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

[Ay]A Studio’s Landscapisms and Digiscapes

As a young architecture student, Jorge Ayala always displayed a strong passion for fashion.

After he graduated and went on to become the Director of the AA Visiting School in Paris  and the founder of the [Ay]A Studio , his passion for this discipline prompted him to experiment further.

In the last few months Ayala’s interest in fashion and in clothing the body with structures borrowed from architecture became one of his main fields of research and he started developing a proper collection with his team.

Based on the actualisation of digital scapes and entitled “Landscapism”, Ayala’s collection is a vision of the future in which the expressive tools of the traditional part of the designer’s trade co-exist with a preoccupation for solving spatial and structural problems more commonly expressed in architecture.

Garments contain and define the space and are conceived and assembled as three-dimensional entities.

The launch of the collection concides with the beginning of a new course at Paris’ Architectural Association School that, entitled “Building Fashion", explores the new possibilities offered by fashion and architecture through interdisciplinary laboratories.

In a world with so many fashion designers, why would an architect decide to launch a fashion collection?
Jorge Ayala: We see the presence of so many fashion designers in the market as very competitive, but also as something very positive. Fashion is a unique creative platform that must go and is going through radical mutations. With this collection our main goal is fostering a sort of new culture, raising awareness within the fashion industry that we must try and avoid processes of mere aestheticisation while preventing at the same time the existing risk of anaesthetisation of our society.       

Architecturally speaking, what inspired the forms and shapes of your designs?
Jorge Ayala: Fashion constitutes mainly a form of ‘dreamworld’ rooted by precedents such as journeys - think about Jean Paul Gaultier’s A/W 2007-08 collection ‘Princes and Maharajas’ - or art mimicry, if you go back with your mind to Yves Saint Laurent’s S/S 1998 collection ‘Cubiste’. A group of architects also operates in the same manner: for our first collection we’ve been more influenced by a notion of a virtual world driven by a digital-based research. We tried to materialise such virtual terrains and pull them up onto the real world, onto physical instances. We obviously also looked at landscape shapes, artificial systems like machines or cyborg prosthesis for clothing devices.

What kind of architectural processes did you use while working on the collection and do you think that specific materials employed in architecture can inspire also fashion designers?
Jorge Ayala: During the conception of our garments we went through many tests, both digital and physical. The digital tests mainly helped our form-finding processes while the physical tests at the beginning were strongly related with structure rather than form. We then tried to merge both and foster the hyper-integration of the formal resolution with its structure and function. Our designs are therefore the result of long processes of analysis, followed by implementing novel techniques of assembling and building garments.

How easy it is for your team working on a fashion collection?
Jorge Ayala: There are a series of contemporary conditions that make today’s society - visually and culturally - related to the world of fashion. As architects we were tempted to develop our designs onto a broader scale, beyond and above the architectural resolution. For the first collection the team started working on very basic geometries, combining them in a very systematic way, that is 3 circles generating a triangle, then 4 circles generating a square, then 5 circles generating an hexagon, and so on. The garments therefore acquired a degree of spatial complexity. We were also prompted by a will to criticise the capitalism undermining our society.

Fashion-wise is there a designer who inspires you in your creations?
Jorge Ayala: I am a big fan of Kermit Tesoro. I love the edginess in both clothes and footwear. He should be an inspiration for all architects, his works are very much interconnected with architecture. It’s all about form Vs structure and function Vs spatial effects.

Are you also working on accessories? 
Jorge Ayala: Yes, accessory design is in progress at the moment. We would like our jewellery to go beyond the mere ornamental and use the accessories as an extension of the body. 

In the history of fashion there are quite a few architects who turned into fashion designers, but not many fashion designers who turned into architects, according to you why is that so?
Jorge Ayala: Traditional educational programs - in fashion or architecture - don’t necessarily encourage such exchanges. I still remember that, when I was studying architecture in London and I showed my interest in fashion, some professors thought that fashion was something superficial and hollow. 

Would you encourage fashion design students to take the architecture path? 
Jorge Ayala: I would actually encourage top schools to start thinking about a diploma that merges both the disciplines in one hybrid full degree. The level of complexity in both disciplines is quite similar. Academics such as myself must be prepared for this important shift.

