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

That Oliver Messel Touch

Oliver Messel (1904-1978) was Britain's leading theatre designer between the ‘30s and the ‘50s.

Acclaimed for his taste and mastery of period style, Messel created settings and costumes for ballet, drama, film, musical, opera and revue, but also worked in interior decoration and textile design.

Messel was famous for creating iconic pieces out of the most bizarre materials, but also for his knowledge of fabrics, cutting skills, sharp eye, research for period detail and flair for creative inventiveness.

In 1932 he designed the costumes for Max Reinhardt’s wordless medieval play The Miracle.

The first two images in this post show the costume for the gypsy character in The Miracle and, though the muted shades suggest fading and long use, you can still see some wonderful features such as the strips of fabric used to emphasise movement during dance, the ample sleeves and the sash of fabric cylinders on the chest.

The costume is currently exhibited in the V&A Theatre collections section. London’s Victoria & Albert Museum actually preserves around 10,000 items by Oliver Messel and the museum also held a major exhibition of his work in the early ‘80s.

The Miracle was very important since it brought Messel to the attention of film director and producer, Alexander Korda.

Messel first worked on the costumes for Korda's The Private Life of Don Juan, starring Douglas Fairbanks, followed by Harold Young's The Scarlet Pimpernel with Leslie Howard and Merle Oberon.

Among Messel’s best work there is Romeo and Juliet (1936), directed by George Cukor and starring Norma Shearer and Leslie Howard.

Messel was commissioned to design the film after Cukor saw his work for The Miracle in New York and the costumes for Merle Oberon in The Scarlet Pimpernel.

With a budget of $1,000,000 dollars, Romeo and Juliet was hailed at the time as the most expensive MGM production.

Messel was actually sent with a camera crew to Italy where, for three months (if only some films had such budgets and such level of research behind them…), he took images of buildings, squares and balconies, studying paintings, frescoes and drawings by Botticelli, Bellini, Carpaccio, Ghirlandaio, Piero della Francesca and Gozzoli.

"The Procession of the Magi" by Gozzoli was actually used as an inspiration for the costumes of the opening scene with the Prince of Verona and his followers, while Norma Shearer’s costumes were inspired by Fra Angelico’s painting "The Annunciation" and her ball gown was adapted from Michele da Verona’s "The Betrothal".

Gilbert Adrian in the end designed all the costumes, but Messel’s vision completed the film that included over 1,000 costumes and involved 500 people to make them.

Thousands of yards of fabric – from cotton to silk and satin with hand-broidered and beaded motifs – were employed for the costumes and one of Romeo (Leslie Howard)’s cloaks was actually made with yards of Mariano Fortuny cloth imported from Italy. Juliet’s skull cap also launched a trend and became a fashion hit when the film came out. 

Messel designed nine films throughout his career, getting and Academy Award nomination for the set and costumes design of Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s Suddenly, Last Summer.

In the mid-1960s, when his style became unfashionable, Messel abandoned theatre and moved to Barbados, launching a completely new career designing luxury homes in the Caribbean.

Some of the details Messel used in his costumes can definitely be reapplied in contemporary fashion designs: in fact don't you think that the cylindrical silver embellishments in David Koma’s dresses and skirts for Topshop call back to mind a bit the fabric cylinders in Messel's gypsy costume?

You decide, in the meantime, for further Messel inspirations check out in a library near you, the 1983 catalogue for the V&A Oliver Messel exhibition, edited by Roger Pinkham.

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Embroidering the Effects of War

The recent events concerning Libya, the brutal attempts of dictator Gaddafi to regain control of his country and the Western allies’ air and missile raids against Colonel Gaddafi’s military made me think a lot about the consequences of war on art, culture and fashion.

The only thing that the fashion industry seems able to do every time there is a major catastrophe is indeed appealing to people to donate money.

After the earthquake, the tsunami and the radioactive alert in Japan, hiding under the very fashionable cloak of religious sainthood, style and fashion sites and blogs started suggesting readers to donate money to charities, but essentially didn’t spark any debates about the effects of climate changes or about nuclear power.

Mind you, after the first appeals they are now back to talk about easy breezy styles for the Spring/Summer season, while maybe we should be focusing on styles for the nuclear fallout.

