fuse reality with imagination.

In 2001 the practice designed "(Un)Plug", an office building in the Defense area of Paris.

Commissioned by the research department of the French Public Electricity Company (EDF), the skyscraper was supposed to gain energy from the sun thanks to a reactive glass façade that integrated alien-looking swelling and photoelectric cells.

In this way the building almost developed a life of its own, being able to unplug from the urban ground and from its energy network.

Further projects focusing on buildings that somehow integrated with the environment while altering it at the same time followed: the practice suggested for their “Dustyrelief / B_mu” project to cover the building of a Bangkok-based museum with an electromagnetic skin that attracted pollution from the air and turned it into a sort of fur-like cover growing on the exterior of the building and dressing it up.

The result was a new study about contrasts focusing on the aseptic environments of the museum and the urban external conditions.

A year later the practice developed for a Trinidad-based art collector the “Mosquito Bottleneck” project, an intestine-shaped private home in which all the surfaces of the house were woven together with plastic wire and plastic shrink-wrap and acted like a trap for West Nile Fever-infecting mosquitoes.

One of the latest projects of the practice, “The Building That Never Dies”, will instead be exhibited in the International Pavilion of the Venice Biennale of Architecture (starting on 29th August).

This project features a nocturnal research laboratory of light employed to analyse “the dark adaptation” to reduce urban light pollution and “the melatonin effect” with Oled lamp to test the human metabolism circadian cycle.

The way R&Sie(n) develop their projects, the shapes and forms they define through their buildings, the work carried out on the alteration of surfaces and their projects based on dichotomies, could be easily applied to fashion, inspiring innovative silhouettes and leading to exciting experiments with different fabrics.

Indeed R&Sie(n)'s work offers an infinity of stimuli that can definitely generate new ideas for what regards style and fashion.

One interesting comparison may be attempted for instance between R&Sie(n)’s projects and the creations of young fashion designer (and finalist at the 2010 Hyères Festival) Yiqing Yin.

The creations of this designer are indeed based on restricting some sections of the fabric employed and letting others loose, creating bulbous and voluminous shapes through sinuous draping and pleating techniques.

Yin's collection presented at the Hyères Festival was based on shapes that sheltered, cocooned and protected the body like armours, concealing or exaggerating some of its parts. 

At the same time Yin's designs manage to retain a certain degree of femininity thanks to their fluid shapes that seem to be directly sculpted on the body.

The fabric employed in these creations also forms a sort of tactile experience like the technically advanced surfaces explored by R&Sie(n).

It's almost impossible to look at R&Sie(n)'s work and not to see that, in many ways, that's where fashion will go in future: towards extreme forms that, employing technology, will change the image of the body, altering its dimensions and  indirectly morphing the perception of what surrounds us. 

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The Metamorphosis of Cheyco Leidmann

The seminal photographer is back with “OXYcoNEXI” a new exhibition part of the Paris-based Festival de L’Art Saint Germain des Prés. The following interview was published on Dazed Digital.

During the ‘80s Cheyco Leidmann’s images established a new visual style. Back then the hyper-real colours of his American landscapes and neon signs, swimming pools and secluded beaches, hotel and motel buildings, bits and pieces of shiny pink Cadillac cars and details of models’ bodies clad in brightly colourful leggings, bodysuits and miniskirts, sparked up the imagination of many art, music, photography and fashion fans.

At the time, Leidmann worked on many fashion and beauty editorials and advertising campaigns, publishing his works in books such as “Foxy Lady”, unanimously considered as a cult volume.

Little by little, Leidmann’s style changed and his explicitly erotic aggressiveness and eye-grabbing visual power verging between the kitsch and the garish transformed.

In more recent years the photographer carried out a sort of social analysis through explicit and disturbing images that show the “toxicity” of today’s life.

Accompanied by his creative collaborator Ypsitylla von Nazareth, who contributed with her styling to quite a few advertising campaigns shot by Leidmann, the photographer is back with an exhibition part of Paris’ Festival de L’Art Saint Germain des Prés.

Entitled ‘OXYcoNEXI’ the exhibition will feature surreal landscapes populated by grotesque characters. Disquieting and disturbing, these images can be viewed as strong statements about the society we are living in.                                          

Where does the title of the exhibition, OXYcoNEXI, come from?
Cheyco Leidmann: It’s an acronym formed by taking three components from the monographs “Foxy Lady”, “Silicon” and “Sex Is Blue”. The 19 images featured are a direct result of this trilogy and are shown for the first time in Paris. Last November the Brescia-based Wave Gallery in occasion of the Notte Bianca dell’Arte event featured 84 images from this set.