You’re preparing to launch a new course that merges fashion and architecture at AA Paris, what will it be about?
Jorge Ayala: Compared to our previous semester when we approached different fields of experimentation from retail store to catwalks prototypes, the progressive agenda for this semester is to look at clothing resolution. Capitalism itself promotes a sense of consumerism and uniform thinking when it comes to architecture and fashion. We’ve seen this topic as the starting point for our critical brief for this Autumn 2011, called “Self-Assembled Prêt-à-Porter”.

Will the course also touch upon new materials/advanced techniques?
Jorge Ayala: Absolutely, this season we will form-find with fibreglass, resin and plaster in powder and latex sheets. We will try and adapt our design protocols and logics in such a way as to reflect our current technological transformations and digital and physical discoveries.
 
If you could collaborate with a fashion designer who would you choose?
Jorge Ayala: I would love to collaborate with Rem D. Koolhaas since United Nude’s designs are very interesting. 

Where will you present your collection in Paris?
Jorge Ayala: Visitors can see our works in our studio in Rue Saint Dominique in Paris. Digital visitors can instead follow our work on our website and blog. 

“Building Fashion” is at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Rue de Rivoli, Paris, from 31st October to 10th November.

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Geometric Abstractions and Avant-Garde Suprematism (in Fashion)

Among the various documents displayed at the State Museum of Vladimir Mayakovsky in Moscow there are also a series of art projects and works such as the "Black Square" by Russian painter and art theoretician Kazimir Severinovich Malevich, the pioneer of geometric abstract art and the originator of the avant-garde Suprematist movement.

The most interesting thing about him is that, as Natalia Goncharova highlighted, he moved from one art genre to the next, changing his style and getting influenced by different genres, from   Impressionism to Symbolism, Fauvism and Cubo-Futurism.

Born in Kiev in 1879, Malevich studied at the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture and in the studio of Fedor Rerberg until 1910. A year later he took part in the second exhibition of the group Soyuz Molodyozhi (Union of Youth) in St. Petersburg, that also featured Vladimir Tatlin and, in 1912, to the third exhibition of the group, that also included Aleksandra Ekster’s works.

First inspired in his art by Russian avant-garde painters Natalia Goncharova and Mikhail Larionov, from 1913 Malevich was deeply influenced by the exhibition of Aristarkh Lentulov's cubist paintings that opened in Moscow.

In the same year he developed costumes and sets for the Cubo-Futurist opera Victory Over the Sun by composer Mikhail Matyushin and writer Alexei Kruchenykh that featured characters clad in costumes (that, for the performance, were made of cardboard and wire) composed of geometric figures such as triangles and tori. 

In 1914, he exhibited his works in the Salon des Independants in Paris together with Alexander Archipenko, Sonia Delaunay, Aleksandra Ekster and Vadim Meller.

The following year the artist moved on and published his manifesto From Cubism to Suprematism: examples of his Suprematist works include "Black Square on White", first exhibited to the public at the 1915 "0-10" exhibition in St. Petersburg, though the artist referred to it as having originated in 1913. 

Malevich saw the Black Square as a basic form full of potentialities; he then produced the monochromatic "White on White", an off-white square angled against a larger white square.

 
The artist was also interested in aerial photography and aviation and worked on rendering familiar landscapes into abstractions (he later on translated the shapes of his paintings into 3D architectural models, which he called "architectonics" or "planity", from the Russian word aeroplan – these works were then exhibited at the 1924 Venice Biennale).

In 1918, Malevich designed the sets and costumes for Mayakovsky's Mystery Bouffe (1918)  produced by Vsevolod Meyerhold. 

After the October Revolution, he taught at different schools and academies and wrote the book The World as Non-Objectivity (published in Munich 1926) that outlined his Suprematist theories.

Confiscated and banned since the Stalinist regime conceived forms of abstraction as "bourgeois" art, Malevich died of cancer in Leningrad in 1935. An image of the black square was hung above his deathbed and the mourners at his funeral rally were permitted to wave a banner bearing a black square.  

Fashion-wise the "Black Square", considered as a synthesis of geometric forms, can still be used as an interesting source of inspiration.

