Irenebrination: Notes on Architecture, Art, Fashion, Fashion Law, Science & Technology: December 2012

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Cringing (and Puzzling) Fashion Stories Roundup

I don't particularly like charts, so this is definitely not going to be a chart but a sort of bullet point style list of puzzling things that recently happened in fashion (from the latest) and that somehow mark the end of the year and, who knows, the end of the world if we believe the infamous Mayan prophecy.

Mario Testino and other photoshopping disasters
Well, the actual news was that Romeo Beckham appeared in Burberry's Spring/Summer 2013 campaign (as usual accompanied by a cringing soundtrack - you wonder why Burberry doesn't invest in a DJ...). Unfortunately for Testino who shot the campaign, the focus ended up somewhere else. Romeo displays indeed a rather unnatural pose, while Edie Campbell and Charlie France also look excessively airbrushed (Campbell's leg is as smooth as a Barbie doll's...). Is this the last Testino photoshopping disaster for 2012 after Karlie Kloss displaying three armpits for Vogue España (View this photo)?

H&M and MM
No, the news is definitely not about the H&M and Margiela collaboration but about it being unsuccessful. This year has actually revealed us that collaborations aren't about actual sales but about "media revenues", so it is (almost) irrelevant if the garments are successful or not. But why were sales not as expected in this case? Too expensive in times of crisis or too avant-garde? Maybe the key to the mystery is somewhere else: H&M doesn't have a clue about people's sizes, so producing oversized “avant-garde” garments wasn't maybe such a smart solution when half of their ordinary selection of clothes just doesn't fit. Their next collaboration? Investing in a team of professional pattern cutters wouldn't be a bad idea.

Dita von Teese - burlesque icon of style and now, unfortunately for us, fashion designer.
In an article appeared on 10th December on vogue.co.uk, Dita candidly recounted her discovery of her new vocation (fashion students cover your ears and eyes now as this could be extremely damaging for your careers):

"I saw a very famous designer, who shall remain unnamed, in a vintage boutique in LA. He was there with his whole team and they were taking pictures for pieces to inspire his next collection. I just thought to myself: 'There's no reason why I couldn't do that.' Vintage stores are where I buy all my clothes - I love the thrill of the hunt."

Amazing. Such wonderfully intelligent comments about ending up in a vintage shop and realising that – like all the other fashion designers out there – you can now essentially freely copy and steal from the past deserves an award. Somebody should have explained Dita there is a difference between stealing, copying, assimilating, researching, being inspired and actually being a fashion designer. After her holy revelation in LA, it was only natural for Dita to produce a collection of “retro-inspired trans-seasonal” clothes remixing French Haute Couture and Hollywood glamour. Did we really need her? No. PS If, in 2013, you ever meet a famous designer in a vintage shop with their entire team, feel authorised to beat them violently and tell them to go back to work in their studio.

Along the “did we really need her” line - Yoko Ono + Opening Ceremony
Love her for her activism, hate her for being the woman who broke The Beatles (even though recent interviews claimed it wasn't her fault...), Yoko Ono came back this year not as obnoxious artist, musician and peace activist, but as fashion designer. Our heroine found some sketches she had done for John Lennon in 1969 as a wedding present and used them to create a limited capsule collection for Opening Ceremony entitled “Fashion for Men, 1969-2012”.

The collection included puzzling trousers with cut out motifs around the buttocks area, plexiglass necklaces with bells attached over the breasts and inscribed underneath with the words “Ring for your mommy” and other assorted and more or less cringing designs. Not having the guts to say it was simply ridiculous, the media called it cheeky, playful, whimsical, fun, exuberant, boundary-breaking and forward-thinking (well, for 1969 that was forward thinking; in 2012 it's just plainly ridiculous...). Somehow, though, it's uplifting to know that, while previously you could buy mooning party shorts at $8.99 (View this photo), now you can have proper mooning trousers at $250. Yet there is one lesson behind all this: never ever let anything you did for a beloved one in private (and that includes art, clothes, porn videos and other assorted materials) become public 40 years later.

