If you are a film fan you’ve probably been spending the last few days relaxing at home and watching movies.
If you are a fashion designer and you are somehow panicking about inspirations for future collections, I would suggest you to forget about panic and do the same. Watching a film is indeed one of the best ways to find inspiring ideas.
Inspirations do not necessarily come from a film plot, from its costumes and sets, but they can even come from the soundtrack or the images used to accompany the opening or closing titles.
Let’s look in this post at a couple of films that can provide some ideas.
The first image in this post is for example a screen capture of the opening titles of Mario Bava’s Diabolik (Danger: Diabolik, 1968).
The effect was created by filming a spinning bucket of paint (don’t try this trick at home without carefully covering the walls and the furniture in plastic…) in which different colours were mixed.
The images used for these opening titles are kaleidoscopically fascinating and are made even more sensual by the accompanying track, "Deep Down" by Morricone. Throughout the opening titles colours change from yellow to green, bright red and electric blue, creating some wonderful abstract effects.
The second image in this post is instead taken from Primo Zeglio’s …4…3…2…1...morte (Mission Stardust, 1967 – already mentioned previously, though I'm planning to explore some Mission Stardust inspirations a bit better in a future post...).
The images used for the opening titles for this film weren’t really that refined and elegant compared to the ones used by Bava, who was a genuine master when it came to special effects.
Yet the shades of pale and electric blue, fuchsia and orange and the distorted effects employed look quite interesting.
In fact they remind me a lot of the palette used by Erdem Moralioglu in some of the fluid floor-length dresses, structured above-knee shifts, palazzo pants and tops from his first-ever Pre-Fall (2011) collection, recently presented in London.
Apparently Moralioglu developed the prints for this collection from manipulated images of fireworks on Guy Fawkes Day, from an abstract '50s wallpaper and from a picture of a garden taken with his BlackBerry.
Applied to versatile and practical yet elegant designs, the abstract prints give the collection a lady-like touch that makes you easily picture the designs on Moralioglu’s typical customers (mainly women in high positions such as powerful editors and first ladies...).
If you like abstract prints, check out for further inspirations also the book A Modern Classic by Swedish artist Olle Bærtling (recently published by Steidl).
Bærtling (1911–1981) was a painter, designer and sculptor associated with the non-figurative group of artists around the “Salon des Realités Nouvelles” and Galerie Denise René in Paris.
The artist was well known for the concept of "The Open Form", that is the representation of space and movements using figures that continued outside the surface of the picture and that therefore looked incomplete and without boundaries.
While Bærtling's pictures reflected the time in which they were made, he saw links between the open aspect of his pictures and the historical moment that took us into the Space Age.
Interestingly enough, some of his paintings make me think a lot about the representations of flying objects on radars in early sci-fi films (check out the last image in this post - again from Mission Stardust).
So, which opening/closing titles will you borrow for your abstract print?
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