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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