Last but not least – the most puzzling fashion event of the year: Alexander Wang appointed by French conglomerate PPR Creative Director of Balenciaga.
Let's put it in this way: if the world ends today we will be spared Wang's collection for Balenciaga.

Yes, you got it, Cristobal Balenciaga the architect and sculptor, the designer who exalted fabric and who was influenced by the dramatically lit draperies of Zurbaran's paintings, against, erm, Wang and his co-hort of partying hip customers in slouchy tees and fancy $150 croc embossed rubber yoga mat with lamb leather strap (well, in case you're one of the armageddon survivors, you may find new purposes for this absolutely necessary object...).

Critics say it will work, and one will benefit from the other, even though the choice shows this is not a century for research, but for churning out garments without much substance behind them.

Who knows, maybe Wang will truly learn something from this experience, after all he already started copying - pardon - getting inspiration from French masters such as Vivier in his latest collection. Yet in a fast world of revolving doors in which one day Donatella Versace states you remind him of her late brother and the next she decides she had enough about you (see the end of the Versus/Christopher Kane "collaboration"), this choice may be the umpteenth example of rapid rise to success and fast fall into disgrace. Time will tell, but for 2012 we had enough cringing and puzzling stories that clearly prove the fashion industry will probably never redeem itself or change for the better in future.

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Posted at 07:34 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)

The Perfect Party Frock? Download Your Design Pattern and Make Your Own, Says SHOWstudio

The festive season can be a dreary time for many of us as we get constantly bombarded with messages suggesting us how we should invest money in that perfect party frock that usually spells disaster or that only ends up being worn on Christmas day.

This year, though, there is a wonderful alternative: SHOWstudio’s Design Download series that allows people to download for free various patterns and make their own designer dresses.

A couple of days ago the site uploaded the pattern for Giles Deacon's “Troubadour” dress.

The latter, an emerald double duchess silk dress with 18th century details (puff sleeves and square neckline), was part of the Autumn/Winter 2007 collection inspired by nature and natural features including forests, leaves and sea cucumbers (no, luckily, this is not the gown made from 550 pattern pieces that was also included in that collection, otherwise some of us would have gone crazy...).

The pattern, accompanied by a short film by Nick Knight starring Ranya Mordanova in the original dress, fits a standard UK size 10 and Giles recommends making it with a fabric that has some structure, such as heavy weight silk, denim or leather.

There is also a competition connected with the dress: once you're done, you can submit high quality images via Twitter (@SHOWstudio #DesignDownload) and/or email ([email protected]) for the chance to see your work displayed online in SHOWstudio's submissions gallery.

The favourite dresses - picked by Nick Knight and Giles Deacon - will be part of a specially commissioned SHOWstudio fashion film (deadline for submissions: 15 March 2013).

If you're not convinced by Giles's dress, you can always try with another design by Alexander McQueen, Martin Margiela, John Galliano or Antony Price among the others (there are currently nine patterns on the Design Download page).

Making a dress is definitely not easy especially for amateurs, but trying is always a good exercise and the fun thing is that you can reinvent a design, update it, use different fabrics and be even more creative than the designer who originally made it.

While the Design Download initiative was originally launched in 2002 to break the boundaries between designer and customers, this could be a new way to reinvent the past and suggest a sustainable future.

In the past a lot of women used to make their own clothes and patterns could be bought in shops or with special magazines. Though ready-to-wear was a great progress, it made us forget a lot of our skills to the point that nowadays, most of us do not even know how to sew a button, or we end up buying clothes in High Street retailers that then need to be adapted as the size often doesn't fit.

Open Source could be a new way to spread patterns, and it would actually be interesting to see how many people would buy the original pattern by a designer rather than the physical creation.