Malevich wrote about its creation: “When in the year 1913, in my desperate attempt to free art from the ballast of objectivity, I took refuge in the square form and exhibited a picture which consisted of nothing more than a black square on a white field, the critics and, along with them, the public sighed, ‘Everything which we loved is lost. We are in a desert…Before us is nothing but a black square on a white background!’ (…) But a blissful sense of liberating nonobjectivity drew me forth into the ‘desert’ where nothing is real except feeling…and so feeling became the substance of my life. This was no ‘empty square’ which I had exhibited but rather the feeling of nonobjectivity…Suprematism is the rediscovery of pure art that, in the course of time, had become obscured by the accumulation of ‘things’”.

I do feel that time has come to strip fashion of "the accumulation of things" Malevich stated had obscured real art and create a new and purer vision, maybe employing the speed and direction of movement of geometric figures in space. How do you feel about it? Do you agree?

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Like an Actor in a Drama: Visit to the State Museum of Vladimir Mayakovsky

In yesterday’s post I looked at collages moving from the work of a young Russian artist. Let’s continue the thread today by exploring the State Museum of Vladimir Mayakovsky, a space filled with very different collages from the ones we saw yesterday, chaotic collages aimed at taking the reader onto a journey through the Russian poet and playwright’s life.
 
Mayakovsky was a representative of early-20th century Russian Futurism and studied sculpture and architecture at Stroganov Moscow State University of Arts and Industry, two aspects that I find particularly interesting. So, when Russian artist and designer Lisa Shahno, suggested to go and visit the museum with her I jumped at the prospect.  

The Mayakovsky Museum opened in January 1974 in the house on 3/6 on Lubyanskiy Passage, where the poet lived from 1919 to 1930. Lisa explained me that reconstruction of the building was held in 1987-89.  

The museum currently stores the Mayakovsky fund that includes thousands of documents, personal papers, books, paintings, drawings, sculptures, posters and adverts.

The best thing about it, though, is that the materials are not showcased in a traditional way, but they are trapped inside metal structures in bright colours such as red, yellow, blue and green, that integrate documents, suits, shoes, photographs and other assorted objects.

This is indeed a sort of chaotic environment, an allegory for Mayakovsky’s life, while the documents and photographs that are often encased in glass displays that seem to be shattering or bending are used to symbolise a distortion, a break or an interruption in the flow of time.

At the same time the chaotic displays also try to turn the style of Mayakovsky’s poetical compositions, the metaphors contained in his works and the rhythm of his poems into something real and tangible.

The spaces are therefore radically transformed through the work of different architects (Lisa helped me making a list: A. Bokov, E. Boudin, I. Ivanov and B. Chernov), set designers (Polyakov T.P.) and artists (Eugeny Abramovich Amaspyur).

As a visitor you instantly turn into an active participant, almost like an actor in a drama full of contradictions, rather than into a distant observer and that’s what makes this museum particularly intriguing.

The story starts from Mayakovsky's childhood when, after the death of his father in 1906, he moved with the rest of his family (his mother and two sisters) to Moscow.

In 1911 he joined the Moscow Art School and became acquainted with members of the Russian Futurist movement turning into the leading spokesman for the group Gileas (Гилея) and becoming  a close friend of David Burlyuk.

His first poems were published in 1912 on the Futurist publication "A Slap in the Face of Public Taste" and he continued to write poems in the Futurist style until 1914 when he was expelled from the Art School for political activities.

In 1915 he wrote the poem “A Cloud in Trousers” inspired by different themes, including art, revolution, religion and love and symbolised in the museum by a green display featuring frames with empty spaces in the place of religious icons (seventh image in this post - the image on the right in the fifth block of pictures). In the same year he fell in love with Lilya Brik who at the time was married to publisher Osip Brik.  

Between 1915 and 1917 Mayakovsky worked at the Petrograd Military Automobile School as a draftsman and witnessed the October Revolution from Smolny, Petrograd. When he moved back to Moscow he created quite a few satirical Agitprop posters, many of them included in the museum displays.

In 1919 he published the anthology of poems "Collected Works 1909-1919" and, between 1922 and 1928, he travelled to Latvia, Britain, Germany, the United States, Mexico and Cuba. In the museum his travels are symbolised by a globe-shaped structure (tenth imagein this post - the right one in the seventh block of images), while the Brooklyn Bridge is put in contrast with the unfinished "bridge to socialism". 