Yet there are ways the fashion industry could provide intelligent opinions and tackle contemporary problems and catastrophes as well.

After the news from Libya started arriving, the work of Arosah Yaseen, a student aged 17 from Sir William Ramsay School in High Wycombe, came to my mind.

Yaseen was one of the runners up (together with Jim Johnston, also aged 17) of the 2010 Saatchi Gallery/Sunday Telegraph Art Prize for Schools (the first prize was awarded to Harry Churchill, aged 12, for his montage works about  Auschwitz and Hiroshima atomic bomb). 

The winners of the award were chosen in January by a judging panel including the photographer Mary McCartney, Yinka Shonibare, the Turner Prize-nominated artist, Margot Heller, the director of the South London Gallery and Andrew Graham-Dixon, The Sunday Telegraph's chief art critic.

Yaseen explored in her work the effects of war on people and places embroidering on pieces of white fabric military scenes, soldiers in combat and bombings.

The textiles pieces heavily rely on a narrative structure since they show a story using embroidered images and also include some text. In a way these pieces have the emotional depth and relevance that lack in many current artworks and fashion creations.

While these works may not be compared to the Bayeux Tapestry and to its intricate scenes representing the Norman Conquest, the final purpose – recording significant historical events in cloth – is the same. So fashion designers and artists should maybe pay attention. Yaseen's works are currently showcased on the 2nd Floor of the Saatchi Gallery.

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We Belong Dead: from The Bride of Frankenstein to Alex Noble

I have already written about James Whale’s The Bride of Frankenstein (1935) in connection with Vera West’s work in a previous post that looked at the costume designer’s creations for the female characters in a few iconic horror films.  

It’s actually worth taking another look at this movie since, though it celebrated its 75th anniversary last year, it is still influencing not only the vision of some horror directors, but also the moods and collections of different fashion designers.

The film – unanimously considered as a masterpiece from Universal’s Golden Age of horror – stars Boris Karloff as The Monster and Elsa Lanchester as Mary Shelley and the monster’s bride and has actually got a special poetic beauty about it.

 

The Bride of Frankenstein could indeed be interpreted as a tale of an outcast whose only desire is that of being accepted by society or as a story of rejection and love unfound.

Pathos and pity mix in the scary yet tragic and moving monster portrayed by Karloff, smiling one moment and looking menacing the next, symbolising the ambiguity of the human soul.

The interesting thing to notice in this film is that, while the horror genre is usually dominated by male performers, in this case the bride emerged in a strong and powerful way.

Frankenstein's fiancée's style created on the screen with the help of make up artist Jack Pierce, was a combination of Nefertiti’s look, form-fitting bandages and West's early forays into the world of Haute Couture.

It was in fact an irresistible mix of beauty and horror, Eros and Thanatos, of something attractive and repulsive at the same time.

Bizarrely, as much as implausible the story and the bride’s look can be, you don’t really feel like shaking your head while watching this film, but often surprise yourself thinking ‘Would it be possible to recreate that in ready-to-wear?’

In the last few years death, graveyards and underground crypts have turned into the main inspirations for different fashion designers: we have seen Alexander McQueen turning into a bone collector; the memento mori theme being explored in menswear and Haute Couture and the death-in-life theme being exploited on Mugler’s menswear runway.

Bandages often reappeared in fashion: at times during catwalk shows (S/S 2001) and presentations (A/W 2010-11) the heads of McQueen’s models were bandaged; Raf Simons included in his Autumn/Winter 2008-09 menswear collection tight jumpers referencing skin and body that seemed to be a sort of blend of underwear and mummy-look (View this photo), while Spanish fashion brand Martin Lamothe recently came up with a nude tulle mini-dress with copper and metal chain appliqués (View this photo) slightly reminiscent of a mummy or the bride’s bandaged body revealed by Henry Frankenstein (Colin Clive) and Doctor Pretorius (Ernest Thesiger) in the film.    

The latest recreation of The Bride of Frankenstein style could be spotted in Alex Noble’s debut collection showcased in February during London fashion Week.

Noble was actually among the artists who took part in January in Selfridges’ “Bright Young Things” project (View this photo) and Lady Gaga is among the celebrities who recently donned his creations. 

