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

Useful Fashion Archive Projects: Digitalising André Fashion Studios and Dal Co’

Mention the word “archive” and many fashion students and younger fashionistas instantly picture in their minds dreadful images of dusty, boring and extremely silent dark places. Yet most archives (even the smallest and remotest ones…) are actually tremendously inspiring and definitely not dusty at all, especially when they are based on digital platforms.

As some of you may have noticed or read on the Internet, thanks to a partnership between the Picture Collection of The New York Public Library and the Department of Special Collections and FIT (Fashion Institute of Technology) Archives, the drawings and sketches produced by the New York firm André Fashion Studios in the 1930s and early 1940s are now finally available online. 

The over 5,000 illustrations included in this unique archive, chronicling the first decade of André’s production, were originally divided between the two institutions that decided to join forces and produce an open-source archive and image portal. 

Pearl Levy Alexander and Leonard Schwartzbach were partners in André, a firm mainly specialised in selling fashion drawings of children’s coats, and ladies coats and suits to manufacturers based in the US and Canada. Pearl create the designs, while Leonard was the salesman and the company produced about 20 sketches a week from 1930 to the early 1970s.

From now on hand-coloured illustrations of costumes, suits, coats and accessories including scarves and gloves – previously accessible only to researchers – will be available to Internet users based all over the world (costume designer rejoyce – imagine how easier it will be to carry out researches for a film set in the '30s-‘40s with this archive available for free!).

The archive also includes André's sketches of original designs by Chanel, Balenciaga, Schiaparelli (the third image in this post shows for example a 1939 Schiaparelli coat with guitar-shaped buttons down front) Lelong, Patou and many others. Users can click on an image, enlarge it to easily analyse it, download it and even share it on social networks.

While many professionals, but also students or fashion fans who can still make their own clothes will find this digital archive particularly useful for obvious reasons (there are some lovely designs, including coats with multiple pockets and cinched waists that look much more desirable than some of the designs seen at the recent fashion shows for the next Autumn/Winter season), the aim of this project is to document the role of New York’s fashion industry in the history of 20th-century fashion.

Besides, the additional goal is actually to encourage fashion-related digital collaborations between different cultural heritage institutions in New York, which I find rather honourable.

During the last few years we have actually rediscovered the importance of fashion archives: while the American and the Italian editions of Vogue have been creating their own digital archives (though, unfortunately, you have to pay to access them…), museums and cultural institutions all over the world have been working on digitalising their collections to make them available to all Internet users.

The Metropolitan Museum Costume Institute put online a while back images (check them all out from the collections page) of Dal Co’ shoes (please refer to previous posts on this site to have further information about the historical Italian brand). 

Even in Italy it’s rare to find books featuring images of Dal Co’ shoes (in fact this brand has been practically neglected for some reason by most fashion writers, even though it’s still alive and, excuse the pun, "kicking"), famous for their innovative designs and construction (including a glove-like "floating upper" which wraps under foot and is stitched to the sled-like sole at the center of the foot), so being able to actually see some pictures showing these pretty and rare pumps from the ‘50s is extremely important on a fashion, style and also a cultural level.

The pictures include pumps in summery colours such as white and yellow from 1955 decorated with little Smarties-like beads; slender stiletto heels in which the leather or synthetic heel was replaced with the internal steel shank (1956); pumps with an appealing colour contrast on the sole and toe and a slightly curved up toe (1956) reminiscent of Dal Co's "paparazzo" shoe and a 1958 pink/fuchsia pump in a novel leather with a printed pattern inspired by Marc Chagall’s paintings.

Some of the Dal Co’s shoes now available online come from the Osgood Collection at the Brooklyn Museum Costume Collection at the Met.

The collection - belonging to Charline Osgood, Director of the Kid Leather Guild, a trade organisation of American kid leather manufacturers - comprises 179 objects, mainly fashionable Italian-made women's shoes dating from the years 1954 to 1958.   

Osgood actually earmarked a pair of 1958 thongs by Dal Cò as one of the most exciting and radical shoes in her collection: the sandals in question feature a rather unique T-strap inspired by Japanese tabi and perfectly following the line of the first metatarsal bone.

Alberto Dal Co' seemed to love taking inspiration from exotic countries and then mixing them with a touch of surrealism.

In 1958 he came up with a pair of shoes (characterised by a very interesting single-seam construction) in which the toe shape derived from traditional Indo-Pakistani footwear, but added to it a court jester bell on its point and a sort of Dadaist heel.

