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

The Bitter Curse of the Visually Enticing Fashion Film

The ever-existing connection between fashion and film has often been explored in previous posts on this site (and I can assure you that further posts will follow about new collections and old films..), yet the moment has come to start considering the other side of the coin of this link between these very exciting media. 

In lectures and courses I did about this topic I often highlighted that looking at fashion and film doesn’t mean - or at least it doesn’t only mean - spotting which fashion designer did the costumes for a film.

Indeed, one of the most interesting points of this connection remains exploring and analysing how the world of fashion often feeds off films and how the work of a costume designer sometimes has a tangible impact on fashion trends.

One of the best examples of these two points is Italian costume designer Milena Canonero (who already appeared here and there on this site): her designs for Chariots of Fire prompted Ralph Lauren and Jeffrey Banks to launch collections inspired by the characters’ attires in the film, and, after the film came out, Canonero herself was asked to design a collection (that won her the Coty Award) for menswear manufacturer Norman Hilton. Canonero’s costumes for Out of Africa spawned instead a trend for safari and travel clothes.  

The most fascinating aspect of a costume designer’s work is the research behind it: not depending from any fashion headlines and deadlines, costume designers compile multi-layered researches in libraries and museums, combining historical data with their own imagination and with the requirements of the film script. This is essentially why some looks, ideas and inspirations that appeared in specific films from the past have reached the iconic and timeless status and keep on being extremely fashionable and desirable even decades afterwards. 

Now, let’s focus on the current fashion film frenzy.

Developed in the last ten years also thanks to London-based galleries and studios with strong fashion connections, the contemporary fashion film is not necessarily something that influences fashion for years to come, in fact most of the times it lives only for the moment. We have seen fashion films developed by young and hip directors to open specific shows or to present new collections by young designers (often when there was not enough money to put up an entire show - and this is absolutely understandable) or to build anticipation about a fashion event/collection.

There is even a new initiative launched by the British Fashion Council and entitled Fash/On Film that is currently on at London Fashion Week and that revolves around the idea of supporting and developing relationships between fashion designers and film makers. Yet what sounds like a great idea, actually hides many pitfalls.

Sadly, shooting a fashion film nowadays doesn’t necessarily mean to create a proper story, with a screenwriter and an entire team (as small as it may be) of movie specialists.

Most of the times, a "fashion film" indicates a visually enticing video of a model posing while wearing the new creations of a particular designer.

While this could be a great idea also on a promotional level (you can virtually reach out to new buyers or new fashion fans by showing the video on the Internet, etc…), this medium usually doesn't turn into the means to an end (i.e. promoting/presenting a collection through a proper film), but into an end in itself (just watching some clothes through mesmerising masturbatory close ups that leave you cold, but that are superficially meant to show the supposed high quality and craftsmanship of the clothes - think fashion porn and you get the idea...), since, after all, a fashion film is not an advert with commercial power, so, it doesn’t even help selling clothes.

Besides, as a passive watcher, you find yourself in a wonderfully visual and enchanted world and, two minutes after, you come down again having more or less forgotten everything you’ve just seen (ask somebody if they remember one of these “fashion films” and they’ll probably say no; ask them if they remember a specific frame of a film with costumes by Milena Canonero and they will most certainly say yes, this, I guess, is the main difference between a real fashion film and a short but visually enticing fashion video).

The other thing I don't particularly like about a strictly fashion film programme during a fashion week is the fact that it pigeonholes films, attracting only a certain audience, while a movie should attract a wider audience, especially people who claim they don't like fashion (I can assure you that, during some presentations I did of films with some fashion connections but not about fashion, these people were the best members of my audience).

In a way, rather than an initiative for short fashion films (or rather videos, because most of the times these are "fashion videos"...), I would like to see a programme of fashion documentaries that showed different aspects of fashion, from the making of a collection to the more exploitative sides of this industry, accompanied by a grant to allow a young director to shoot a real film with some fashion connections and another grant for somebody who wanted to study as a costume designer but can't afford it. These would be genuine fashion and film connections. 

In conclusion, if you’re a fashion designer and you desperately want to jump on the fashion film bandwagon, before doing it, sit down and wonder if the film is actually a means to an end ( = promoting and selling a collection), if it’s a more creative product that you want to circulate together with your collection to highlight the inspiration(s) behind it, or if the film is an end in itself, because, if this is the case, you and your director will be living in a visually enchanting and enticing world, but, commercially, you may be on the wrong track.  