Entitled “Soft Death”, Noble’s collection focuses more on Haute Couture than on ready-to-wear and references a lot Alexander McQueen especially in the frayed lace motifs covering some of the dresses and in the fascination of this young designer for creations inspired by body parts with jewel encrusted ribcages and appliquéd cotton pieces forming a skeleton (à la Schiaparelli) or tracing patterns of blue glittery veins on a sheer bodysuit.

The collection also included one couture gown with a bodice made up of tight strips of nude and yellowish silk fabric and a tulle skirt. When Noble showcased the collection the dress was worn by a model with a bandaged head and the design looked a bit like a crossover between some of the creations from Alexander McQueen’s "Voss" collection (S/S 2001) and Elsa Lanchester's costume in The Bride of Frankenstein.

In a way this design makes me think about the ambiguities of fashion and its attraction to beauty, glamour, death and deathliness, but also brings to mind the monster’s classic lines of dialogue in Whale's film, such as “We belong dead”.

For further inspirations I’m embedding here an extract from a documentary about the making of The Bride of Frankenstein that also mentions the make up and costumes from this film. 

 

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The Studs Terkel Approach and the Fashionable Insurrection of a Million Minds

I've always been fascinated by Studs Terkel's broadcastings and interviews tackling themes such as the Depression, the war, race relations, labour and the American dream.

In fact I think we desperately need a series of interviews in the style of Studs Terkel that focus on the fashion industry. 

Despite what they want you to believe, the fashion industry is indeed based on the cult of the fake and on a pile of massive lies.

Many teenagers believe nowadays that if you post online a picture of yourself looking stylish, you may become a model, will be invited to sit in the front row at catwalk shows, will turn into a credible fashion commentator and even get a job as consultant for a big fashion house. Some people even think that the word “blogger” means “job/money/no compromise” and is accompanied by the sort of income that allows you to buy three pairs of designer shoes a month.

Young fashion design students naively think instead that one day they will win a major competition just because their work is the best in their class/year, then they will launch their own fashion house and live happily ever after.

Sadly this is not the truth: in the last few weeks, between one thing and the other, I have been sitting with different fashion designers, artists linked with the fashion world and young creatives.

All the people I've been interviewing or informally chatting with have one thing in common, they are very talented, usually even more talented than the people who continuously appear on magazines or on the Internet, but they often struggle to get noticed.

This essentially happens because they aren’t anybody’s protégées, they aren’t supported by some diabolical PR officer/consultant or endorsed by prominent bloggers.

The system currently regulating the fashion industry basically favours the less talented ones and helps those who don’t seem to have anything strong to say, creating an entire generation of highly talented but unnoticed creative people juggling different jobs, usually 3 to 4 at the same time.

Two of these jobs usually pay the bills and the food, in a nutshell they allow you to survive; the others don't but it’s these jobs that don’t pay the bills that make you happy and make you feel alive.

In some cases on top of the 4 paid/unpaid jobs there are also the semi-unpaid jobs, that is jobs rewarded with clothes/accessories, make up and other assorted goods. Unfortunately you can't eat a lipstick or the review copy of a book (when you're given a physical copy and not a PDF file…), though you may try and sell them on eBay and maybe make some money out of them.

Though physically tired, if you have 2 paid and 2 unpaid jobs, you are obviously in a much better situation than young graduates who are currently caught in “the internship tornado”, a phenomenon that doesn't have much to do with climate changes, but refers to the fact that you pass from one unpaid internship to the next without gaining any experience, but becoming well accustomed to sleep on friends’ sofas and floors, while cursing the day you decided to enrol in a university course that didn’t give you much experience but left you indebted for life.

And what about edgy, trendy and cool young fashion designers? Soon we will have to establish a charity to save them all from suicide since, as a journalist, once you have reported about one of them once or twice, magazines don’t want to know anymore about the young and talented designer in question, but ask you to pass onto the next big thing and focus on someone even more exciting and extravagant.

This means we are creating a generation of young designers who are fashionably hip for six months and we are ready to move on looking for more fresh blood like thirsty vampires as soon as our interview is out, abandoning the young and hip ones we interviewed  to their cruel faith, which usually consists in finding another job to sustain themselves and leaving behind their fashion dreams.       