This Dal Co' design from 1958 also appear in the volume 100 Shoes, curated by Harold Koda and introduced by Sarah Jessica Parker.

Hopefully, if you started reading this post thinking archives are boring places, you have by now changed your mind, but, if you haven't, try visiting some of the best digital archives put together by the most famous costume institutes or museums around the world.

You can bet that, after browsing them for a while, you will feel a bit like a time traveller taking an exciting trip through history, fashion, style and trends that will allow you to get to know the past and even get a glimpse of the future.

 
Member of the Boxxet Network of Blogs, Videos and Photos

Member of the Boxxet Network of Blogs, Videos and Photos

Add to Technorati Favorites

Lijit Search

Madama Butterfly's New Wardrobe

Maurizio Galante appeared in some previous posts in connection with interior design.

Yet Galante is also a fashion designer and recently tried his hand at the difficult job of costume designer (this is actually not his first time, as he also worked on Hans Werner Henze's opera based on Yukio Mishima's novella Gogo No Eiko).

The designer recently created the costumes for a new representation of Puccini’s "Madama Butterfly", directed by Giorgio Ferrara, with sets by Gianni Quaranta and featuring orchestra conductor Pinchas Steinberg.

The opera with Daniela Dessì (Madama Butterfly) and Alexey Dolgov (Pinkerton) was recently performed in Rome and will be restaged in September in Palermo.

Ferrara added as a homage to the Kabuki Theatre a flying character (threatening Uncle Bonzo) and elements borrowed from the Greek tragedy (the choir), but the costumes are definitely among the most interesting elements of this new staging of Puccini’s opera.

In some cases, Galante replicated the techniques used for his 2009 Haute Couture collection; in others, he employed hundreds of yards of grey, pink, white and pearl-coloured organza to create a costume imitating a giant, ethereal and ephemeral peony. Unfortunately, there are not pics available of Kate Pinkteron’s costume, but it’s a sort of crossover between a classic suit by Dior and a power suit donned by Rachael out of Blade Runner with some slightly Oriental twists included.

Since I have already paid homage to Maria Callas’ Madama Butterfly in a previous post, I’m gonna leave you with a rather different Butterfly, Malcolm McLaren’s.

  

Member of the Boxxet Network of Blogs, Videos and Photos

Member of the Boxxet Network of Blogs, Videos and Photos

Add to Technorati Favorites

Lijit Search

Remake, Reuse, Reassemble and Recombine: "Sturtevant - Image Over Image"

In our digital age in which we easily appropriate, borrow, copy, cut and paste different materials, from texts to images, often without adding anything new (including comments, completely killing in this way any critical skills we may have...), the work of American artist Sturtevant assumes a different kind of meaning. 

Born in Ohio, Sturtevant (Elaine Sturtevant - though she doesn’t like being called with her full name) moved in the ‘60s to New York where, inspired by issues such as originality, authenticity, authorship and intentionality, she started to manually reproduce paintings and objects created by contemporaries such as Roy Lichtenstein, Claes Oldenburg, Jasper Johns, and Andy Warhol (she even did an entire show using endless copies of Warhol’s "Flowers" series in 1991).

Pop Art mainly dealt with the surface, though, and, wanting to explore also the understructure of art, Sturtevant then moved onto Joseph Beuys and Duchamp and onto further artists such as Robert Gober, Anselm Kiefer, Paul McCarthy, and Félix González-Torres.

She became a master in reproducing specific artists who weren’t very famous when she first started “borrowing” their works.

The artist was so accurate in recreating these works that, when a Jasper Johns' flag painting that formed part of Robert Rauschenberg's “Short Circuit” was stolen in 1965, Rauschenberg got her to paint a reproduction of the original work.

As the years passed, Sturtevant began exploring new possibilities, mixing mass-media images with her own filmed materials.

Sturtevant’s works appeared in several exhibitions (she held her first solo exhibition in 1965 in New York) and, in 2011, she received the Golden Lion for lifetime achievement at the 54th Venice Biennale.

A new exhibition at Stockholm’s Moderna Museet (opening next week) celebrates the American artist.

Curated by Fredrik Liew and entitled “Sturtevant: Image Over Image”, the exhibition features around 30 works, ranging from her repetitions of artists such as Warhol, Duchamp, Johns and Gonzalez-Torres, to her most recent large video installations.