It would also be very interesting to have an accessible book about pattern cutting made by a skilled designer (Isabel Toledo, would you do it, please?).

If you feel that patterns are a bit too difficult to understand as you are at amateur level, ask someone to help you or try making a miniature piece for a doll. You'll soon catch the bug for making a dress – that's guarantee.

If you're already quite good at making dresses, well, pass onto the next stage: Giles' A/W 2007 collection also featured oversized knits, so get your needles out and complete your "Troubadour" dress with your very own unique knitwear.

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Posted at 07:26 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Vintage Marimekko

Let's continue the interior design and fashion thread that started yesterday with a quick look at a feature published on the Italian edition of Grazia magazine in December 1959.

The article was part of a longer fashion and interior design report that explored Northern Europe and included a photoshoot made between the Arctic Circle, Sweden, Norway and Finland (as you may guess Elsa Haertter was among the photographers who worked on this reportage).

The feature announced that hand-printed cotton fabrics by Marimekko had finally arrived in Italy and were available at La Rinascente department stores. The fabrics mentioned in the article featured stylised motifs of flowers, leaves and figures and came in bright colours including red, orange, yellow, violet, green and brown, shades that were considered as exotically colourful for Italian tastes.

The article stated they were affordable and therefore perfect for different fashionable and stylish solutions, including using them as wallpaper, curtains or to renew sofas and armchairs.

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Posted at 07:48 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Return of the Memphis Milano Movement in Fashion: Lack of Ideas, Genuine Paradigm Shift or Representation of Chaos?

For quite a few years now this site has been trying to bridge the gaps between different disciplines such as architecture, interior design and fashion. This isn't a new goal since there have been quite a few pioneers in Italy in the '80s who tried to find a sort of common ground between these fields. There seemed to be indeed more maverick artists at the time, some of them interested in offering an innovative approach to design.

For what regarded interior design, there were artists more interested in creating an emotional value of some sort behind everyday objects. The pieces created by the Memphis Milano movement are perfect examples. The designers gravitating around Memphis were indeed more interested in creating pieces that focused on the relationship between human beings and the domestic habitat surrounding them considered from a cultural and expressive point of view.

The results – interior design objects from table lamps to sofas and armchairs, from fabrics to vases and teapots – were all characterised by very bizarre and often unpredictable shapes and shocking colours. Some critics called them irreverent not only for their fantasy shapes and silhouettes that at times made the function not so clear, but also for their colour combinations including neon glowing shades and zebra stripes that often clashed one with the other in what the movement's harshest critics thought was a tasteless display of vulgarity.

Yet the key behind these pieces was a complete disgregard for conventional design and a will to literally destroy the image of “pure design”.

As seen in a previous post, the Memphis Milano movement came back in fashion in Dior's Autumn/Winter 2011-12 Haute Couture collection. Then, last week footwear brand Sergio Rossi launched with a special event at Milan's 10 Corso Como its Spring/Summer 2013 collection entirely inspired by the Memphis Milano movement (some of the shoes can already be bought from the store or you can admire them also at the Galleria Memphis Milano in via della Moscova 27, Milan).

Some of the Sergio Rossi shoes are characterised by the unmistakable graphic zigzag lines or black and white stripes broken by colourful elements of Michele De Lucchi's “Flamingo” and “Polar “ tables and of his “Oceanic” lamp, or by the contrasting shades and patterns of Nathalie Du Pasquier's “Carrot” or “Onion” porcelain vase and fruit bowl or they call to mind the colour combinations of Ettore Sottsass' “Tigris” and “Alioth” glass vases.

It would be interesting to discover if there are other reasons behind this return of the Memphis Milano movement in fashion. Memphis was a reaction to years of rationalism, so it's only natural to wonder if fashion's love story with this movement was generated by a lack of new ideas or if it represents a genuine paradigm shift from pure and clean lines to more ebullient trends or if this inspiration is just a representation of the chaos and confusion we're living in at the moment.