So far we have created designers, trends, books and films that don't last more than 6 or 8 months. Funny if you think that some of the stuff – clothes, books, films, etc – created 50 years ago is still inspiring us. Will our current routines inspire people in 50 years' time? I doubt our silly tweets about having a cup of tea, feeding the cat or the dog and other assorted mediocre amenities will inspire somebody in future.

Things are even worse if you are a woman. Indeed, if you are a woman you face different levels of exploitation: most of us are aware of unpaid fashion models, but there are also fashion houses who get hip male artists to come up with the concept for advertising campaigns for products aimed at women. Usually such artists do not even bother to check if their vision actually inspires a woman to go out and buy that specific product, because they think they are hip and cool and therefore do not need to ask women about their opinions.   

While we still have an amazing amount of idiots trying to make you believe fashion is a healthy funfair full of smiling happy people, a democratic bubble of joy floating in an otherwise sad and nuclear wasteland, little by little, people are waking up from their fake glamour-induced slumber realising that some designers wouldn’t have probably won major fashion awards without the support of specific editors; that the wardrobe of some of the most fashionable “Internet icons” of our days would actually fit a Samsonite for Ryanair trolley if fashion designers would stop giving the alleged “Internet icon” free clothes and accessories, and that when powerful fashion editors leave the magazine they work for is usually because they are going to get a disgustingly overpaid job as a consultant for a disgustingly powerful fashion conglomerate.     

I do think that while the first stage for a major change in the fashion industry, but also in the art and culture world would be a series of interviews à la Studs Terkel with real people working in this fields and talking about their jobs, projects, problems, pains and joys, I also feel that the second stage must be a cultural coup-du-monde similar to that envisaged by Alexander Trocchi in the Sigma Project.

As much as this may sound utopian, extracts of Trocchi’s “Invisible Insurrection of a Million Minds”, such as the part in which he says, “The cultural revolt is the necessary underpinning, the passionate substructure of a new order of things,” could be the key to new ways of looking at the future.

Trocchi wrote about a world in which life was renewed by art, in our case it’s the fashion industry that should be renewed by life and by truly creative and dynamic people with an international mind-set.

It would help a lot being able to throw out of the industry liars, poseurs, pushy and unimaginative PR officers and people who still think that if you don't own a designer bag you're not worthy of being considered a human being. But maybe we could start by applying our own knowledge and specialisations to different fields, mixing them all together, operating metacategorically and looking at collaborations with different like-minded professionals, from artists and architects to directors, scientists or designers, in a nutshell with a pool of talents from every medium of creative endeavour. 

The future will indeed not be about matching this pair of trousers with that pair of shoes, buying into trends and pretending you are happy, but in building bridges, looking at thought-provoking and mind-expanding ideas that can truly change us and our society.         

Fashion is essentially a rotten corpse with the annoying tendency of continuously standing, like a zombie in a Romero film. Yes, for the next Autumn the zombie will hide its putrid smell under layers of latex, plastic and rubber, but it will still be a rotten corpse currently feeding off superficially demented things such as Kate Middleton’s wedding dress, the positive vibes you can get from wearing bright coloured lipstick and idiotic columns in which women continuously complain about leading sexually depressing lives à la Bridget Jones.

This is not fashion, this is not art and this is not culture. We've all had enough and it's time to cut the crap and look at ways to develop culturally innovative and inspiring projects. Fancy joining the fashionable insurrection?

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150 Years of Unity, 150 Years of Fashion

Italy celebrates today the 150th anniversary of its unification.

Despite being happy about it, I'm deeply ashamed by being represented by a clownish Prime Minister and by some members of the Italian Parliament who still conceive Italy as a country essentially divided in two parts, a powerful and wealthy North and a backward and poor South.

Honouring the history of your home country is important, but how can such celebrations be considered as genuine when the politicians who lead the country are a bunch of corrupted comedians who don't really care about the honest citizens they represent, but only think about their personal interests?

Hopefully Italy will soon get out of this nightmare, waking up from the dark days of “Berlusconism”, an invisible illness that badly damaged the country from a cultural and social point of view.

So let's try to look at this important anniversary from a fashion perspective.

Fashion fans keen on joining the celebrations will find quite a few interesting events to satisfy their main passion.

Fashion represents a precise time and society and has a vital role in the history of a country.