The latter include interrelated films that, mixing borrowed images with her own material, address themes such as displacement and linkage, and four works specifically made for this exhibition such as repetitions of Marcel Duchamp’s "Fresh Widow" in the Moderna Museet collection. 

The title of the exhibition refers to the fact that Sturtevant went from making paintings, so favouring concept over image, to videos, that is favouring “image over image”.

“Sturtevant is a pioneer who, at the age of 82, is at the height of her career," Liew states.

"She was ridiculed when she made her debut in 1965, and no one at the time made the links between her work and a critical discussion of surface, product, copyright and autonomy. Nor did anyone consider what it could mean that a woman artist was repeating the works of male colleagues. But then, her repetitions came before Barthes, Foucault, Deleuze, Millet and Greer had published their seminal works on these subjects.”

The main aim of the works collected in this exhibition is to cast a critical gaze upon society and its superficiality. As Sturtevant states in the Moderna Museet press release for her exhibition: “What is currently compelling is our pervasive cybernetic mode, which plunks copyright into mythology, makes origins a romantic notion, and pushes creativity outside the self. Remake, reuse, reassemble, recombine – that's the way to go.”
   
“Sturtevant: Image Over Image”, Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Sweden, 17th March 2012 - 26th August 2012

Member of the Boxxet Network of Blogs, Videos and Photos 

Member of the Boxxet Network of Blogs, Videos and Photos

Add to Technorati Favorites

Lijit Search

Architecturally Revamping Chinese Opera: WKCDA's Call for the Xiqu Centre

Since yesterday's post focused on architecture, let’s continue the thread today with some quick architectural news with an artistic edge.

Hong Kong’s West Kowloon Cultural District Authority (WKCDA – the West Kowloon Cultural District is currently the largest cultural project in Hong Kong, focused on providing a vital district for the local arts scene) is inviting the design of a Chinese Opera venue, the Xiqu Centre.

Xiqu - or Chinese Opera – is a form of performing arts integrating singing, acting, speech, martial arts, gongs and drums, strings, costume (Chinese Opera costumes and make-up are particularly rich and inspiring...) and body movements 

In January, to celebrate the Year of the Dragon, the WKCDA launched a series of traditional cantonese opera performance at the temporary Bamboo Theatre, on the future site of West Kowloon’s Xiqu Centre.  

The competition covers the design of a 1,100-seat main theatre, a 400-seat small theatre, a Tea House for performances for audiences up to 200 and ancillary training and education facilities.

The Xiqu Centre will become a world-class performing arts venue, hosting Cantonese and other Chinese opera performances, and will be a vital facility for practitioners, students and audiences.  

Interested parties can submit an Expression of Interest to WKCDA to pre-qualify for the design competition.

Shortlisted design teams will later on be invited to submit schematic designs of their concepts.

Deadline for submission is April 10, 2012.

Further details are available on WKCDA’s website or at this link.
 

Member of the Boxxet Network of Blogs, Videos and Photos 

Member of the Boxxet Network of Blogs, Videos and Photos

Add to Technorati Favorites

Lijit Search

The Real (Architectural) McCoy: Upon Rediscovering Esther McCoy, Mother of Modern California Architecture

In Tuesday and Wednesday’s posts, I mentioned two inspiring women, so, since it’s International Women’s Day, let’s continue the thread by looking at another one, architecture critic Esther McCoy.

A new book about her, entitled Piecing Together Los Angeles: An Esther McCoy Reader and published by East of Borneo, has just come out, while the critic was recently the subject of an exhibition at the MAK Center for Art and Architecture at the Schindler House, Los Angeles, entitled "Sympathetic Seeing: Esther McCoy and the Heart of American Modernist Design", co-curated by Kimberli Meyer and Susan Morgan.

McCoy was born in 1904 in Arkansas and, as a young woman, attended a number of colleges, before moving to New York City. Here she became assistant to the novelist Theodore Dreiser.

In 1928 she went to Paris where she began writing fiction. Upon returning to New York she didn’t manage to find work as a writer, even though a shortened version of her unpublished novel Blackberry Winter had won a mention in Scribner’s novella competition. 

In 1932 McCoy moved to Santa Monica to recover from double pneumonia, and, falling in love with California, she never left.

McCoy started reading books about local architecture, visited houses in construction and met local architects.

When the United States entered the Second World War, she enrolled in a job-training program and became an engineering draftsman. Her newly acquired skills allowed her to start drafting work for architect Rudolph M. Schindler, for whom she worked until 1947.