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The Gene Kelly Palette

Fashion weeks are a bit like a movable feast nowadays, a sort of glittery and glamorous yet dark circus on a perpetually endless tour, so, before continuing with further posts about collections from New York or London Fashion Week, I’m going to have a break and leave you to ponder with this image of Gene Kelly in Invitation to the Dance.

Kelly stars in different roles in this movie, but this image is from the “Circus” segment of the film with Kelly as Pierrot. The costumes in this segment, in a wonderful orgy of colours (check out the masks on the legs), are by Elizabeth Haffenden and, somehow, they make me think of Clown Alley in Angela Carter's Nights at the Circus.

It is indeed almost impossible while watching this image not to remember the words of Buffo the clown in Carter's novel (applicable also to some fashionista...): "...we take to clowning when all else fails. Under these impenetrable disguises of wet white, you might find, were you to look, the features of those who were once proud to be visible (...) It is given to few to shape themselves, as I have done, as we have done (...) But once the choice is made, I am condemned to be 'Buffo' in perpetuity (...) Yet am I this Buffo whom I have created? Or did I, when I made up my face to look like Buffo's create, ex nihilo, another self who is not me? And what am I without my Buffo's face? Why, nobody at all. Take away my make-up and underneath is merely not-Buffo. An absence. A vacancy."

Invitation to the Dance won in 1956 the Golden Berlin Bear and the Berlinale closes today (find some tips about a famous film on tonight at the Berlinale with wider connections with fashion in this post; in the meantime, well done to the Taviani Brothers for winning the 2012 Golden Bear for Best film with Cesare deve morire), so this seems to be the perfect image for today.

I also have another more personal reason for choosing this picture: I’m Italian and on Tuesday my home country will be celebrating Carnival, a feast about masquerading, dressing up and essentially overturning all ordinary rules. Hope you enjoy this image as much as I do.

 

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May Kagemusha (and Ferré and Armani) Be With You: Proenza Schouler A/W 2012-13

You often wonder how inspiration strikes fashion designers: do they travel to far away places? Do they visit hundreds of museums and exhibitions to admire the work of obscure artists? Do they spend an incredible amount of time in secret archives? Maybe.

Or maybe all fashion designers actually organise secret meetings where they sit around a table, collectively think about ideas and then divide among themselves colour charts, moods, themes and film references. This would explain why at times you get collections by very different designers referencing the same exotic country, the same style/movie icon or the same historical period of time.

If this is the case maybe, at one of these secret meetings, somebody must have brought a photocopy of the catalogue for the 1982 "Intimate Architecture: Contemporary Clothing Design" exhibition, since some of the themes tackled by the designs included in that event, resurfaced here and there in current collections.

Tisci may have mentioned Aelita as a somewhat distance reference for his Givenchy S/S 2012 Haute Couture collection, but then you have all the Asia-inspired moods that came out during New York Fashion Week, some of them displaying not just the usual qipao derivations, but a strong fascination with samurai armours, one of the inspirations behind some of the Italian designs in that early fashion and architecture event.

"Intimate Architecture” actually included quite a few designs by Gianfranco Ferré and Armani, all inspired by samurai attire. The Ferré section featured garments (from a 1982 collection) characterised by wide and stiff rectangular collars designed to dramatically frame the face of the wearer; corseted dresses with stiffened torso pieces and obi-sashed tapered coats that moved from the kimono but had a somewhat sleeker shape and silhouette and were inspired by the costumes in the battle scenes of Akira Kurosawa's Kagemusha.

Two years earlier, in 1980, Armani moved from samurai dress, using metallic satins, textured coils that mimed the protective ribs of the Japanese warriors' chestplates and a samurai-inspired .bustier made of flattened panels that recalled the plates of medieval armours. 

Some elements from these collections – in particular Ferré's stiff collars and panels and Armani's ribbed samurai leather pieces with obi sashes – reappeared in Proenza Schouler's Autumn/Winter 2012-13 collection.

Jack McCollough and Lazaro Hernandez claimed they were inspired by a Nepalese vacation but, somehow, their crisp poplin jacquard and stiffened pique shirts with neat collars and angular folds, bulky jackets with flat panels and oversized loose pants, indirectly referenced those early fabric armours by Ferré.

The dresses with interwoven strips of leather that created grids and ribbed samurai armours in black and orange and black and navy, seemed instead direct derivations of Armani's A/W 1980-81 collection inspired by Akira Kurosawa's Kagemusha and by the Italian designer's idea of protection.