What’s the secret behind the perfect shot?
Cheyco Leidmann: Eyes are the weapon. Think subversive. It is all about speed, experience, discipline, reaction, knowledge, precision and luck bundled together at the right moment of nihilistic silence. When that happens chances are that you’ll shoot a 90% arresting shot.

Looking back at the brightly coloured images you produced in the 80s, how do you feel about them?
Cheyco Leidmann: I guess each frame has its own pacing, rules, emotions and culture reflecting the period of time you are living in. At the time I rocked the world of photography and if I had regrets about those shots they wouldn’t be worth mentioning. Times have changed and I see things from another perspective today, conceiving my work in continuous evolution.

Some of the images collected in the volume “Toxytt” are very powerful and in some cases disturbing, were you ever subjected to any restrictions while working on them?
Cheyco Leidmann: The “Toxytt” images offer an uncompromising look at society. The book publisher and I had the pleasure to work without any restrictions on the book. But censorship still occurs: in Switzerland a distributor censored an issue of a magazine that featured some of my works since they apparently contravened Article 197 of the Swiss Penal Code that states that material considered pornographic in character is illegal.

Do you feel that some of the most powerful images you recently shot could be read as commentaries upon society?
Cheyco Leidmann: Absolutely. “Toxytt” for example may not be a documentary or reportage project but the haunting images featured in it speak for themselves and sometimes hit you in the stomach. Though I guess that, rather than interpreting them as commentaries, we should maybe see them as strong statements about contemporary issues, about the insanity running wild in our world that pushes many people in our society to commit criminal acts because they feel trapped into grinding poverty and desperation. While shooting these images I was trapped myself for over 4 years into a relentlessly recurring nightmare that allowed me to witness through my eyes these images as if they were acts of a hallucinated play about the human condition being performed on a stage.

Of all the cities you visited, which is in your opinion the most “toxic” one?
Cheyco Leidmann: Each city, town or village has its own “toxicity”. Yet the most dramatic places are those where the streets never sleep.

What kind of exhibitions do you like visiting and which artists or photographers inspire you?
Cheyco Leidmann: I visit exhibitions that feature artists who have something strong to say. I will definitely see the thematic exhibition elles@centrepompidou in Paris. I usually prefer to focus on my own vision and inspire other people with thought-provoking images rather than be inspired by others. I’m always pleased to hear my work helped other creative people, such as Duran Duran’s bassist and guitarist John Taylor who claimed my creative, playful and surreal images were the starting point for their videos, or fashion designer Véronique Leroy who stated my photographs and style inspired her collections.

Where are you based at the moment and where would you like to live if you could move anywhere in the world?
Cheyco Leidmann: I consider myself as a restless cosmopolitan artist so I have the freedom to move anytime and anywhere if I want. I live where I like to live, in ‘Toxyttcity’!

Cheyco Leidmann’s ‘OXYcoNEXI’, is at the Galerie de l'Europe, 55 rue de Seine, Paris, 27th May – 26th June 2010. 

All Images courtesy of Cheyco Leidmann

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The Quest for the "Satanik" Woman

In the '60s noir comics were all the rage in Italy. Diabolik started the trend in 1962, but, soon, further comics with similar atmospheres and themes were released.

Most of them featured masked anti-heroes as main characters and the stories usually involved murders, robberies and other assorted criminal activities.

As the years passed, though, the noir themes were mixed with two new components: horror stories and explicit sex scenes.

Comic writer, journalist and director Luciano Secchi, better known as Max Bunker, created two extreme anti-heroes, Kriminal and Satanik.

The first issue of Kriminal was published in 1964, and, while its main character was sort of based on Diabolik, the contents of this comic book were much more violent.

Having spent his childhood in a reformatory, Anthony Logan, the protagonist of this comic book, first pursued revenge against the man who had pushed his father to commit suicide, and then, clad in a yellow and black costume with a skeleton mask (slightly altered in its cinematographic version, directed by Umberto Lenzi in 1966 – spot the connection with George A. Romero's Creepshow in the film’s titles), turned into a sadistic killer.