Discouraged to enter the architecture school at the University of Southern California because of her gender and age, McCoy started writing about architectural history and criticism.

Her sharp, lucid and readable prose endowed with a poetic twist meant that she quickly managed to get her writing published by prestigious newspapers, magazines and architectural journals. 

Rejected by the Guggenheim Foundation when she was trying to get the research for "Five California Architects" off the ground in 1953, McCoy finally published it in 1960.

The volume, a guide to Modernist architecture focusing on Bernard Maybeck, Irving Gill, brothers Charles and Henry Greene and R.M. Schindler, proved McCoy was a very clever critic of the much neglected architecture of Southern California, showing that California architects were important innovators.

Further books followed, her second focusing on another local architect, Richard Neutra.

McCoy also promoted the Case Study Houses project originally launched by the magazine Arts & Architecture that focused on getting prominent L.A. architects to create small single-family houses for the middle class.

As the years passed, McCoy kept on writing and working to get Californian architecture known.

She campaigned  to preserve the Dodge House and wrote and produced a short film about it, directed by Robert Snyder; she organised museum exhibitions, became an expert in Mexican and Italian art and architecture and published a sort of follow up to her Five California Architects, The Second Generation, that looks at J.R. Davidson, Harwell Hamilton Harris, Gregory Ain and Raphael Soriano.

McCoy died in 1989 in Santa Monica, unanimously considered as a chronicler of the Southern California avant-garde architecture.

Even though she wasn’t an architect, thanks to her precise descriptions and ctiticism about modern residential design in which she mixed disciplines as different as art history, sociology and economics, McCoy became known as “the mother of Modern California architecture”. 

McCoy remains an almost unknown figure, so it may be worth rediscovering her through the out-of-print essays, articles, and short stories, as well as unpublished lectures, correspondence, and memoirs collected in the book Piecing Together Los Angeles: An Esther McCoy Reader.

N.B. If you’re on the lookout for further inspiring women check out The Daily Beast’s list of 150 Fearless Women. 

Member of the Boxxet Network of Blogs, Videos and Photos 

Member of the Boxxet Network of Blogs, Videos and Photos

Add to Technorati Favorites

Lijit Search

Amelia Earhart, From the Sky to the Runway

In the Autumn/Winter 2012-13 collections there were references to films, movie icons and architecture, but very rarely designers named an inspiring female icon borrowed from other backgrounds rather than just cinema or fashion. Yet there have been (and there are!) inspiring female figure in the worlds of art, literature or science that may provide interesting ideas.   

Design duo Ling Liu and Dawei Sun, who after working at Balenciaga, John Galliano and Yves Saint Laurent are the current creative directors at Cacharel, moved for example from Amelia Earhart, the first female aviator.

Earhart took her first flying lesson on January 3, 1921, and in six months managed to save enough money to buy her first plane. In 1928, she was asked to join pilot Wilmer "Bill" Stultz and co-pilot/mechanic Louis E. "Slim" Gordon in a trip across the Atlantic. This was a landmark flight since three women had died within the year in the same attempt.

When the crew returned to the United States they were greeted with a parade in New York and a reception held by President Calvin Coolidge at the White House (image 2 and 3 in this post chronicle this event).

In 1932, she took off from Harbor Grace, Newfoundland, to Paris, but because of strong winds and icy conditions she landed in Ireland. Earhart beame the first woman to cross solo the Atlantic, and in the years that followed she broke further records, disappearing in 1937 during a flight around the world.

Earhart may not have been a desperately new idea for a fashion collection, even though
Ling Liu and Dawei Sun tried to adapt her style as best as they could to a modern woman's wardrobe.

Everything started with an Art Deco mood that was injected in the ‘20s coats and hats and that was also mixed to Bauhaus inspirations. The colour palette mainly revolved around crimson red or yolk yellow (mainly used for the accessories) matched with sky blue.

Yellow must have been another reference to Earhart: her first plane, a second-hand Kinner Airster was a two-seater biplane painted bright yellow. Earhart named the plane "Canary," and used it to set her first women's record by rising to an altitude of 14,000 feet.   

Sky blue also came back in the prism prints inspired by ice crystals seen through the windows of a plane.

Earhart’s style was evoked mainly by the flying caps and gloves, the tailored jumpsuits and zipped aviator jackets often matched with palazzo pants, and while Cacharel trademark flower prints and some nice geometrical zigzagging knits provided some alternatives, you felt that somehow the collection would have been much better if romance, girly dresses with matching hairclips and white tights had been left behind in favour of stronger masculine notes, to maybe emphasise a little bit more Earhart's challenges.