In a way fashion contributed to the unity of Italy as the style of Turin, the first Italian capital, influenced the rest of the country.  

Defined by its critics as an “old provincial town”, Turin in 1861 was much more similar to enlightened capitals such as Stockholm or Oslo. French fashion remained at the time the main inspiration for the stylish inhabitants who seemed to have a predilection for good taste and elegance.

The locals quickly developed a passion for the theatre, for car races, ice skating and cycling and Turin was soon rechristened the “Capital of Fashion”, thanks to its stylish inhabitants.

In 1961, when Italy celebrated its 100th anniversary, there were already a few events dedicated to fashion, style and design in general, among them also a grand exhibition organised by Giovanni Battista “Pinin” Farina entitled “Moda, Stile e Costume”, that was divided in 5 themes and 12 sections and included art, architecture, design, fashion, ballet, theatre and literature.

Unfortunately this time we don't seem to have any extravagant major events like this one, yet there are some exhibitions looking at fashion, style and costumes that you may find inspiring.       

People interested in illustrations should maybe check out the exhibition “La donna immaginata, l’immagine della donna” (The Woman Imagined, the Image of the Woman) on until 30th April in the main offices of Turin's Associazione Piemonte Artistico e Culturale (Piazza Solferino 7).

The event features a selection of images from Italian and French newspapers and magazines from 1860 to 1970 that chronicle the evolution of fashion and of women's roles in society.

The exhibition looks indeed at women and at their emancipation from mothers, wives, mistresses and objects of desire to protagonists of an active society and at their contributions in politics as well.

The evolution of female fashion is also tackled in this event through illustrations (by Dalsani, Teja, Bompard, Girus, Manca, Mazza, Kremos, Belli, De Seta, Barbara, Cavallo, Vera D’Angara and Adriana Bisi Fabbri), caricatures and portraits of famous Italian women including Eleonora Duse, Anna Magnani, Nilde Iotti, Matilde Serao and Ada Negri.

People into costumes should instead check out the exhibition “L'oro e la seta – I più bei costumi del Regio” (Gold and Silk – The Most Beautiful Costumes of the Regio Theatre) at the Museo di Arti Decorative Accorsi (until 26th June).

This event focuses on the costumes of opera heroes and heroines and includes some wonderful pieces such as Stefano Poda's futuristic designs for Massenet’s Thaïs, costumes for Manon Lescaut, Francesca da Rimini, Madame Butterfly, Tosca and Armida (the latter inspired by 17th century costumes of the Savoy court), plus the original costume worn by Spanish soprano Mercedes Capsir in her role as Violetta at the Teatro Regio in 1931 and the stage costumes belonging to tenor Francesco Tamagno, famous for his habit of saving money for restaurants and hotels, but willing to invest all he had on his costumes and on his personal wardrobe (he used to travel with hundreds of trunks full of costumes, wigs, boots, make up and heavy armours like the one for Verdi's Otello).

Further celebrations and exhibitions will be organised in the next few months: “Moda in Italia. 150 anni di eleganza” (Fashion in Italy. 150 Years of Elegance) will launch in July at the Reggia di Venaria Reale (23rd July-11th December 2011).

The event is curated by Italian costume designer and Academy Award winner Gabriella Pescucci (she will focus on the first part of the exhibition that will probably be impeccable since Pescucci knows her history very well) and Vogue Italia editor Franca Sozzani (who will be looking at the second part of the event that will therefore include designs by her own friends...).

“Moda in Italia” will look at the transformations Italian fashion went through from 1861 on and also analyse the connections between Gabriele D'Annunzio and the Italian Futuristi with fashion and the links between film divas and fashion.

The event will also feature a 1865 black velvet dress from the Tirelli archives that belonged to Virginia Oldoini, better known as the Contessa di Castiglione (Countess of Castiglione).

Guess that, even though this very special anniversary may not help us getting rid of the clowns in power, it will at least help us rediscovering some hidden treasures from our fashion history. By the way, you're all invited to the celebrations, just forgive us if we have a sad comedian as Prime Minister at the moment...  

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Tailoring Details from the British Navy

Our wardrobes and attics often hide little fashion and tailoring treasures. The coat in this picture wasn't actually hidden in my own wardrobe, but in Frank Boyle's and it's a coat from the British Navy that belonged to his father.