More quilted styles followed, at times decorated with embellishments of birds and Oriental symbols borrowed from traditional costumes, but reinvented in a Kagemusha-meets-The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo sort of way.

Interestingly enough, Proenza Schouler also adopted the Kagemusha palette, that is orange/red, black and blue, with occasional splashes of gold.

Now, the East, Oriental motifs, samurai armours and inspirations borrowed from Kagemusha often appeared in fashion, so, while this may not be a case of blatant plagiarism, it still proves that we are not in front of pure moments of genius as most of the members of the press may want you to think. After all, these are no new shapes/colours and, if these designs are tangible proof of high craftsmanship, well, so were the Armani and Ferré designs referenced in this post.

In conclusion, it wouldn't hurt to start distinguishing what's truly original from an updated and modern remake, and stop describing some of the contemporary collections (especially those by young American designers promoted and supported by Anna Wintour & Co...) with grand words, pondering a bit more about them and checking how the past is not only referenced, but it's too often blatantly copied in the present.

It would be even better to maybe also start wondering why contemporary designers are so ready to protect their own creations and defend copyright laws when they themselves actually move from - and very often copy - previous designs.

PS Suggestions to fashion designers: I would like to remind you that Ronaldus Shamask and Stephen Manniello haven't been copied for quite a long time, so if you can quickly jump on their bandwagon now, you will probably be among the first ones to copy - pardon, I meant "pay homage to" - them in the next season...

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A Brief History of the Pilgrim Fathers' Shoes from Marc Jacobs to Parabiago (via Manolo Blahnik)

As a follow-up to yesterday’s post I’m focusing today on Marc Jacobs shoes for the Autumn/Winter 2012-13 season.

To do it I’m going to summon up the dark and very knowledgeable forces of my friends Milo Bandini and Irma Vivaldi from the (bilingual - Italian/English) Paddock blog (remember them?).

They are indeed real footwear experts and, for the occasion, they are very kindly letting me pilfer some images and links from their mighty posts on Italian shoes and seminal Italian manufacturers.

So we know that Marc Jacobs' shoes for the next season are somehow inspired by pilgrims and puritans, we are therefore assuming that, before he designed them, he locked himself in a museum or a library and started looking at paintings/books with images such as Charles Lucey's "Landing of the Pilgrim Fathers".

Yet you don’t even need to go as far back as that to spot pilgrims' shoes in fashion, in fact you could just go back to 2006 with this "Tetvan" boot by Manolo Blahnik, inspired by the Pilgrim Fathers, a connection suggested to me by my Paddock friends, who also kindly sent me the image (from the book Scarpe! edited by Ilaria Danieli and Rosa Chiesa, Rizzoli 2010).

Wait, wait, did we say Manolo Blahnik? Yes, we did. But Blahnik actually has a strong connection with Italy and in particular with Vigevano where the company that produces the designer's creations is based, so let’s move to Italy to discover further pieces of our pilgrims' puzzle.  

In yesterday’s post I mentioned how the high-tongued buckled shoes or similar versions of these shoes were actually fashionable in Italy in the '70s.

Some of the earliest models actually arrived on the Italian market in 1968. Check out these shoes by Parabiago-based Rancir marked as the next big thing, "the fabulous shoes worn by Rome's young people".

The following year, 1969, was another great year for buckled and high-tongued shoes: this is an example by another Parabiago-based company, Colette (you can discover its history here).

In this case the shoes look rather elegant (maybe more Vivier in Belle de Jour than Pilgrim Fathers, even though in this case they have an oval buckle), but you can check out further designs by Colette in this post.

Buckled and high-tongued shoes continued to be popular at the end of the '60s as this post illustrates with further examples by Zorzi.   
 

As the '70s approached, it was more buckle galore, with Otello Bertocco (one of the most original Italian designers between the '60s and the '70s) winning a prestigious award in 1971 in Turin with the "Elyse" model.

A year earlier the Calzaturificio di Varese (check out the original post regarding it here) came up with an ostrich tasselled moccasin with no buckle, but with a similar heel to Jacobs',  that I'm juxtaposing here to a buckled and checkered shoe by Molaschi (1970) that could be seen as the more elegant evolution of the original "Pilgrim Fathers' shoes".

My friends at Paddock - who have been on the lookout for me for further Marc Jacobs-like shoes in their own archives - also sourced for me the following designs by Charles Jourdan for Dior (source: the Musée International de la Chaussure).