In her life Earhart went against many prejudices and financial obstacles to make her dreams come true and this message is essentially lacking in many things aimed at women, including clothes (look at the content of the mainstream fashion magazines...).

After her 1932 flight, Earhart felt it had proved that men and women were equal in "jobs requiring intelligence, coordination, speed, coolness and willpower."

In a letter she wrote to her husband in case a dangerous flight proved to be her last, Earhart said: "(...) I am quite aware of the hazards. I want to do it because I want to do it. Women must try to do things as men have tried. When they fail, their failure must be but a challenge to others."

Earhart's biography says that she also kept a scrapbook of newspaper clippings about successful women in predominantly male-oriented fields, including film direction and production, law, advertising, management, and mechanical engineering.

Tomorrow is International Women's Day and, while remembering Earhart's achievements and words (rather than just her style...) would be very apt, maybe starting to work on our own file about successful women in our society (and above all, in different fields and professions, science included) wouldn't be such a bad idea.

Member of the Boxxet Network of Blogs, Videos and Photos

Member of the Boxxet Network of Blogs, Videos and Photos

Add to Technorati Favorites

Lijit Search

Putin’s Russia

As you by now know, Vladimir Putin claimed victory in the Russian presidential elections held last Sunday.

Yet election observers stated there were irregularities during the vote count while international monitors such as the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) urged fraud allegations to be fully investigated.

Meanwhile, as protests continue against Putin's return to the Kremlin (you can keep updated on The Guardian Russian elections page), International Women’s Day is approaching and, the more I think about Russia and about women, the more journalist Anna Politkovskaya, a critic of the Kremlin and of Putin murdered in 2006, comes back to my mind.

I’ve often been asked what is style and I’ve always replied that style is not what you wear, but what you are and how you relate to the people who surround you.

In my opinion, Anna Politkovskaya was an outspoken icon of style in her own way.

I’m republishing today a review of Anna Politkovskaya’s Putin’s Russia (The Harvill Press) that I wrote for a political magazine in 2004 when the book was released (I'm republishing it as it was, without changing anything, so bear in mind as you read it that this was written roughly 8 years ago), dedicating it to some of the people I met when I visited Moscow last year who are trying to change through their work in different fields such as art, culture, film, fashion and style, their own country.

Anna Politkovskaya - Putin’s Russia (The Harvill Press)

On 1st September 2004, when news broke out about children being taken hostage in a school in Beslan, North Ossetia, investigative journalist and reporter for the Russian paper Novaya Gazeta Anna Politkovskaya, decided to flew there.

She wanted to try to negotiate the release of the hostages (she had acted as a mediator also in 2002, during the Dubrovka theatre siege) and allow Aslan Maskhadov, former Chechen president and rebel leader to come out of hiding and convince the hostage-takers to free the children.

Yet, getting to Beslan proved quite difficult since all the flights had been cancelled. Politkovskaya ended up spending a long evening at Vnukovo airport and eventually managed to get on a plane directed to Rostov-on-Don. While on board, she had a cup of tea, then, suddenly, she started to feel sick. She woke up only a few hours later, in Rostov regional hospital, without being able to remember anything. Behind her mysterious incident, she claimed, there were the Russian intelligence services, the FSB, who wanted her out of action.

The story of Beslan and of Politkovskaya’s poisoning, are not included in her book Putin’s Russia (The Harvill Press), but many other stories are collected in this harrowing volume.

The author opens her book with a chapter about the army in Russia and about soldiers being abused, beaten, tortured and even sold as slaves by their officers.

The chapter also concentrates on a mother’s desperate search for the body of her son who died during a battle and was left behind on the battlefield.

Readers will be confronted by a terrible and shocking reality in the pages that follow: an army officer raping and killing a Chechen girl and expecting to walk free after the trial; a corrupt judicial system; the decline of the Russian intelligentsia; the dire conditions in which submarine engineers and admirals live in Kamchatka where the local nuclear fleet is rusting; the Urals mafia illegally taking possession of many local industries; the silence of the servile Russian media; the Chechen war and the war on terrorism; the lies of the government during the Dubrovka theatre siege in 2002, where 129 people died when the special services released gas into the building.

