In yesterday's post I mentioned Russian painter and artist Alexandre Iacovleff’s illustrations for Poiret, so let's move today from an illustration Iacovleff did for a 1934 fashion magazine.
If you’re not familiar with Iacovleff’s work, I would actually encorage you to do your own little research about it. His paintings are beautiful while his fashion illustrations are very stylish. He was a member of the Mir Iskusstva (The World of Art - founded in 1898 by Diaghilev, Alexandre Benois and Léon Bakst) and travelled a lot to Mongolia, China, Japan, Syria, Iran and Afghanistan, eventually settling down in Paris.
The Iacovleff illustration I have in mind shows an evening gown by Elsa Schiaparelli matched with a Martial & Armand fox fur cape. The back of the evening gown is particularly interesting since Schiap created through fabric two dynamic lines (the magazine describes the shape of the dress as "the new Schiaparelli silhouette") that extend behind the body of the wearer.
The evening gown mankes me think a lot about Boccioni’s studies in the continuity of space and in particular about his sculpture "Forme uniche della continuità nello spazio" (Unique Forms of Continuity in Space, 1913) in which he harmonised speed and force into a sculptural form, creating a figure that strides forward leaving behind fluidly aerodynamic ripples.
The world of art and design was actually very much into dynamic forms and shapes in the early decades of the 1900s (think also about the new means of transport and Art Deco's fascination with speed, planes, trains and cars...).
A 1921 advertising image from the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs collection shows for example the "Goddess of Flight", a girl standing on a globe and holding a model airplane while the fabric of her dress forms aerodynamic lines behind her.
This image brings us to our times with Hussein Chalayan's Spring/Summer 2009 collection in which he showed a fascination with cars, movement and speed, freezing some of his sculptural dresses in technological materials in aerodynamic motion (by the way, Chalayan’s exhibition is on at Paris' Les Arts Décoratifs until 11th December).
The same dynamic lines come back in Chalayan’s Autumn/Winter 2011/12 designs for Puma's Urban Mobility line. Entitled "Double Exposure" this collection takes inspiration from photography, from the structure of a camera (think shutter, lenses, but also the use of light in photography) and from themes such as travel and the speed we move at. In the case of the "Urban Swift" sneaker, the camera, not being fast enough to catch the picture, created a dynamic blurred motion on the heel area. Can you think about other examples of "dynamic designs" in fashion?
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