The label (View this photo) revealed it's a Zambrene weatherproof raincoat, advertised in the '20s as “The Best Rubberless Raincoat”.

Adverts for the Zambrene coats usually featured Army officers wearing a raincoat in rainswept trenches (View this photo) with the accompanying text stating: “The proofing employed in all the garments is the famous Zambrene 'Triple – Triple' proofing which guarantees the cloth to remain porous and self-ventilating and therefore perfectly hygienic”.

You can easily find Zambrene adverts and posters illustrated by artist, painter and illustrator Frank Brangwyn in the collections of war museums, such as the Imperial War Museum.

Yet the most interesting feature of this coat is not the fact that it's waterproof, but a tailoring detail: the pockets were indeed slits that allowed the wearer to reach into the trouser pockets without taking the hands out of the coat.

Would it be worth rediscovering this feature in modern menswear? Probably yes, so fashion design students take your notes and, the next time you visit a war museum, look very carefully at the hidden details in the showcased uniforms.

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Paint Tube Inspiration: Brian Clarke

I recently visited the Saatchi Gallery.

Upstairs they currently have an exhibition about Brian Clarke (until 27th March 2011) that includes his works on paper, from his collages to his grids, drawings, skull paintings (often compared by critics to works by Warhol, Basquiat and Hirst - artists who displayed in their art a preoccupation with skulls) and studies for stained glass windows.

Clarke is actually more known for the latter, he indeed developed interesting techniques about the bonding of glazed colours, creating in his glass works striking visual effects also thanks to the use of multiple layers that allow him to avoid dividing the windows with lead strap work (Clarke's fascination with glass started in the mid-70s when, for his first exhibition, he had a truck dumping thousands of pieces of broken glass into the open window of a gallery).

There are quite a few works among the ones exhibited at the Saatchi Gallery that may provide you with some inspirations if you are a fashion designer (check out for example his collages incorporating newspapers).

Among them there is a series of paintings with paint tubes from 2010 - “Paint Tubes Organised by Colour”, “Line of Paint Tubes”, “Table of Paint Tubes”, and “Table of Paint Tubes and Caramels”- that looks pretty colourful and radiantly life affirming.

While the series doesn't have the disciplined formality of Clarke's grids, it tackles his obsession with colours and I think it would look perfect if it were transformed into a print for garments and accessories. 

I'm embedding here the exhibition catalogue: leaf through it to discover Clarke's works and maybe find further inspirations.

Open publication - Free publishing - More brian clarke

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The Future of Fashion

Having been busy with other commitments meant that I didn't have much time in the last week to update properly the site.

This also meant that I wasn't able to write earlier about “The Future of Fashion”, an exhibition hosted by global fastening producer YKK and curated by Kei Kagami.

The event - organised in St Martins' Courtyard - opened in February and closed last week, a couple of days after Kagami came back from Paris.

I was lucky enough to meet him there and together we went through the pieces exhibited.

The main piece of the exhibition remained Kei Kagami's zipper dress, a design characterised by a column-like silhouette and entirely made out of fluorescent zips that create intricate motifs when interwoven together (View this photo) or reproduce the effects of rays, opening up and spreading around.

The exhibition featured ten young and talented fashion designers: Aitor Throup's showcased two ninja-like figures entirely clad in black (View this photo); menswear designer Matteo Molinari went for an all black approach with a linear coat that featured an ample knitted collar in what Kei described to me as a “less is more approach” (View this photo).

Rob Goodwin also opted for black, though his piece - a leather cape with winged headgear - would be perfect on the set of a post-apocalyptic film about a tribe of futuristic Amazons, while Martina Spetlova incorporated in her colourful jacket a series of zippers mainly employed to alter its shape.

The accessories featured were also rather strong with Hanwen Shen's neckpiece that focused on the erotic power of a woman's nape (mentioned in a previous post), Char Har Lee's architectural shoes (View this photo) and Yunus & Eliza's eccentric metal structure with headgear incorporated that could be considered almost as a wearable sculpture.

Yunus & Eliza are among the recipients of the BFC/ELLE Talent Launch Pad for the SS11 & AW11 seasons, together with another designer also featured in the exhibition, David Longshaw.