Kriminal was often banned because of the violence and sex scenes it featured, yet things got even worse when Bunker created Kriminal's female twin, the even more violent and sexually explicit comic Satanik.

Born Marny Bannister, this heroine was a talented biologist with a tragic and traumatic past: mistreated by her entire family who considered her as a sort of monster because a birthmark disfigured a large part of her face, she decided to take her revenge upon society.

After discovering a miraculous formula that transformed her into a beautiful woman, Marny turned into Satanik, and started carrying out horrendous deeds, killing as many people as possible (her family included…) and sexually exploiting all the men she met. 

Clad in her red and black costume, Satanik frightened the readers because her thirst for money, men, power, sex and success, put her on a par with the Devil, yet, at the same time, she also attracted them.

Satanik was mainly conceived by its author as a sort of female Dr Jekyll and Mister Hyde, while the stories that saw her as main character mainly mixed Robert Louis Stevenson with Oscar Wilde, Howard Phillips Lovecraft and Edgar Allan Poe.

In the stories created by Max Bunker with drawings by Roberto Raviola, AKA Magnus Pictor (or simply Magnus) Satanik was a relentless killing machine capable of unleashing her destructive power upon men and women and of committing unspeakable deeds like injecting acid into her own sister’s veins.

Satanik represented everything that society wanted to repress, in particular women's sexual power: legend goes that anonymous calls to Bunker often asked him to stop producing this comic because it was inconceivable for a woman to commit such criminal acts and to be so free. 

Sadistic, avid and violent, the heroine destroyed all the last taboos that were left, changing forever the world of Italian comics: soon the supernatural elements (ghosts, vampires and mummies included...) featured in Satanik's comics were mixed with more sex scenes and noir comics turned into erotic tales aimed at an entirely new audience and readership. 

The myth of Satanik remained, though, for one main reasons: male readers saw in this figure the embodiment of every man’s erotic dream, but female readers, especially those ones who didn’t see themselves as fitting the canons of beauty set by society, conceived Satanik as a final liberation, a nemesis against men and society. 

The comic book was turned in 1967 into a film that, directed by Piero Vivarelli, was characterised by an almost inconsistent plot.

The most interesting point in this film from a costume point of view was Magda Konopka, who starred in the role of Satanik, appearing towards the end clad in a Diabolik-meets-Irma Vep leotard, and performing a strip tease. 

Satanic women provided great inspirations for fashion collections: red may be considered as a colour symbolising love, affection, warmth and romance, but, more often than not, in fashion (and in recent collections) it was interpreted as the colour of strong passions, power, blood and war injuries.

In previous posts we have seen a young designer like Kat Marks creating armoured pieces that evoked in their colours, shapes and materials Satanik’s costume, while Tomas Maier’s at Bottega Veneta reinterpreted the themes of women's power in an original way in the fashion house’s Autumn/Winter 2010 collection, with black leather trouser suits and through structured shoulder red leather harnesses matched with fluid silky dresses.

In fact it wouldn't be incorrect to say that Satanik's subversive power is one of the engines behind the presentations of many fashion collections.

What we usually see on the various runways are indeed powerful and strong models who often look like amazons and dominatrixes.

The interesting point to notice is that this image doesn't seem to be reflected in our society in which we keep on seeing an annoying insistence on stereotyped women.

While the fantasy of a catwalk show suggests indeed women can be girls on motorcycles, vamps and dominatrixes with a wardrobe to match, our society still tends to relegate women to the realm of well-behaved nonsense.

In too many contemporary films or novels women spend enormous amounts of their time complaining with their girl friends about men rather than doing something to actively revert things, like going out and, well, terrorise men not through violent acts, but with their brains.   

Let's ponder a little bit on this imminent catastrophe: in a few days’ time Sex and the City 2 will turn again cinema theatres all over the world into shopping windows for famous fashion brands (almost 200 brands and fashion houses to be precise).

Yet that’s definitely NOT the most criminal and satanic aspect of this film: the worst thing is that it doesn’t represent most modern and intelligent women at all.

Above all such movies do not represent the conditions of those women living in countries that still deny their rights, or in which they are physically, sexually and psychologically abused.

Rarely such women become the protagonist of any films, because they would be as unsettling and disturbing as Satanik for the society we live in.

It's safer for the society we live in to still portray women as a bunch of empty-headed morons with a shopping bag in their hands even in times of recession. Yet I do think that fearless Satanik is ready to step out of the comic book page and off the fantasy of the runway to come into this world. Believe me, most women out there are probably more ready to go on a killing rampage than on a shopping spree.   