Visitors interested in Russian Constructivism and fashion fans will definitely enjoy the crew of pilots - including Lyubov Sergeyevna Popova and Varvara Stepanova and their designs characterised by bold use of colour, geometric shapes and clashing and contrasting patterns - symbolising the ideal of art.  

Disillusioned with the course the Soviet Union was taking under Stalin, Mayakovsky wrote satirical plays "The Bedbug" (Клоп, 1929) and "The Bathhouse" (Баня, 1930). The poet shot himself on 14th April 1930. Ten days after his death the criminal investigator of the case was also shot dead, fuelling suspicions about the poet’s suicide.

The heart of the museum is the tiny room where the poet lived and died, furnished with humble belongings that contrast with the chaotic and colourful displays outside it.

The following poem was found in his papers after his death; Mayakovsky used the middle section with just a few changes as the epilogue of his suicide notes:

Past one o’clock. You must have gone to bed.
The Milky Way streams silver through the night.
I’m in no hurry; with lightning telegrams
I have no cause to wake or trouble you.
And, as they say, the incident is closed.
Love’s boat has smashed against the daily grind.
Now you and I are quits. Why bother then
To balance mutual sorrows, pains, and hurts.
Behold what quiet settles on the world.
Night wraps the sky in tribute from the stars.
In hours like these, one rises to address
The ages, history, and all creation.

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Generational Wall Collages from Moscow: Kolya Saprykin

There is a little bit of everything on the walls of young Russian artist Kolya Saprykin, from pieces of newspapers, stickers and sketches to pictures of models, of Vladimir Putin, Dmitry Medvedev and Dolce & Gabbana, assorted adverts, postcards and random notes.

The chaotic bits and pieces forming his walls - part of Saprykin’s “P01W8P88” project showcased during a preview at the recent Cycles and Seasons event in Moscow - represent the artist’s memories and the personal chaos in his mind, but they also form a poignant portrait of modern Russia, symbolising the precarious and schizophrenic balance between luxury and poverty in which local young people have been living in the last few years.

How did this project start?
Kolya Saprykin: I started bringing home invitations to parties, photos that people gave me, booklets from exhibitions and other bits and pieces and I realised that, as time passed, they meant something to me. I felt I didn’t want to throw them away because they were part of my personal story, so I started building them into a system, into a sort of collage and used them to decorate the walls of my flat to recreate almost a timeline of my life, from 2007 to 2010. When I showed them to art curators, they actually said I had managed to delineate a portrait of a particular generation of people living in Moscow in these years.

Which are the main issues your generation has been dealing with?  
Kolya Saprykin: In Moscow we have a problem: things that are in your head never relate to the things that actually surround you. You may have a beautiful image in your mind, but the reality can be pretty different and this means that our generation can easily turn into a slightly schizophrenic entity, since at times you feel you have an imaginary life in your head, but, at the same time, you know that the reality is a completely different thing.

How did you manage to reconcile these contrasts through your project? 
Kolya Saprykin: I moved to the countryside and lived in a very secluded environment for almost one year. I tried to make sense of my life and of what was happening around me. I started writing small articles to illustrate the pictures and items I had brought together to try and highlight my personal relation with that particular piece or with the people portrayed in those images or present my point of view about something. I listed everything on a website including links to the people mentioned or to their Facebook page, so that visitors who come and see my installation are able to check them out and move from the exhibition space into a sort of social network. In this way, while studying my project and the website I created, visitors also find themselves in relation to other people and somehow rediscover themselves.

Moscow looks like a city built on dichotomies to foreign visitors, do you feel that these contrasts actually had an impact on your project? 
Kolya Saprykin: Absolutely. Through my project I also wanted to tackle those distorsions between unimaginable things, such as people eating buckets of caviar and the images you get of Moscow once you jump in your car and get out of it. I guess my project was also a way to get out of this distorted frame of mind that makes you think that caviar and champagne are normal and that make you blind to other things happening around you. It was a way to clean myself out of all this, to find a sort of catharsis, get on with my life and finally be able to move onto the next project.

Special thanks to Alex Boyarskaya-Waitt for her help in translating/facilitating the interview. 

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Heukrip or Jeongjagwan?