Memphis was a radical design movement that achieved iconic status and, rather than seeing another collection being inspired by it, it would be much more interesting and refreshing to see Italy generating more innovative and influential movements as it used to happen in the '80s.

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Posted at 08:02 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)

Seapunk Schiaparelli?

In pre-Internet times it would usually take a few months to make sure that a passing obsession turned into a fully-fledged mainstream global trend, but, nowadays, you can spread news, passions and fashion in just a few days' (or even in a few hours...). A perfect example of this theory is seapunk.

Inspired by oceanic elements and motifs including dolphins and palms (well, the name says it all...), characterised by a '90s aesthetic and based on values such as peace, love, unity and respect, the trend apparently originated last year when Brooklyn DJ Julian Foxworth (Lil Internet) tweeted a dreamy vision of a "seapunk leather jacket with barnacles where the studs used to be".

The tweet sparked a series of jokes and music tracks, but, rather than dying a horrible death like most Internet jokes, Seapunk turned into a benign aquatic monster that also spawned dedicated bands and record labels, influencing music videos like Azealia Banks's “Atlantis”.

Seapunk reappeared more recently in the background graphics that accompanied Rihanna's performance on Saturday Night Live.

Last week the trend was analysed once again by different publications including The Guardian.

Some of the articles also looked at how easy it is to detect seapunk inspirations in current fashion collections or in the aqua green/blue hairstyles of some models on the runways (see Chanel's Resort 2013 or Jeremy Scott's A/W 2012-13 shows).

At the moment young seapunk followers are quite upset by pop icons stealing their subculture from them to turn it into a maintream toy or incorporating in their allegedly seapunk inspired videos and works, imagery like mermaids that are not considered as representatives of the most genuine seapunk values.

Yet my dilemma is different from theirs: Schiaparelli did a tropical pennant coralfish top in 1928 and a sea anemone straw hat in 1938 in powder pink, lilac and violet shades; Cinzia Ruggeri included in her Spring/Summer 1984 collection the so-called “Dress with Octopus” (an early incarnation of Lil Internet's dream?) that turned the body into a surreal yet sensual sea creature (the collection also included a dress accompanied by a fishing net-like poncho and yellow bags that matched with the octopus dress – see video embedded at the end of this post).

Could they be considered as early exponents of seapunk or has fashion managed to co-opt an innocently funny joke and some nice sea inspirations from the 1900s and assimilate/revomit them in a new package? The doubt remains...

Image credits: Schiaparelli hat by Marco Garzia, 2012

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Posted at 08:03 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)

(Interactive) Light and Life Landmarks Necklace

Inspiration sometimes comes from the most bizarre and unlikely places. During summer for example I've been taking pictures of lamp posts and lamps everytime I encountered one that I particularly like and then made a moodboard.

Lamp posts in St Peter's Square in Rome and under the colonnade and lamp posts in Venice were definitely my favourite ones, and in the weeks and months that followed I worked along these themes to find materials that could help me creating a new piece.

One strong inspiration was also light and the will to capture that moment between the night and the early hours of the morning when lamp posts are switched off. This is a nostalgic moment in a way, as the magic of the night fades away and reality destroys the dream and the illusion of the darkness.

Obviously architecture had to come in as well since lamp posts are found in urban areas. Though very satisfied with my latest pieces incorporating drift wood I wanted to push things further while retaining the architectural aspect. But how could I come up with something architectural, nostalgic and bizarre at the same time?

Technology in the end came to my rescue and I opted for an interactive necklace that can be switched on and off. A button allows you to switch all the lamp posts on or off or to switch five on and one off, to symbolically hint at the reality of the morning seeping into the dream of the night and shattering it.

Lamp posts are city landmarks, but in this case they can also be interpreted as life landmarks (hence the title of the necklace) because they mark the time passing from the night to dawn.