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Can Fashion Shows and Interior Design Meet Again?

I’ve always loved French designer Emmanuelle Khanh, but also the creations of her husband Quasar.

There is actually an interesting connection not many people remember about between them and Ottavio and Rosita Missoni.

In 1964 Tai and Rosita went to Paris where they asked Emmanuelle Khanh (whom they had already met in New York) to do a collection together.

The French designer saw this opportunity as a chance to inject her fresh and young ideas into Missoni’s advanced knitwear and very gladly accepted it.

The results of this collection were presented in 1966 at the Gerolamo Theatre in Milan with a fun catwalk show.

Rather than sashaying down the runway models walked around the stage, drawing on a sort of transparent paper curtain behind which more models moved, undressed and dressed again before reappearing on the stage.

A year after, in 1967, the Missoni team presented at the Pitti tradeshow their new collection.

At the very last minute, Rosita realised the models’ underwear didn’t match with their futuristic and thin lame knits, so she sent the girls out without anything underneath, causing a little scandal (though the design duo had just anticipated in this way the “nude look”…).

The organisers decided therefore not to invite the couple at the next Pitti.

Yet this temporary ban allowed the husband and wife team to present the Spring/Summer collection with a special event organised in December at the Solari swimming pool in Milan.

The new designs were presented by models floating on the water sitting on inflatable armchairs and sofas pushed around by swimming champions.

The furniture pieces used for the occasion were designed by Quasar Khanh, who, clad in a futuristic tuxedo with silver lapels, greeted the audience from a gigantic floating house.

The show closed with a collective swim in the pool, led by a 25-year-old German model called Silvia, and it sort of marked Missoni’s success (after this event, Elle dedicated to the fashion house for the first time the cover of a following issue), but also the beginning of a new trend in fashion, catwalk shows turned into proper performance events.

What I found really interesting in this specific catwalk show was the connection between fashion and interior design.

This presentation was one of the very few in the history of fashion in which pieces of interior design were used during a fashion show.

Obviously in this case the pieces employed really fitted the atmosphere and the mood of the catwalk show, but it's strange that, in more recent years, there hasn't been such a fun and original interpretation of fashion and interior design.

I wonder if it would be possible to do something along these lines in our times, trying to fuse one of the intrinsic components of fashion, dynamism, with dynamic pieces of furniture. 

One of the main reasons why interior designs is usually not incorporated into catwalk show is indeed the fact that pieces of furniture are static, while models walk down the runway at a fast pace.

This makes extremely tricky to combine interior design pieces and fashion creations.

The interior design/fashion connection also came to my mind while preparing an interview with Philippe Starck. 

The French designer born in Paris in 1949, started creating inflatable furniture in 1968 and, the following year, he was appointed artistic director of the Pierre Cardin fashion house, designing for it also an interior design line.

So the main exercise for fashion design students for today would be to try and think about how to integrate fashion and interior design together in a fashion show.

In the meantime, to get further ideas and inspirations, you can read the following interview I did with Philippe Starck (or you can read it on Dazed Digital where you will also be able to find further images relating to the Starck-Dedon collaboration as all the images in this post regard the Missoni-Emmanuelle/Quasar Khanh collaborations).

Playing with Philippe Starck

Philippe Starck talks to Dazed Digital about his latest project for Dedon, democratising design and a designer's role in contemporary society. 

Try to find just one definition to describe Philippe Starck and you will probably spend an entire day without managing to come up with a proper answer. So far Starck has been an architect, interior, accessory and clothes designer, an eclectic citizen of the world and among the first supporters of the currently ever so trendy ethical and ecological lifestyle.
Starck presented last month at Milan’s International Furniture Fair a project he designed for Dedon, the producer of hand-woven indoor and outdoor furniture. “Play with Dedon” includes the lightweight and stackable “Play” chair-armchair, that can be redesigned to achieve a personal fit, ordered online or produced upon request, the tables “Bistro”, in porcelain ceramic and moulded polypropylene, and “Dining”, in mirror-finish aluminium, and the lamps “Superarchimoon Outdoor” and “Romeo 3 Outdoor”, developed in collaboration with Flos. The main concept behind this new collaboration is very simple: liberating design while creating pieces that can make people happy. 