The shoes come from the 1969-70 (left) and the 1970 collections (right) and they betray a sort of royal court derivation (think Louis XV). For their colours and rhinestone embellishments, they are probably the most similar to Marc Jacobs’s Autumn/Winter 2012-13 shoes. 

So fancy the Marc Jacobs shoes for the next season, but worried about the effects they may have on your bank account? Fear not: with a little bit of luck, you'll be able to find your beloved Pilgrim Fathers' shoes in a well-stocked vintage market, though, now that I think about it, some lucky Italian/French fashionistas probably still have them hidden away in a forgotten corner of their houses, attics or garages.

All archival images courtesy of the Paddock team.

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Confusion, Excesses and Death: Moments of Designer Genius or Symptoms of American Decline?

I rarely bother to look at images of stars and celebrities on the Red Carpet as I find them an annoyingly useless spectacle involving marketing, fame, devilish PR agents and other assorted evil forces.

A good example was the Red Carpet at the latest Grammy Awards, though this time it wasn't only annoying, it was also disturbingly grotesque.

I’m all in favour of religious satire especially if it's cleverly done and spot on, but a supposedly red nun’s habit by Versace that looked like a Carnival costume for Red Riding Hood donned by Nicki Minaj, accompanied for the occasion by a Pope look-alike, was not inappropriately silly, it was just ridiculous.

It remains a mystery also why Sasha Gradiva was wearing a rather horrid robotic Terminator arm to accessorise an otherwise unoffensively bland pink tulle dress (mind you, maybe it was right because the dress was unoffensively bland...).

In their defense one could point out that this is the attention seeking realm of showbiz, so it's all perfectly normal, yet there were some links between this grotesque and unnecessary display of madness and other events of a more fashionable nature during New York Fashion Week, such as Marc Jacobs and Thom Browne's catwalk shows. 

Jacobs' collection was apparently spawned by manifold inspirations comprising puritans and pilgrims, Charles Dickens, Kurt Cobain, Dr Seuss' Cat in the Hat, and Anna Piaggi (anything else?).

Models walked around a spooky unfinished paper-like castle of arches and caves (sort of Alice in Wonderland in a Tim Burton key) by artist Rachel Feinstein, wearing dresses in brocade tweeds and leather over cropped pants, matched with round capes and bell-shaped coats.

All the looks - in a wide range of fabrics that displayed not knowledge but a penchant for pastiche and collage - were completed by oversized furry "Cat in the Hat Vs Mad Hatter on acid" headdresses in multi-coloured shades designed by Stephen Jones and accessorised with crystal encrusted buckled high-tongued shoes (a more tamed version of these shoes available for both men and women was the cause of much hilarity in the '70s in Italy...having witnessed it, I can assure you they were the best cure against depression at the time...).

Shimmering fabrics, glittery sequins and splashes of Lurex were employed in the knits and the socks; lamé dresses and blouses and iridescent inserts were juxtaposed to darker tones, but what struck the attention were the rather unflattering curving volumes that turned the thin bodies of the models into tilting dolls and roly-poly toys, a concept somehow strengthened by the layered structure of the various looks.   

But, while Jacobs opted for overcharging looks and models in his excesses, at Thom Browne's excess was filtered through death.

In the history of fashion, death has been spotted so many times during catwalk shows that this connection doesn't scare or amazes anybody anymore.

Yet Browne, master of the bizarre and the surreal (and, for many classically trained tailors, destroyer of any sensible human proportion...) couldn't somehow resist the temptation of playing with death and resurrection in fashion.

The designer had ten models dressed in gray suits and with their heads, hands and feet covered in organza shrouds lying down in pinstripe-lined coffins arranged in a row on the floor of the New York Public Library.

Apparently, they represented ten girls who had died for fashion but were somehow revived twice a year by a fashion dream, a vision of fantasy and wonder.

The starting point and the story may have been different from Jacobs', but the emphasis was on the same points: oversized volumes, layered looks (skirts were layered one upon the other to show how "cleverly" the different fabrics were used, but the final effect was that of impairing movement), exaggerations, protrusion and extrusion, narrow waists and expanded shoulders, breasts, elbows and hips and a will to play at creating Haute Couture without having the skills to do so.

The main difference was that, while Jacobs threw into his cauldron all his styling talent, Browne pilfered Gaultier (cage skirts, conical bras), Rei Kawakubo (body morphing and padded areas) and Yohji Yamamoto (dinosaur suits/dresses from the S/S 2006 collection).