Since the wearer regulates the light this can't be considered as a behavioural piece, but as an interactive necklace that allows those who wear to keep on living the last and nostalgic hours of the night, come back to reality or go back to the safe and dreamy illusion provided by the darkness (or signal to other people surrounding them something by switching on/off the lights).

I admit there were a few moments of desperation behind this piece, first caused by how to build the electric circuit and isolate one of the lights, then by the battery that had to go in (followed by more minor tragedies involving the tiniest bulbs...) while making sure that the final piece was still wearable.

Yet hours of researches gave brilliant results and also helped me finding the foam polystyrene sheets for the bridge, walls and pavement (the piece is almost entirely made out of polystyrene sheets and even with the battery it weights less than 120 gr). The care I put into the materials comes from my personal almost obsessive experience in recreating Nativity scenes as a child and a teenager.

The mood also calls back to mind a 1955 Italian song entitled "Vecchio Frack" (literally "Old Tuxedo") sung by Domenico Modugno. The song told the story of a mysterious man walking alone in the silent and deserted streets at night. The man is wearing a tuxedo, white waistcoat, blue silk bow tie and diamond cufflinks, a gardenia flower in his buttonhole, and a top hat and he's carrying a crystal stick. He is dreamy and nostalgic, and, as he walks, he says goodbye to all the things he passes by, from lamp posts to a stray cat. As the song progresses and the night turns into the day, the lyrics picture a very different scene, a top hat and a flower floating in a river hinting at the man committing suicide.

The story behind the track was indeed inspired by the inexplicable suicide of an Italian prince occurred in 1954. Somehow I find this story as very contemporary: we are living in very confusing times and we often feel inadequate when facing life's challenges. The song always left me with a personal doubt that is also tackled by the necklace: would the prince have committed suicide if the lamp posts had never been switched off and the night had lasted forever?

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Posted at 07:49 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Haute-Tech for the Future: Pretty Smart Textiles

Developing technologically advanced clothes for a not so distant future and for a society that constantly moves at a faster pace has been one of the main preoccupations of many designers and researchers in the last few years.

Designing, producing and putting into the market a truly supermodern wardrobe may still be difficult, but, for the time being, there have been interesting and exciting projects providing an insight into what the future of fashion may be like. One of the latest events is the Pretty Smart Textiles exhibition (on until tomorrow) at the Textiles Open Innovation Center in Ronde, Belgium.

Curated by Melissa Coleman and designed by Joachim Rotteveel, the exhibition features a selection of garments, accessories and applications merging design and technology and exploring how environmental changes can interact with our bodies and clothes.

Projects span from 2009 to the present day and include quite a few “behavioural” garments from the Histerical Bubble (Anja Hertenberger) that explores the interaction between an individual and a group to Unlace (Eef Lubbers), reactive lingerie that allows partners to connect and become more aware of touch and warmth; from a helmet that can help the wearer saying sorry (Meg Grant) to a human hair dress that moves when you brush it (by Dutch designer Django with technical support of designer Ricardo O'Nascimento) and a carpet that picks up radio waves and acts as a medium to enter an electromagnetic space transforming those who sit or walk upon it into human antennas (Florian Kräutli).

Some of these multi-sensory pieces such as a necklace that contracts when the wearer reaches certain stress, joy and anxiety levels (Seçil Ugur, Laura Duncker), a dress that gives out an electric shock when the wearer says a lie (Melissa Coleman/Leonie Smelt) or organic skins that express emotions (Local Androids) are used to explore new technological, behavioural and aesthetic possibilities, while shoes that can reveal people's positions and send messages/images on Twitter and Facebook (Ricardo O'Nascimento) take interaction to the next level.

LED lights are providing new ideas allowing electronics to be woven into fabrics: in some cases LEDs are integrated inside tops to give the illusion that the light shines through the body or are combined with conductive thread and wool (Charlotte 't Hart); OLEDs (Organic light-emitting diodes) are instead used as elements of self-expression in a skirt (Marina Toeters and Loe Feijs). In some cases open-source platform Arduino was also used to programme the patterns of light generated by the LEDs.