What prompted this collaboration with Dedon?
Philippe Starck: You are right to wonder ‘Why another chair?’ Well, it’s about love. To have beautiful children, parents must be in love. There is no successful project without strong human component. The only goal of a project must be the profit for people, the human dimension. To be successful you must wonder how a project can help our friends, our tribe, to have a better life. This project is about intelligence, generosity, respect, tenderness, visions, humour, love, poetry, it’s about all these immaterial parameters. I met Dedon founder and chairman Bobby Dekeyser through Nicolas Rapetti. Bobby created a complete universe, really modern and human. “Play with Dedon” reflects this as it combines the best technology, for the moulded polypropylene and fibreglass frame, added to the best craftsmanship for what regards the weaving. The manufacturing process is also based on ethical principles. The idea was to have a base, with or without armrest, and then play with it, so that people can be able to create their own item. I guess the most challenging part of this process was making sure the balance of technology and craftsmanship resulted in a good product. Other than that, the entire process was a real good journey, with everybody in the team working in the same direction to create a playful collection.

Freedom is at the core of your philosophy: do you feel that freedom has changed also our habits concerning interior design as companies trying to impose a product on consumers often failed, while the offer multiplied and consumers started making their own choices?
Philippe Starck: Freedom is the only style. That is why I never speak about beauty or beautiful products but “good products” that are not the ones marketed by very smart marketing departments of companies whose goal is to steal the money of what they call target consumers. Nowadays, we have to face so many challenges: economic, religious, political and also ecological, so it is not really a priority to care for beauty. The only way for us is to focus on an ethic and ecological behaviour, because we don’t have any further choices. Fifteen years ago, I developed the Good Goods Catalogue in collaboration with La Redoute, conceiving it as the catalogue of the non-products for the non-consumer of the future moral market. Hopefully, people will start understanding what they are offered and asking themselves ‘Do I need to buy this product?’ I think refusal is the first good act.

Can design be political?
Philippe Starck: I do not know why I design, somehow design chose me. But I think design is a very weak tool: a politician can change the world with one law, a journalist with one article, but what can you do with design? This is why I created object after object and place after place, trying to come up with something more than just design. There has always been a strong political statement in all my creations: from the Good Goods catalogue I already mentioned you to the mail order wooden house meant to show the terrible law in France that allowed construction companies to sell houses without architects under a certain cost, ruining in this way the landscape. Of course there is also the democratisation of design I started 30 years ago: I’ve always fought to give the best to people by striving to reduce the price while increasing quality. When I started working, the price of a designer chair hovered around the equivalent of 1,000 Euros, now you can find very good ones at less that 100 Euros. I recently continued along these lines with the personal wind-turbine “Democratic Ecology” and I’m currently developing Democratic Ecological Architecture to offer good affordable wooden houses.

Throughout your career you developed very different projects, from furniture to clothing and accessories: is there a product you would like to develop that may change and improve our lives?
Philippe Starck: I strictly have no desire to develop more products. Future is about dematerialisation. Dematerialisation is in fact one of my main focuses: you can see it in the Louis Ghost chair, in the elegance of minimalism in my watches, in the yacht I created. Ideally, I’d like to create useful things without using materiality as all materiality is vulgar. As far as interior design is concerned, everything will disappear slowly: curtains shall be replaced by liquid crystal windows, while the natural evolution regarding mankind will be bionism.

In your opinion, what’s a designer’s role in the current economic climate?
Philippe Starck: To serve and offer a better life to its tribe by being political and ecological.

A while back you launched the research consultancy The Key: has it proved a useful tool for Asian entrepreneurs?
Philippe Starck: The research consultancy was first started to teach Asian subcontractors to become creators and set up their own brands in order to stop being the slaves of the West. Success was quick to come, but the thing is that in the end, each client wanted to develop a Starck brand! The project was launched over ten years ago, I guess I was too early and now we have a lot of famous Asian brands.

What are you working on at the moment and what future projects do you have on your agenda?
Philippe Starck: To continue democratic ecology with solar boats and implement democratic ecological architecture with the first prototype that will be ready in early 2011. This week we are also opening the renovated Alhóndiga, an amazing centre for life and culture in the heart of Bilbao. We’re also working on a port in Palma and we’re opening the new Royal Monceau in Paris in a couple of months’ time.

The new spaces of the Alhóndiga de Bilbao designed by Philippe Starck opened on 20th May 2010.