Hooray for the Plastic Cartwheel Ruff

I have already confessed in previous posts that I am slightly obsessed with cartwheel ruffs both from a historical and fashion point of view.

The problem is that, after spending too many hours rambling around museums and looking at paintings from 1550s to 1600s, while my mind was lost on Space Age fashion for personal research purposes, I started thinking about how to recreate the cartwheel ruff using everyday objects.

For a few months my creative space has been flooded with a large stock of belt buckles coming in all sizes, shapes and materials, that I acquired a while back from an Italian company that was closing down and, digging among them, I found some medium-sized basic plastic buckles. I realised that, by sandwiching together two buckles, I obtained an interesting fan-like effect.  

But what to do with them became clearer when I did a sort of mind moodboard that featured three images: Eduard Charlemont’s painting The Lacemaker (La Dentellière, 1889), inspired by Dutch seventeenth-century genre works (Charlemont has been on my mind since I have been doing a personal research on the artists - among them Charlemont and his brother, but also the Klimt brothers - who decorated the Vienna Burgtheater, built by Karl von Hasenauer and Gottfried Semper); a picture by Cecil Beaton portraying Audrey Hepburn wearing a rigid clown collar (from the book Beaton: Portraits) and a black and white picture taken by Angelo Frontoni showing a model wearing a design characterised by a multiple rigid collar that I had seen a while back during the Annamode exhibition in Florence.

Charlemont's The Lacemaker, showing a woman embroidering and a man wearing a cartwheel ruff watching her, represented in my mind craftsmanship. The collar worn by Hepburn seemed instead characterised by a very special quality I also wanted to achieve, linear rigidity, while the design showcased by the model in the third image had a sort of architectural flair, but also referenced Space Age, while tackling in a way themes such as impairment by fashion and visual excess, things that deeply fascinate me.

In a nutshell, I was essentially looking for was craftsmanship, rigidity, futurism, fashion impairment and extravagance. I started playing with the sanwiched buckles and realised that, if I put through them a simple satin ribbon, I obtained a simply perfect plastic cartwheel ruff, rigid, futuristic and, well, rather excessive. 

While it took me very little time to do this piece, I must admit I’m very happy with the final results. It's the sort of necklace that gives you instant gratification and proves that we are surrounded by materials that, recycled and reinterpreted through art, history and photography, could easily be reused to reinvent unexpectedly original, exuberant and unique pieces.   

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Comments

[Jen O]

wow, that is terrific. A perfect blend of the cartwheel ruff with sort of a mid-century modern spin to it.

[Tricorvus]

That is the coolest dang thing! I used to make cartwheel ruffs for my dolls. I was very taken with them. This beats all. I may copy it. I'm warning you. :D :D