The exhibition also includes pieces that explore the power of sound: the Body Speaker is a device that allows the wearer to listen to one's own internal body sounds (Karina van Heck), while the Circuit Dress is an unwerable dress, but a wearable instrument that can be played through copper finger-plates (Nicky Assmann).

One of the most stimulating projects about sound remains Melissa Coleman's Media Vintage, a series of three interactive electronic textiles entitled “Alpha” (a suitcase in which temporary messages can be woven in Morse code), “Bravo” (a tapestry that sings a song when the visitor passes a finger on the embroidered Braille) and “Charlie” (a trench coat that reads fabric punch cards and tell stories from an elderly man's life), based on the fact that nowadays we all lose our images and memories pretty easily since we store them on digital supports that often become inaccessible after a few years. In the case of this project digital memories are stored inside textiles encoded by embroidery, weavings and patterns of holes.

An important concept behind quite a few projects showcased is the mix of traditional techniques with new and advanced technologies: patchwork inspired a snowflake that, thanks to a servomotor, transforms into a sunny flower (Heike Sperber); lace was employed for sensor dresses embroidered with poems that, evoking different emotions, trigger gestures that allow the poem to be played through tiny speakers integrated in the dress, and tailoring traditions inspired a men's suit that allows the wearer to change music by pulling on six zippers on the suit (Maartje Dijkstra and Beorn Lebenstedt aka Newk).

The most interesting researches look up at solutions that could be applied to garments in a not so distant future including a photovoltaic fibre that will enable any textile surface to become a flexible solar panel and generate all the energy we need for different appliances, mobile phones and storage batteries included, but there are also intriguingly dystopian biotechnology projects looking at the possibility of implanting spider silk produced by transgenic modified goats in the human skin to make it bulletproof (Jalila Essaïdi).

Videos like Bart Hess's study on the simple expression of body and structural form and Florian Kaayk's Human Birdwing saga about his fictional character Jarno Smeets and his dream of building a pair of wings to fly complete the event.

Will Haute-Tech be the real future of fashion? We will have to wait and see, but it's exciting to think that one day the fashion industry will stop revolving around the fashion designer and will also include other key figures like researchers, engineers, technological pioneers and scientists.

When did this travelling exhibition start?
Melissa Coleman: The exhibition started in 2010 when we got the opportunity to show works of e-textiles in a place called the Nutshuis in The Hague. At the time I gathered everyone I knew that was doing this kind of work in The Netherlands and suddenly I realised we had a proper show. It was quite exciting to see all the works together as it suddenly seemed easy to think about technology and the impact it can have on fashion. After this first event we were offered different places, so we kept on updating the exhibition with more works trying to arrange them in settings made for specific sites. I think the current exhibition allows to easily spot the direction e-textiles are taking in The Netherlands.

Which of these technologies on display do you feel will become availble to us relatively soon?
Melissa Coleman: I think that electronics in general and textiles integrating lights in particular will be easily accepted into interior design. In a way it's also easy to see how the technology behind some works may be applied in future on products manufactured on a larger scale for companies such as Ikea: who knows, maybe in a few years' time Swedish design will include tapestries integrating electronic parts and lights!

Did you find it difficult to select the pieces?
Melissa Coleman: There is a lot of work being made along the wearable textiles/technology lines, but it is still quite complex to find pieces that work on three levels - aesthetically, technologically and from a material point of you. Most of the works I wanted are included in this exhibition, but, if I continue to do this for another two years, there will be many more pieces and this will allow me to select things more by theme (interior design, fashion, art, new material explorations....) rather than trying to give a complete picture of what is happening. All of the pieces I selected in the exhibition now do work on all these levels in my opinion (technically, aesthetically, conceptually...), although some garments or accessories work more in one of these fields than in the other.