The final effect was the same, though, as both successfully managed to confuse critics and buyers and to be hailed as fashion geniuses. 

Theatrical? Undoubtedly.

Entertaining? Asbolutely.

Weird? Of course.

Original and desirable? No (maybe the gray flannel foxes imitating real fox stoles were original, but they already appeared in other fashion collections/incarnations). 

The more naive fashion commentators may think these displays of nonsensical fun are magnificent moments created by clever fashion designers writing with magical thread a dark and dreamy modern fairytale (fashion designers who never took part in any kind of death vigil and spent time with actual corpses, because if you did so, you also knew there is nothing glamorous and fun about it).

As a critic you may instead argue that the darkest and more disturbing aspects of Jacobs and Browne's shows could be seen as the final embodiment of that scary alternative dimension that Neil Gaiman's Coraline found on the other side of the wall.

These modern spectacles of confusing obsessions that get naively praised by most "critics" may be hiding behind them something else and there may be other issues that somehow link together unique displays of excesses such as the Grammy Awards, Marc Jacobs and Thom Browne's shows. 

In Europe, every new day that passes marks another downgrade by a rating agency, and while it's undeniable that "Greece + bankruptcy" and "Italy + recession" have become inseparable concepts, the US economy hasn’t been going that well in the last few years or even in the last decades.

The '70s were marked by a slow economic growth and by inequitably distributed wealth.

Things were made worse by the financial crisis of the 2000s with unexpected loss of jobs, wage cuts and unemployment rates rising.

Yet these issues aren't reflected in a coherent way by fashion as the industry seems to prefer to take refuge in odd and disturbing visions of beauty, in morphed human bodies, fashion zombies and creatures with strange and upsetting shapes, silhouettes and protuberances.

In a way, these orgies of incoherent inspirations, bad taste, assorted fabrics and garments thrown together, are symptoms of a deeper malaise, of a financial, social and psychological confusion, disturbance, decadence and decline. 

It's true that fashion and excess go hand in hand, but it's also true that New York Fashion Week and its focus on quantity rather than quality and on useless excesses mirrors not the health of the country, but its decline (no matter how many times Anna Wintour & Co will desperately deny this - and please don't try to make us believe that these clothes are actually made by hand in the "garment district" respecting labour rules and human rights...).

There may be no immediate solutions for the persisting global crisis, but there is a solution to excess and that's shifting the focus from the spectacle (and the quantity...) to the quality (trying also to criticise things rather than blatantly praise them...) and to the actual manufacturing industry, but this won't happen if we don't stop feasting upon this overdressed bulimic zombie called fashion spectacle that doesn't even seem to be able to enjoy sublime consolation in death because it keeps on being resurrected by incredibly zealous and incredibly desperate fashion designers.

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The Joys of a (Geometrically) Functional Wardrobe for Urban Nomads: Yeohlee Teng A/W 11-12

Apart from being totally unnecessary, including in one single collection too many looks can be tricky and easily drive both the designer who created it and its reviewers simply crazy.  

It is ofen the case that behind the longer and at times more extravagant shows there are evil market forces together with the strong desire to create a spectacle and the secret and perverse hope the reviewers will get so distracted by the action that they won’t actually pay too much attention to the designs and eventually realise how bad they are.

After all - somebody may argue - there is safety in numbers, so the more looks on the runway, the better.  

Praise should be given instead to those designers who, in a sea of confusion and chaos, keep things short and coincise, realising that ordinary people may not have the money to buy an entire collection and may not even have the space where to store it.

Even more praise should be given to those designers who try to empower women using a little bit of clever minimalism rather than coming up with collections full of dresses unwearable by most real women above a certain age. Yeohlee Teng is definitely among such designers.

Still moving from one of her main principles - the one that claims that the geometry of clothes can form shapes capable of lending a wearer power (and how can you disagree with this statement? Try a perfectly cut garment and see how you feel…) -Teng launched her new collection during New York Fashion Week via an informal presentation that featured only seven looks.

Yet this somewhat reduced presentation included more relaxed designs such as a loose black jersey dress (think along the lines of Teng's "one size fits all" principle and you get the idea…), but also an elegant fitted silk faille dress in a dark purple shade that embodied two of the designer's obsessions, geometrical precision and passion for textiles.

Indeed creating perfect patterns means to respect the material you're working with since you avoid superfluous cuts and seams. 

Since the early '80s Teng designed her garments from one single piece of cloth, calculating the proportions by eye and hand on the table and throughout the years she perfected her technique.