Politkovskaya analyses in her book the situation in Chechnya, but also the hatred, violence and racism Chechen people face in Moscow, themes that fascinated the journalist since 1999 when she first started reporting about Chechnya, which also became the topic of her previous award winning book A Dirty War: A Russian Reporter in Chechnya (The Harvill Press, 2001).

Mr Putin, supported and encouraged by European leaders Berlusconi, Blair, Schröder, Chirac and by American President Bush, is compared in the book to Soviet leader Josef Stalin, to Nikolai Gogol’s character Akaky Akakievich, more concerned with his image than with his soul, and to an over-promoted spy inadequate to govern the country.

Mr Putin, Politkovskaya warns in the book, is simply moving the country back to a Soviet-style dictatorship. “Why do I so dislike Putin?” Politkovskaya wonders towards the end of the book, “I dislike him for a matter-of-factness worse than felony, for his cynicism, for his racism, for his lies, for the gas he used in the Nord-Ost siege, for the massacre of the innocents which went on throughout his first term as President.” 

Politkovskaya’s style is raw and haunting and the best things in her book are undoubtedly all the interviews the author made with simple people, ordinary men and women who seem to have lost all hope of getting any protection from the state and who expect nothing but unfair trials and unfair verdicts.

Putin’s Russia, a book supported by the English PEN, deserves to be read because it is definitely the best non-fiction book published this year, but also because it is written by one of the bravest and most passionate journalists around.

Member of the Boxxet Network of Blogs, Videos and Photos

Member of the Boxxet Network of Blogs, Videos and Photos

Add to Technorati Favorites

Lijit Search

Rare Moods Between Art Deco and New Objectivity: Dodo - A Life in Pictures

Michel Hazanavicius's film The Artist resurfaced here and there in different fashion collections, spawning in the last two seasons a trend for Art Deco and silent movie icons.

Yet, if you want to remain in the same period of time while discovering a slightly more obscure reference, check out the exhibition currently on at the Kunstbibliothek in Berlin.

Entitled "Dodo (1907-1998) – A Life in Pictures” (until 28th May 2012), the event celebrates the rediscovery of artist Dörte Clara Wolf, simply known as “Dodo”.

Born in Berlin in 1907, Wolff trained at the local Reimann Schule and, from the late ‘20s on, she worked as a freelance fashion illustrator.      

Between 1927 and '29 she created some of her best works, caricaturally drawn gouaches inspired by Berlin’s cosmopolitan life style and socialites for the Berlin-based satirical weekly ULK.

Her works were characterised by rather complex compositions, very intense, vivid colors and sharp silhouettes. 

Dodo knew Marlene Dietrich and Josephine Baker and also designed costumes for revues and parties.     

In the '30s Dodo went through a rather turbulent period of time in her life, marked by intense works of art and, in 1933, she spent four months in Zurich, undergoing psychoanalysis, a therapy meant to help her dealing with her repressed personality conflicts.

Being Jewish, Dodo went into exile in 1936 moving to London, where she died in 1998. Throughout her life she kept on creating art, producing illustrations for children's books, greeting cards and promotional graphics.

The exhibition - comprising around 120 graphic works from all phases of her life and showing how Dodo moved from Art Deco to New Objectivity - includes glamorous costume and fashion drawings, drafts and cheerful yet acerbic watercolor vignettes and illustrations for ULK, as well as her often critical portraits of the cosmopolitan socialites in which she hinted at alienated gender relationships, plus some “pictures of the unconscious” she made while in Zurich, illustrations for Jewish magazines and works created in exile in London.  

"Dodo (1907-1998) – A Life in Pictures” is at the Kunstbibliothek in Berlin, Germany, until 28th May 2012, and will move to London's Ben Uri Gallery in June. 

All images in this post are taken from the website Staatliche Museen zu Berlin   

Member of the Boxxet Network of Blogs, Videos and Photos 

Member of the Boxxet Network of Blogs, Videos and Photos

Add to Technorati Favorites

Lijit Search

Of Ziggurats and Wall Dresses: Time to Bring Back Cinzia Ruggeri?

One of my personal "fashion dreams" would be to see Cinzia Ruggeri's coming back into the fashion arena. So far, rather than seeing her own designs, I have seen her ideas coming back in other collections.

Born in Milan, Ruggeri studied design at the local Accademia delle Arti Applicate in the ‘60s. Even before she graduated she started exhibiting in local Italian galleries and, after her studies, she moved to Paris where she worked for Carven. 

Upon her return, she settled down in Milan and started working on her own collections, becoming soon well-known for her creations, clever mixes of disciplines such as fashion, architecture and interior design reinterpreted in a surrealist key. 