As a follow up to yesterday's post about the Russian China exhibition at Moscow's State Museum of Oriental Art, I'm posting today this image focusing on headdresses and featuring the Korean "heukrip" and "jeongjagwan" - both come from the late 19th-20th century and are made with bamboo, horsehair, paper and lacquer.

I find difficult to say which one I prefer since, apart from their shapes, I think the materials employed to make them are very interesting and I'm sure some fashion students/designers preparing their catwalk shows may find them inspiring for headdresses/showpieces for their collections (this post is dedicated to my young friend Dima Shabalin, currently writing for a few Italian publications, studying journalism in Moscow and designing at the same time extravagant headpieces for performances).

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Go East: «Русский Китай» (Russian China) @ Moscow’s State Museum of Oriental Art

Located in Nikitsky Boulevard, in the pale yellow building known as “Lunin House” designed in the traditions of Russian classicism under the guidance of Italo-Swiss architect Domenico Gilardi (who was inspired in his work by Luigi Cagnola and Giovanni Antonio Antolini’s Milanese imperial classicism), Moscow’s State Museum of Oriental Art houses several permanent exhibitions that include exclusive pieces from unique collections.

A new exhibition entitled “Russian China” and dedicated to Russian emigration in Asia recently opened at the museum. The history of Russian émigrés is a very lengthy and complex subject, but the vicissitudes of Russian immigrants escaping their home country amidst the Revolution and Civil War to move to China, are a chapter on their own.

This is why the curators opted for a visual approach to the topic, trying to tackle the problems associated with the life of the Russian émigrés via artifacts, objects - including wood carvings, fans and vases – photographs, illustrations, costumes and accessories.  

Official Russian contacts with China started in the early 17th century, though this exhibition mainly focuses on the 1920s-30s and features pieces selected from the collection of Dmitry Melnikov who moved to China in the 19th century, worked in the Russian tea company, and returned to Russia shortly before his death in 1949, and costumes from the collection of Russian-born French Historian of Fashion and Costume Designer Alexandre Vassiliev.

Emigrants setting down in China - among the most famous ones there were artist, poet and cabaret performer Alexander Vertinsky, jazz composer and conductor Oleg Lundstrem and painter Nicholas Roerich - mainly moved to Harbin, Shanghai, Tianjin, and Wuhan and sometimes they worked as writers and journalists.

Their works reflected the problems of the Russian diaspora, but they also helped spreading a sort of taste for Chinese art, clothing and decoration.

One of the highlights of the exhibition is definitely the Art Deco room with several evening dresses from the collection of the private secretary of Admiral Kolchak, Lyudmila Vasilyeva, and of poet and dancer Larissa Andersen.

Other objects on display are dresses and kimonos made in Harbin in 1920s-30s - including a lame dress with a poppy and ears of corn motive from 1932-34 and a dress with Egyptian motifs from the Kalveran fashion house - as well as "Chinoiserie" numbers by British and French designers of the time.

This room actually tackles pretty well Deco’s fascination with China and its attraction to the exotic in its iconography, materials and palette.    

The most important thing about these dresses is that  they provide a picture of life since the wardrobes of different ladies are represented, from wealthy women in fur coats and beautiful kimonos, to female employees of the Chinese Eastern Railway and the daughters of tea merchants.

One dress made by Russian costumier Brizak with an embroidered motif of swallows is particularly symbolic since it merges the boundaries, representing a tribute to the East while still looking very European and, in particular, very French. 

While there are books addressing the subject of this exhibition, not many of them focus on this specific period of tine and not many of them are translated into European languages this is why this exhibition is a good introduction to the cultural traditions, art and work of  Russian emigrants in China.

A visit to the rest of the museum collections is also worth since the permanent exhibitions allow visitors to take in the beauty and richness of Asian culture through Persian carpets, Iranian ceramics, Indian jewellery, Japanese prints and drawings, sculptures, paintings, arts and crafts from Transcaucasia, Buryatia, Kazakhstan and Chukotka, China, Japan, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Burma, Indonesia and Thailand.   
 
"Russian China" is at the State Museum of Oriental Art, Moscow, Russia, until 2nd January 2012.

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Fun with Linguistics

Linguistics is an amazing discipline (one of the reasons why I started loving Noam Chomsky's works when I was at university...), but linguistic conventions are also amazingly funny things.