The designer often claimed she creates for a urban nomad in mind, so she favours versatile and multi-functional clothes, adjectives that could perfectly be used to describe garments such as gabardine skirt-shorts or a mohair wool cape in ombré gradations of green.

You could argue that such clothes privilege the wearer’s comfort and mobility over spectacularity.

But maybe we (reviewers, buyers, consumers...) should try to remember more often that the spectacularity and the sensuality come from the wearer and not from the garment.

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Grace, Poise and Punk Twists: VPL A/W 2011-12

Looking for interesting and cleverly carried out inspirations in today’s fashion collections can be rather difficult; finding them in that affair of impressively bulimic proportions that has become New York Fashion Week is usualy tricky and often almost impossible.

Yet, every now and then, you see sparks of hope and good intuitions appearing here and there, this was the case for example with Victoria Bartlett’s VPL collection.

The designer moved from the world of dance, but – gratefully – not strictly from ballet.

Fashion used and abused ballet for ages, with collections that often included tutu-like dresses, ballet slippers and pale pink sweater wraps, directly borrowed from the wardrobe of a ballerina.

Bartlett went another way instead, moving from the punkish side of dance and in particular from Michael Clark’s "Modern Masterpiece", retitled in later years "Mmm". 

A very physical piece that moved from Stravinsky's controversial The Rite of Spring and also included accompaniment from the Sex Pistols and Public Image, Mmm was first staged in 1992 in a depot behind London's King's Cross station with a cast that comprised Clark himself, Julie Hood, Matthew Hawkins, Joanne Barrett and Bessie Clark and with costumes by Leigh Bowery.

 

The show was divided in different parts and at times had a sort of pastiche-like structure, two aspects that Bartlett somehow managed to include in her collection.

Mainly based on neutrals, such as nude, white, gray and black with some splashes of ochre here and there, the collection started with garments characterised by draped motifs and in shiny fabrics contrasting with matte ones that, wrapping and twisting around the body, created movement while successfully calling to mind the episodic nature of the show, the different choreographies and clashes of music.   

The knits that closed the show - including boleros, tops, shorts and body pieces - didn’t inject into the collection any grotesque elements à la Bowery, but seemed to be with their armour-like elements, skirts that turned not into tutus but into rigid and tortuous architectural structures, oversized ribbed or braided shoulder areas and intricate motifs that in some places were reduced to a single thread, a reference to Clark’s trademark distrust of conventional beauty and to his distorted and absurd aesthetic.      

While these destructured knitted pieces may have been references to Joanne Barrett’s intricate movements as she danced on Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring in Clark's "Mmm", they were more probably an indirect tribute to Bodymap's innovative designs with holes in unexpected places or with fabric revealing specific areas of the body (remember the dancers in Clark's 1986 "No Fire Escape in Hell" in their buttock-baring unitard?).  

I’m going to leave you with two clips for further inspirations.

The first one relates to another Michael Clark choreography this time on The Fall's 'Ludd Gang' and fits in with the polka dot trend that arrived in London after Yayoi Kusama’s exhibition opened at the Tate Modern.

The second one is a nostalgic memento of when Italian TV was extremely intelligent (so intelligent in fact they had to destroy it...) and it's a clip of Michael Clark himself dancing on T-Rex’s "Cosmic Dancer" on Italian State TV channel RaiUno (the woman you see for a fraction of a second at the beginning of the clip is Italian dance critic Vittoria Ottolenghi, who used to present a very popular daily - note daily! - dance programme in the '80s).

  

 

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An Eye For Fashion: Celebrating Norman Parkinson

I'm republising today a feature I did for Zoot Magazine about an exhibition of rare and unseen prints by British fashion photographer Norman Parkinson at Bristol's M Shed that takes visitors on a discovery trip through a glamourous decade that marked women's emancipation.

Jill Kennington and Melanie Hampshire are chatting to bobbies on the beat and jumping on London buses wearing Mary Quant and Jean Muir’s designs; stunningly beautiful Carmen Dell'Orefice is elegantly posing in front of a pool in the Bahamas while French model Nicole de la Marge with dreamily closed eyes is surrounded by The Rolling Stones. These are just a few shots part of the exhibition “An Eye for Fashion” featuring 60 iconic images - selected from the Angela Williams Archive - by British photographer Norman Parkinson, that recently opened at Bristol's M Shed.