In the '80s Ruggeri designed some of the most iconic pieces ever created in Italy, from her “Homage to Lévi Strauss dress”, with its three-dimensional ziggurat-like motifs to the “Dress with Octopus”, that turned the body into a surreal yet sensual sea creature (and that somehow anticipated the seapunk trend…).

Her fashion shows were also considered theatrical events, with exclusive performances of light and music: in the ‘80s, Brian Eno created for her a ziggurat-shaped light installation for one of her shows in Milan.  

Ruggeri developed “transdisciplinary” pieces that were inspired by cubism, futurism and constructivism, and combined fashion, the scenic arts, photography, anthropology, geology and ecology together. The designer also started experimenting with behavioural garments and materials that changed colours according to body heat.

For example, she employed liquid crystals that enabled her, thanks to the change of temperature, to create from a single model a number of variants of colours and patterns.

As the years passed, apart from creating also iconic accessories such as her "Schiaffo Bag" (Slap Bag), Ruggeri began working in other fields: as an artist she designed theatrical productions, ballets and artistic events, venturing into interior and furniture design and designing wardrobes, glasswares, mirrors, pieces of furniture and home accessories for different companies. 

Her fashion designs have been widely exhibited, appearing at the Venice Biennale, and during iconic fashion exhibitions such as “The Genius of Fashion” (FIT, New York) and “Fashion and Surrealism” (FIT, New York).

In 2011, the “Homage to Lévi Strauss dress” was bought by London’s Victoria & Albert Museum, officially becoming part of its extraordinary fashion design collection. The dress was showcased during the “Postmodernism: Style & Subversion” exhibition at the V&A that has currently moved to the Mart in Rovereto (until 3rd June 2012).

I did a post last year about contemporary designers/recent collections inspired by Cinzia Ruggeri's creations and so far her designs resurfaced here and there during the Paris Fashion shows.

Zandra Rhodes’s collection, presented during the ON|OFF showcase, featured a coat with a ziggurat/zigzagging pattern that called to mind a Ruggeri dress from the ‘80s (check out also the yellow dress in the Matia Bazar video embedded in this post).

You could argue this was a retrospective catwalk show to honour Rhodes’ creations over the past 36 years, so the coat wasn't new, but I think Ruggeri's ziggurat designs pre-dated it anyway. 

The second collection that somehow reminded me of Ruggeri was Manish Arora's: the latter opened with all white or all black dresses/skirt and tops embellished with bits and pieces of grass protruding from a wall print and also featured tulle blouses with appliquéd flowers matched with leather skirts in iridescent laser-cut leather.

While Ruggeri was among the first ones to use iridescences and silvery fabrics in her designs, the comparison here is with her "Abiti Natura" (Nature Dresses) with their backs covered in ivy and with her "Abito Muretto” (Wall Dress) from her Spring/Summer 1983 collection.

Bizarrely enough, also the make up and hairstyles of Arora's models looked a lot like those featured in Ruggeri's early '80s lookbooks or sported by the singer of Italian early '80s band Matia Bazar (often dressed and styled in those years by Ruggeri).

Time to bring back Cinzia Ruggeri then, I wonder, while I’m currently thinking of turning my dream of bringing back Cinzia Ruggeri into a mission...

Member of the Boxxet Network of Blogs, Videos and Photos 

Member of the Boxxet Network of Blogs, Videos and Photos

Add to Technorati Favorites

Lijit Search

Crazy for the Art/Museum Archive Print, But Who Owns Its Copyright? (Carven/Dries Van Noten A/W 2012-13)

The Paris Fashion Week shows brought us some beautiful designs and a very interesting conundrum.

As you may have seen from the images and reports on the Internet, Guillaume Henry came up with a series of pretty dresses in his collection for Carven.

Some of them were characterised by elements reminiscent of ecclesiastical robes from the Middle Ages (after all the setting was supposed to be a church or a convent...) and made with tapestry-like fabrics.

At times they were also enriched with laser-cut motifs that hinted at the beauty of stained glass windows or featured prints of paintings and colours borrowed from the Dutch and Flemish Renaissance masters.

Striking silhouettes included heavy pannier mini-skirts, but, among the best designs, there were a few dresses and blouses featuring brightly colourful prints of Hieronymus Bosch’s painting “The Garden of Earthly Delights”.