Can you tell me more about the inspiration behind your Media Vintage project?
Melissa Coleman: I'm a very nostalgic person in general and everytime I see old products I'm amazed by the solutions that they suggest. Sometimes they feature very clever ways to close or fold them or organise things within one product – think for example about a classic toiletry bag that you can open and hang somewhere. I think we don't see anymore such inventions in a product and while products are more clever from a digital pont of view, they are less clever when it comes to providing functional solutions. While thinking along these lines I read an article by Bruce Sterling in The Book of Imaginary Media in which he referred to new media dying in a much quicker way than the old media and I found this point really interesting. Technology improves all the time, but everything we are storing in these black boxes – or that we stored on floppy discs and CDs – has a very limited time. These supports may work well for about ten years and then they deteriorate or become obsolete and we have to transfer them to new media. Most people don't do it simply because that's not in our nature, since if you have an old diary you don't rewrite it into a new one every few years. So technology is somehow preventing us from physically accessing to information, while a book, an old diary or letters that you used to write to people are still there, they are physical archives that we can still check out. The project was spawned by the idea that we have to find a middle-ground and get the best of the new and old media.

Why do you think Dutch designers are so forward-looking when it comes to wearable technology: are you more experimental or do you have more resources at university level?
Melissa Coleman: Wearable technology has been a topic of interest within the cultural sector in The Netherlands. We have quite a few art organisations that really put wearable technology at the forefront of their researches and that provided people interested in this kind of things with hands-on workshops. Besides, at university level there is also a great interest in this topic: at the University of Eindhoven there are roughly 60 students each semester specifically working on wearable technology.
Where would you like to take this exhibition in future?
Melissa Coleman: That's a good question. I hope that the next few times we can show it in a place that is really central so that a lot more people can see it. We always exhibited in lovely places but at times they were a bit secluded, so the people who came were specifically interested in this kind of work. So far we mainly got people from the textile or the fashion industry, design students and independent artists and designers among our visitors, in a nutshell people who are interested in discovering how this topic may have future applications or who may be interested in developing their own projects. I hope next time we will be able to show it in a more central place so that people who may just stumble upon the event may become familiar with this work. I do feel that even those who are not into the wearable technology concept may still enjoy the pieces on display or they may find it interesting to discover there is a paradigm shift going on in the technological field as well. We are very familiar with a type of technology that has a very specific look at the moment, but in future things may be different and some visitors will understand this as soon as they walk into the exhibition.

Images 2-7 and 9-13 by David Joosten

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Posted at 07:12 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

A Life In Pain, A Life in Colour: Las Apariencias Engañan - Los Vestidos de Frida Kahlo @ The Museo Frida Kahlo, Mexico City

Garments and accessories, even the simplest ones that we wear on an everyday basis, help us building our identities. But if fashion is a language that enables someone to send signals to other people, then it is possible to explore someone's personality and life just by examining their own wardrobe. In a way that's one of the main points behind a new exhibition celebrating Mexican painter Frida Kahlo.

Entitled “Appearances can be deceiving: Frida Kahlo's wardrobe”, the exhibition opened in November at the Casa Azul - now the Museo Frida Kahlo - in the Coyoacán district on the southern part of Mexico City.

Co-curated by Circe Henestrosa and Hilda Trujillo, Director of the Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera-Anahuacalli Museum, the exhibition bears a title inspired by a sentence - Las aparencias engañan - written by the artist herself under one of her drawings that remained unknown for nearly half a century. The drawing portrayed the artist as if she had been X-rayed: under an ample skirt and blouse, her naked body revealed a cage-like corset that braced her spine and a leg symbolically covered with butterflies.

Kahlo often hinted in her works at pain and at the numerous operations she had in her life and the exhibition attempts to reconstruct her identity through a moving selection of garments and personal objects that were found in 2004 in the chests and closets inside the bathroom of the Casa Azul, the house where Kahlo was born and where she died.