Unanimously considered as a pioneer in fashion photography, Parkinson brought his models onto the street, making them pose on unusual backdrops, from working-class districts to the docks. Parkinson worked as a portrait and fashion photographer for Vogue, then moved to Queen as Associate Contributing Editor and, from 1964 until he died in 1990, worked as a freelance photographer.

The images included in the exhibition - carefully selected by Williams, a photographer herself who worked as Parkinson's assistant in the early '60s - follow ten years of British fashion, from 1954 to 1964. Among the most interesting pictures there are previously unseen and unused covers for Life and photo shoots for Vogue and Queen featuring famous models such as Melanie Hampshire, Celia Hammond and Tania Mallet or actresses like Jean Shrimpton in a striking James Wedge polkadot hat. Yet there is more than just a story of style and fashion behind the images showcased here together with a selection of costumes and objects from the same period of time: indeed these photographs indirectly show how women's roles in society radically changed in the decade that marked the transition to the ‘60s, explains Catherine Littlejohns, Senior Collections Officer at Bristol's M Shed.

How was working with Angela Williams?
Catherine Littlejohns: Working with Angela was a brilliant experience. She knew the images and Parkinson’s career inside out because, as his assistant, it was her life too. What made it special was that Angela always had extra anecdotes about the pictures and the people in them, so Parkinson wasn’t just the subject of an exhibition: I feel that, now, I have a greater sense of him not only as a photographer, but as a person.

As a curator, what fascinates you about Parkison’s life and work?
Catherine Littlejohns: As a social historian there are so many things in Parkinson’s images that I love. There’s a really strong sense of time and place, particularly in the images from the early '60s which were so different to what had gone on before. Then there’s the development of the fashion magazines and how women were portrayed, not forgetting the clothes too, of course! But it’s also Parkinson himself. He was a really flamboyant character and I think this comes through in his images. He seems to have been able to create a relation with his models and encourage them to work with him to push boundaries and express themselves. As a result, many of his pictures have an energy and movement about them that was incredibly innovative. There is also very often a sense of youth and fun in his pictures that still shines through today.  

What is the cultural significance of these images and what do they tell us about those years and about women’s image and role in society?
Catherine Littlejohns: That’s quite a big question. The period we focus on in the exhibition, 1954 – 64, was an incredibly important period socially and for fashion in general. During wartime women performed all sorts of new roles, from working in factories to flying planes. Post-War, although many of these women returned to ‘more suitable’ pre-War roles, things had already changed. Simmering away beneath the surface, the advances made by one generation of women were taken up by their daughters (and sons) as soon as social conditions, such as high employment, allowed. Comparing the photographs in the early part of the exhibition with those in the later part shows this transition through fashion. In fashion terms, the reality was that at the beginning of the '50s the country was still gripped by post-War austerity measures. Although the photographs don’t necessarily show this, what they portray is still fashion aimed at women in their twenties and thirties, as it had been before the war. There was no such thing as teen fashion and most young people, once out of children’s clothes, dressed as their parents did. By the early '60s that had all changed and fashion was young, exciting and experimental. Much of the period we look at in the exhibition is before the ‘Swinging Sixties’ kicked in, but so much of what happened then had its beginnings in this earlier time.
 
Which famous models and garments by Haute Couture houses and High Street retailers appear in these images?
Catherine Littlejohns: Famous models include Jean Shrimpton, Melanie Hampshire, and Nina von Schlebrugge (Uma Thurman’s mother). Garments in the pictures include everything from Worth to Wallis. There are significant high street options from the period such as Susan Small, featured in several images, but probably most significant were the emerging designers like Mary Quant, who were very quickly going to change the whole face of fashion.

In your opinion, which is the most iconic Norman Parkinson picture included in the exhibition and which is your fave one?  
Catherine Littlejohns: That’s really difficult as there are so many! Probably the most famous is the Cadbury’s Plain Girl advert, featuring Jean Shrimpton wearing a spotty James Wedge hat. However, there are several images featuring group shots of models wearing clothes by designers of the Incorporated Society of London Fashion Designers. The images are beautiful as group shots but also highly significant because of their promotion of British Couture designers. The later part of the exhibition also includes several images from the ‘Brash New Breed of British Designers’ series, completed for Life magazine in 1963. The models, including Jill Kennington and Melanie Hampshire, are out and about in London, chatting to bobbies on the beat and jumping on London buses, wearing designs by Mary Quant, Gerald McCann and Jean Muir. There’s a real sense of time and place in these images, and of course time has increased the significance of certain designers. Choosing my favourite is probably even harder and it keeps changing. This week though, it’s a 1960 image of model Sue Kinnear wearing a Jean Muir cocktail dress. It’s a very quiet image, quite different to the energetic images Parkinson is better known for. To me it’s more about the photographer’s desire to reveal something about his subject, and his quest to show women and clothing as beautiful as they can be.  It’s not an image that shouts, but, when you notice it, it’s very hard to look away.
 