This is definitely not the first time that art successfully appears in fashion: one of the most recent collections in which art was used in all its glory was - as you may remember, though too many critics seem to have already forgotten - Alexander McQueen’s last collection.

The latter was a perfectly fashionable trip through art, inspired by the palette of the Flemish masters, and featuring Bosch’s chaotic overcrowded fantastic scenes with their grotesque creatures from the "Garden of Earthly Delights" triptych, plus decorative elements inspired by Grinling Gibbons’s wood carvings and prints of “The Virgin of the Annunciation” from Hugo van der Goes's Portinari Triptych.

It’s undeniable that prints incorporating works of art can be extremely beautiful and that choosing a painting or a sculpture by a long-dead artist also means that, most of the times, you don’t have to pay any kind of copyrights, yet there are some exceptions and there are also some rather unique situations.

The problem is that many artworks exhibited in museums are there to be enjoyed by the public, and therefore by each and everyone of us, but what happens when a specific work ends up on a designer’s piece? Think about this: we buy mugs, shirts, scarfs or notebooks with prints of paintings or sculptures from museum shops all the time and we know that our money goes to that museum. But when we buy a dress with prints of a specific painting preserved in a particular museum who gets the money? Just the designer? 

Let’s look at another example: the first few looks at Dries Van Noten’s may have almost displayed a derivation from the architectural elements of De Chirico’s costumes for the Ballets Russes’s "Le Bal", but the main inspiration for the collection was actually revelead later on when models wearing garments with Oriental motifs walked down the runway.

Apparently Van Noten visited the Victoria & Albert Museum in London last October and had a look at the Chinese, Japanese and Korean costumes in its archives.  

Visitors to the "Imperial Chinese Robes" exhibition may remember that the musem often showcases some of these pieces vertically and spread open to show the beautiful colours, embroidered motifs, materials and construction.Van Noten photographed them laid flat, reshaped them, then sectioned the images, cut them into pieces and remixed them, digitally printing them onto silk, crepe, and matelassé. 

The traditional rainbow coloured stripes of a beautiful yellow robe from 1800-1911 - probably destined to the empress as bright yellow remained her prerogative - became a decorative motif for tops and coats for modern empresses; in some cases one section of the costume ended up on a skirt, while assorted bits and pieces multiplied on a shirt.

Even some of the more prominent colours in the collection, such as burnt-orange, and embroidered motifs of cranes and dragons on military cut jackets, came from the V&A costumes. 

The final effect was graphically beautiful on relaxed trousers and silk dresses, though it became very desirable when images of embroidered silk damask robes with their imperial insignia and gold threads were applied to masculine tailored coats and jackets.

As a whole this "Dries Van V(and)A" collection was a successfully commercial and saleable one, but, here’s the conundrum: we don’t know the names of the people who made these robes, but they are property of the V&A, so my question is, who owns the copyright of these beautiful prints?

Is it the designer, because he took the pictures and then remixed them? But then again Coldcut and Fatboy Slim did some great tracks but didn’t own the samples they incorporated in their music and had to pay to use them. So my next question is, did the designer have to pay the V&A to take pictures and then use their images or was he allowed to use them for free for what is ultimately a commercial product (or is he granting that a part of the sales from the collection will go towards the preservation of a specific work of art? mind you, this last hypothesis is practically unlikely in the fashion industry...)?

In case the answer to my second question is a positive yes, well, Dries Van Noten created what is legally known as a "precedent": if he had access to the V&A archive, then we, as ordinary people, can all have access to the V&A archive, take pictures and then make our own clothes and accessories remixing other images, costumes, paintings, statues and everything else stored in the museum collection. 

If, as ordinary people we are denied access, then why was Van Noten allowed to have access to these materials? Because he is a fashion designer and therefore capable of reusing the past better than us?

So, while the doubt remains, if you fancy copying – pardon, I mean "take inspiration/pay homage to" – further pieces showcased at the V&A, remember that the next exhibition involving fashion will be about Hollywood movies (Orientalist fans rejoyce: there will also be the costumes from Bertolucci’s The Last Emperor, designed by James Acheson) and will start in October.

In the meantime, you can always try to gatecrash not only the V&A archive and collection, but any archive from any museum near you. And, if they try to stop you, well, remind them that, if Dries Van Noten can do it, we want to be able to do it as well. 

Member of the Boxxet Network of Blogs, Videos and Photos 

Member of the Boxxet Network of Blogs, Videos and Photos

Add to Technorati Favorites

Lijit Search