A week has gone since the Super Bowl and Madonna strutting and fretting upon a stage emblazoned with Vogue's logo, while wearing Riccardo Tisci for Givenchy’s costumes.
Many articles, features and posts were written about Madonna's performance, but there is something I’m particularly grateful I didn't see anywhere, a lengthy interview with Riccardo Tisci about his costumes for the famous star.
Yes, because the last time he was asked where his inspirations for Givenchy’s Spring/Summer 2012 Haute Couture collection came from, he indirectly revealed the clueless ignorance wrapping up the fashion industry at the moment like a thick fog.
But let’s go back to the beginning of the story and Givenchy's S/S 12 Haute Couture collection. Many designers got stuck in Art Deco times for their collections, but Tisci mentioned two cinematic connections, Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927) and Yakov Protazanov’s Soviet sci-fi Aelita: Queen of Mars (1924), for a mere coincidence (a mere coincidence...), probably the two films I cited the most on this site last year (even in the same post).
The latter is definitely not a totally obscure film as many may think; in fact it is a well-known reference in certain (more educated) fashion circles.
Taken from the eponymous 1923 science fiction novel by Alexei Tolstoy and often dubbed as the"Soviet Metropolis", the film - the story of an imaginary love story between Russian engineer Los (Nikolai Tsereteli) and the Queen of Mars Aelita (Yuliya Solntseva) with wider political implications (bourgeois state Vs popular uprising...) - was first mentioned in connection with fashion during the 1982 "Intimate Architecture: Contemporary Clothing Design" exhibition at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Aelita was then forgotten again, resurfacing at the Cannes Film Festival in 2000, where it was considered among the 33 most important science fiction movies of all times.
The film was often mentioned in connection with fashion, for the beautiful sets by Alexandra Exter and Sergei Kozlovsky and for Exter's costumes, a combination of geometric forms reflecting the futuristic city characterised by Constructivist shapes and silhouettes where the Martian characters lived.
Looking at the '20s, Metropolis and Aelita, Tisci came up with ten long gowns in a palette comprising black, white and brown, decorated with micro beads, crystals, sequinned micro-dots covered in tulle and stars (a reference to Soviet times or to William Klein's Mr Freedom, the unspoken reference point behind Givenchy's A/W 2011-12 menswear collection, allegedly inspired by the American flag?) on silk satin dresses.
Crocodile skin was severed into little segments and scales that were subsequently numbered and then reassembled again on silk tulle to create geometrically graphic motifs (that some reviewers deemed Constructivist and therefore linked with Aelita...) a process that took something like 350 hours.
Zippers asymmetrically crossed some designs, slicing the dresses in halves, while all the looks were accessorised with oversized nose rings and tribal earrings.
Now, you could try and see the dichotomic worlds of Metropolis and its overground Vs underground tensions or of Aelita with its earthlings and its Martians, its middle-classes and its workers, symbolically replicated in a man's white tank top (in a cashmere blend) worn under a painstakingly embroidered evening gown or a tank top matched with a silvery white skirt held up by a metal chain (slightly echoing Aelita’s long dress that left her hips bare in the film).
But there weren’t very direct connections with Aelita: Alexandra Exter played with art and architecture in her costumes that mixed structural articulation and the mobility of metallic components on and with the body, something that was missing in Tisci’s gowns for Givenchy.
In fact Tisci didn't openly say his gowns were inspired by Exter’s costumes, Russian Constructivism, the cryptic radio message beaming mysterious words - Anta, Odeli, Uta - around the world, engineer Los, Aelita, her maidservant Ihoshka or the Radiant Energy Tower Guardian Gol.
The designer claimed indeed (and this statement was then reported by many journalists all over the world, so you can easily check it out) that he actually took inspiration from the Aelita soundtrack, that, in more recent years, inspired Techno music.
The problem is that a) Aelita is a silent film; b) if it it was accompanied by live music (some claim by Dmitri Dmitriyevich Shostakovich), it went lost; c) no official DVD release is available with the original music accompaniment, but all the copies released in the last few years were rescored using different composers (one of the most popular DVDs out there features a mix of music compositions by Aleksandr Skryabin, Igor Stravinsky and Alexander Glazunov); d) no document, book or research exists about the derivation of Techno from Aelita (Mr Tisci, Techno derived from the Detroit scene; you could have maybe – maybe – argued that Techno was somehow inspired by early music experiments by Futurist composers such as Pratella, but not by Aelita).
So where did Tisci actually hear Aelita’s soundtrack? Has he got special powers, a zelant archivist cousin with a penchant for early silent movies soundtracks or did the Queen of Mars send him a secret CD via her powerful telescope?
Apparently, the solution is easier than you may think: the post published on this site on 16th October 2011, the one that mentioned Metropolis and Aelita together, closed with a note on my Moscow lecture and an Aelita-inspired video by Jay Artworx accompanying DJ Batman's track "The Ghost of Anna El-Tour" (that I'm also republishing in this post).
The latter is an electro remix of opera singer Anna El-Tour (1890-1954) with samples from Nikolaj Andreevič Rimskij-Korsakov.
Tisci, his underage team of PR officers or his desperate interns looking for clever inspirations and names to drop to a bunch of journalists fakely interested in the joys of Haute Couture but otherwise bored out of their skulls, probably stumbled upon the post and, rather than reading what the video was about, they just assumed that it showed iconic Russian film Aelita and its original soundtrack.
If my theory is right, this rather peculiar incident reveals something rather sad about the contemporary fashion industry: things have become so fast that designers and their teams probably do not even have the time to check if what they are saying actually makes any sense.
Yet it's not only the fault of the fashion designers and their teams: no journalist actually questioned the fact that Tisci took inspiration from the soundtrack of a silent movie that allegedly "spawned" the Techno genre.
Last but not least, Tisci and his team didn't even bother to check who actually did the music for the video and correctly name the artist, who may have benefited from such a mention (if you don't want to pay for copyrights etc, at least mention the correct name of the artist to make sure he gets some credit!).
But this is the small minded, superficial and immoral world of fashion, a strange warped universe that would look rather bizarre even to Aelita, the Queen of Mars.
I can't deny that I'm feeling rather sad just thinking about all the pathetic consequences that undigging Aelita will now have: how many of us will be able to stand Anna Dello Russo pretending she is the Queen of Mars?
Will we see any high profile fashion blogger claiming of being a Russian Constructivism expert and maybe going to fashion shows with a massive crown of metal beams protruding from their head like planar projections in true Aelita fashion?
Mind you, I do have something of being proud of: together with DJ Batman, I have indirectly hijacked a couture show and thousands of reviews of a Haute Couture collection, revealing there is more ignorance and superficiality in the world of fashion than many of us may have ever imagined. But, next time, Mr Tisci, remember that - to paraphrase Jean-Luc Godard - it's not where you take things, but it’s how you copy them and then report them to the press.
PS Mr Tisci, if you want to see Aelita (and eventually understand what this film is about...), you can do so at the 62nd Berlin International Film Festival in the Retrospective section dedicated to the German-Russian film studio Mezhrabpom-Film. If you missed it last Friday, you will be able to catch it again in a week’s time, on 19th February, at 4.00 pm – check the programme here. And if you miss it again, don’t despair, the Museum of Modern Art (Moma) is going to take to New York - from 11th to 30th April 2012 - some of the films included in the Berlinale Retrospective and, hopefully, your beloved Aelita will be included in the selection.
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