Why would the images included in this exhibition still be important to today’s fashion, designers and photography fans and what has been the visitors feedback so far? 
Catherine Littlejohns: The feedback has been overwhelmingly positive so far and people really appreciate the different levels in the show – the photographs, the social history and the costume. The photographs are stunning and I think the energy and interest in the composition keeps them fresh. In fashion terms, the elegance and glamour of the clothing in the pictures will never be outdated and, of course, everything in fashion comes back around!
 
Can you tell us more about the costumes also included in the exhibition, are they all selected from the museum collection?
Catherine Littlejohns: The costumes show how fashion magazines like Vogue and Queen influenced what could be bought on the high street, and therefore what most people wore. Key style features can be traced through the Parkinson photographs to the shop-bought and homemade items on display. Many Bristolians have contributed with their shopping memories of the '50s and '60s and with tales of net petticoats blowing up over their heads, or of stuffing long pointed tie shoes with cotton wool, so the realities of wearing the fashions have also been included.

An Eye For Fashion - Norman Parkinson Photographs, British Designers 1954-1964, M Shed, Bristol, UK, until 15th April 2012.

Image credits:

Jean Shrimpton 'Plain Girl' 1963, wearing James Wedge © Norman Parkinson Limited/Courtesy Norman Parkinson Archive www.normanparkinson.com
 
Queen Magazine 1960 © Norman Parkinson Limited/Courtesy Norman Parkinson Archive www.normanparkinson.com   
 
Norman Parkinson and Carmen Dell'Orefice, "In The Bahamas", July 1959, Angela Williams Archive. 

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Anta Odeli Uta: Fashion Designer Dementia, Givenchy S/S 12 Haute Couture and The Aelita Connection

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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Space Is The Place: From the Sri Sathya Sai Space Theatre to Alice Palmer

Let's continue today the thread that I started with yesterday's post and that moved from futuristic structures. While putting some order into a stack of postcard I had lying around, I found this one portraying the Sri Sathya Sai Space Theatre, a planetarium part of the Sri Sathya Sai Institute of Higher Learning, in Puttaparthi, India. The latter is actually the first university in the country to employ a planetarium for educational purposes.

Though the Sri Sathya Sai Space Theatre is mainly employed by the university to help students understanding better concepts relating to the fields of astronomy, mathematics or physics, the planetarium is also open to the public, and offers free regular shows to introduce people to the marvels of astronomy.

In the last few weeks I tried to focus on the new yarn trends for the S/S 13 season, so knitwear has been a lot on my mind and, while looking at the Sri Sathya Sai Institute, Alice Palmer's designs came to my mind.

A graduate of Glasgow School of Art with a Master from London's Royal College of Art, Palmer launched her first collection (S/S 2009) during New York Fashion Week, winning various awards (she was also one of the three finalists of the 2010 Fashion Fringe competition).

In her experimental knitwear she often employs optical patterns that seem to form bold architectural shapes around the body. Her S/S 12 collection, entitled “Interstellar” and inspired by glam rock and David Bowie's Ziggy Stardust, includes dresses that look as if they were cleverly engineered around the body and feature large and small scale chevrons and decorative stripings mirroring each other, forming modern graphic motifs and geometrical effects around the neckline or the hemline.

Palmer's silhouettes with those three-dimensional triangles that seem to erupt from the body, call to mind the geodesic dome structures designed by Richard Buckminster Fuller and the dome of the Sri Sathya Sai Space Theatre. Some of the colours and motifs that characterise the latter also seem to be replicated in Alice Palmer's Op Art assemblages of stripes in different sizes and in bright, almost artificial shades.

Though in today's post Palmer seems to be more related to the space rather than to our planet, there is something that makes her strongly connected with the Earth: the designer uses for her main line sustainable production methods that require no fabric waste. Looking forward to seeing where Palmer will take her knitwear techniques during the next season.

In the meantime, as a further inspiration, I'm leaving you with something very "interstellar" for the weekend, Sun Ra's cult film Space Is The Place, directed by John Coney.  

Watch Sun Ra - Space Is the Place - 1974.avi in Entertainment  |  View More Free Videos Online at Veoh.com  

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