Among the accessories designers featured, the most interesting one from a structural point of view was definitely Emma Yeo.

The winner of the YKK award at ITS#10 with a piece that incorporated wood, leather and a zipper, Yeo is known for her signature “biomorphic” designs, intricate nets and architectural structures in leather and wood that seem to combine together biology, modern architecture, fashion design and surrealism.

From a tailoring perspective, I really enjoyed Mason Jung's “Camouflage IV”.

The piece is taken from Jung's “Camouflage” series and explores standardised customs.

The series also looks at the designer's childhood memories of wearing uniforms in a restricted culture that led the garments to be remembered as a social trauma that suppresses individuality.

“Camouflage IV” comprises a jacket, waistcoat and scarf, yet the pieces aren't layered one on top of the other, but they seem to merge (View this photo), almost creating fossilised forms of men's habitual dress codes in order to reveal the individuality hidden by social agreements.

This summer Kagami will be once again part of the the ITS award panel and I'm sure that his vision will help the other members of the jury to spot very talented designers.

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Origami-Like Visions of M.C. Escher: Issey Miyake A/W 11-12

The fashion industry seems to be extremely removed from the tragedies of this world.

The fashion weeks were indeed in full swing during the revolts that have changed and are still changing the face of the Middle East.

Paris Fashion Week closed at the beginning of last week, then a terrible earthquake and tsunami struck Japan.

As the death toll soars and the crisis at nuclear plants spreads, it's difficult to think about less vitally important and more superficial things such as fashion.

Yet, beauty can often help you overcoming tragedy and traumas, so as a tribute to Japan, let's look in today's post at Issey Miyake's Autumn/Winter 2011 collection.

From the point of view of a writer or a cultural commentator, Miyake's collection was probably one of the few ones for the next Autumnal season that allows you to write well about artistic and philosophical concepts.

Origamis were the main inspiration behind this collection: the opening tail coats, dresses, skirts and jackets were indeed made out of folded and stapled paper reproducing giant origamis.

Little by little fabric variations of these pieces that were put together by catwalk assistants, appeared on the runway.

Garments in different shades of grey - from dove to charcoal -  or in black and white, characterised by houndstooth and herringbone patterns were clearly inspired by the previous origamis and by their precise angular and geometric shapes and silhouettes.

Yet the chevrons, folds and voluminous padded lapels integrated in some of the designs soon transformed, including an architectural element, but also creating optical illusions (see for example the skirts in which the chevrons looked like prints, but were actually made out of woven ribbons) employed to evoke a sense of movement.

The effect worked quite well in coats in bright shades such as red with squarish or zigzagging motifs that evoked M.C. Escher's works.

Dutch artist Escher actually appeared in this blog in a previous post in connection with another fashion designer, Alexandra Verschueren.

Yet, while the latter seemed to recreate Escher's vision in the fabric of her designs, sculpting it in her silhouettes, Miyake's creative director Dai Fujiwara's looked at prints, colours and graphic effects that could have the same purpose of Escher's impossible constructions, that is fooling the brain via repetitions and slight variations. 

Maybe it was that mixture of origamis and optical illusions, maybe it was the combination of bold graphics, non-Euclidean symmetries, and immaterially ethereal coloured chiffon layered or folded to create innovative nuances or poetical movements, but Fujiwara's last collection after five years as creative director at Miyake's was definitely one of the best and most intriguing ones presented during Paris Fashion Week, both from a fashion and from an artistic point of view. 

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Waiting for Yamamoto

The Yohji Yamamoto retrospective kicks off tomorrow at London's V&A.

So, while waiting for the exhibition to open, here's a quick image of the current windows of the Yamamoto shop in Conduit Street.

The exhibition promises to be quite exciting since it will feature over 60 creations by Yamamoto, including his menswear, and will also involve a series of installationsat the Wapping Project sites. 

A review will hopefully follow sometime soon. In the meantime, check out also the V&A blog to discover more about the preparation process in which also talented artist Polona Dolzan (readers, remember her from the "Fish and Chips, Twice Please" exhibition in Vienna?) was involved. I'm sure that, though working on an exhibition can be stressful and tiring, she will be quite pleased to see the event finally being open to the public.

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