The best thing about languages is indeed the fact that, at times, a word has one meaning in one language and a completely different one in another.

Some Russian words can be hilarious for Italians: one example is "Kacca", pronounced as "Kassa" and meaning "cash desk" or "counter".

In Italian "kacca" sounds indeed like "cacca", that is "shit".

This obviously offers numerous photo opportunity to Italian tourists visiting the country, but, when applied to the banners indicating the money exchange rates, it becomes almost a political slogan hinting at the fact that money is shit.

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Political Messages Vs Fashion Mottos

This is the cover of a recent issue of Russian magazine «Большой Город» , that means The Big City.

The magazine mainly focuses on life in Moscow and I was introduced to it by Julia Vydolob at Look At Me after I asked her a few questions about Russian publications etc.

One of my readers, Alice Ruzavina, who also acted as interpreter and facilitated a couple of interviews during my Moscow trip (spasibo!), wrote me down the translation.

It says:

Be surprised when
you are humiliated,
stop feeling scared,
fight for your
values,
demand honest elections, send both to resignation,
be healthy

The mottos mainly refer to the political situation in Russia and the coming elections, but  there are a few sentences that could be easily adopted as good slogans for completely different purposes.

"Stop feeling scared" and "fight for your values" are great mottos also if you work in the current fashion industry, a rather complicated world in which too many editors are scared of losing money coming from adverts; too many journalists are scared of expressing their own ideas to avoid PR not inviting them to catwalk shows and too many buyers are scared of investing into little known designers who are actually more talented than your average "hip" designers because people don't buy into talented but completely unknown gems. Time to change it all, don't you think so? 

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Padding, Fencing and Reconfiguring: Nina Donis A/W 2011-12

I'm slowly trying put some order into my notes and my mind at the moment, so more posts about my Russian adventures will follow once I'll be done (in the meantime, thank you so much to all the great people I met along the way and who helped arranging visits to museums, translating, interpreting and generally facilitated my visit).

Since on Friday evening I mentioned Nina Donis' Spring/Summer 2012 catwalk show during the Cycles and Seasons event, well let's look at a few designs from Nina Neretina and Donis Pouppis's Autumn/Winter 2011-12 collection before passing onto the new collection.

I saw the designs yesterday morning at the Moscow-based concept store (and cafe) Kuznetsky Most 20. This collection, mainly made with the lining material thinsulate, was inspired by fencing, uniforms and army clothes, with some references to modular construction and Louise Bourgeois thrown in.

I'm not usually into furs, but I found the coats in these images very interesting from a reconfigurable point of view since they can be unfastened and turned into a short/long sleeved jacket, providing different looks in just one design (who needs different coats when you can reconfigure one?).

Some of the concepts behind these designs - reversibility, fastenings, flat and rigid shapes that get a life once they are assembled and the wearer inhabits them made me think a lot about the creations by Italian designer and architect of fashion Nanni Strada.

I actually asked Nina about architectural inspirations and she said that, when she finished school, she was in two minds about studying fashion or architecture. I'm sure if she had chosen the latter the loss of the fashion industry would have been the gain of the architectural discipline. 

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Books Cling To Me

You know that famous quote by film director Sergei Eisenstein that says "Books cling to me. They fly down to me - ran up and attach themselves to me"?

Well, that's exactly what happens to me: even when I'm not looking for a book, I end up stumbling into a bookshop or a library.

Yesterday for example I found myself in front of Moscow-based Biblio Globus by pure chance.

Outside it was raining and it was too early to go and visit any museums, so I had more than just one reason to get in apart from my book obsession.

I surprisedly found out that there were already quite a few people inside even though it was just 9.30 am.

The bookshop is massive and I really felt frustrated at not being able to speak Russian. Imagine that they even have a "Children's Poems" Section, simply inconceivable in many other countries where such books are catalogue under "Children" with no distinction from novels.

The shop windows were also rather unusual as, rather than displaying any best selling novels, they told the history of literacy through little scenes that started from prehistoric times. 

Biblio Globus really made me think about the state of the publishing industry and of book retailers in Europe and the USA where quite a few big bookshop chains lost customers or even closed down (think about Borders announcing liquidation a few months ago...) as readers moved onto the digital book format.

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