The collection on display is divided in different rooms and themes, starting from the early origins of Kahlo's style and following its developments, chronicled also through photographs. Items displayed - some of them restored employing high quality materials - include everyday clothes, shawls, aprons, blouses, skirts, embroidered huipiles and accessories such as jewellery, laces and collections of ribbons and balls of wools that helped the artist creating her trademark hairdos.

Though colourful and apparently cheerful, the traditional Mexican clothes (Kahlo once stated she dressed like a Tehuana because that was her favourite Mexican costume, even though she used many different versions of the traditional dress) and eclectic combinations of textures, ruffles and laces that the artist favoured also helped her hiding her wounded and suffering body.

Physical pain became the starting point to build a new identity for the artist and the garments on display at the museum turn into a way to read through the tragedies Kahlo went through in her life, from suffering polio at the age of six, which left her right leg useless for her entire life, and that prompted her to wear long skirts, 3-4 socks on her thinner leg and shoes with a higher heel, to the accident she suffered in 1925, when the bus she was riding crashed with a tram causing her permanent damage.

The exhibition reveals this contrast pretty well by exploring the themes of ethnicity and disability, juxtaposing her dresses to her medicines, her prosthetic leg still wearing a handmade Chinese style embroidered boot, and her corsets looking like cages.

The event is very accessible both to art connoisseurs and to people who may only be familiar with some aspects of Kahlo's life.

The former will easily identify some of the clothes on display as appearing in specific paintings and self- portraits including Mi vestido cuelga ahí (1933) Diego en mi pensamiento (1943) or Autorretrato con medallón (1948).

Those who may not be too knowledgeable about Kahlo, will easily understand how her manner of dressing became a part of her personality, a way to assert her independent creative nature and describe the relationship the artist had with her body.

Another aspect explored by the exhibition is Kahlo's influence upon fashion, tackled through contemporary fashion designs and corsets by Jean-Paul Gaultier, Dai Rees, Rei Kawakubo for Comme des Garçons and Riccardo Tisci for Givenchy.

There will also be additional especially commissioned designs that will change every few months (the first designs on display are by Costume National and Jason Wu).

This aspect of the exhibition was somehow inspired by a portrait taken by photographer and Frida Kahlo's lover Nickolas Muray in the late '30s (and recently used as the cover of the November 2012 issue of Vogue México - the magazine is also one of the sponsors of the exhibition) and by an image by American fashion photographer Toni Frissell published in Vogue USA in October 1937 showing the artst in front of a maguey plant, in a long white skirt, emerald blouse and red shawl.

Can you tell us more about the background of this exhibition - what inspired it and how long have you been researching it?
Circe Henestrosa: I have a very close relationship with the Tehuana dress, which is the ethnic dress Kahlo used to wear. My family on my father's side comes from the Tehuantepec Istmus in Oaxaca and this dress originates from over there. It is a matriarchal society and the women who administrate it are powerful and their dress symbolises empowerment. I am a wearer of this dress too; I have my own dresses that I wear for very for special occasions. My great uncle Andres Henestrosa and my aunt Alfa Rios, were very close friends of Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera and later I learned that my aunt, who was a native from the Tehuantepec Istmus, had given Frida one of her first dresses. She was among other friends one of the many people who brought dresses from this region to Frida. So my own personal relationship to this dress inspired me to conduct this research, which has taken more than 3 years to complete in the form of this exhibition.

How many items are featured in the exhibition and were they all taken from the museum archives?
Circe Henestrosa: There were around 300 items discovered in the bathroom among blouses, skirts, jewellery pieces, orthopedic devices, shoes and other personal belongings of the artist. The exhibition displays around 170 items in total. There are 9 looks of Frida's dresses displayed that will rotate every 5 months to give people the possibility to see as much of Kahlo's personal garments and 'looks'.

Which are your favourite ones and why?
Circe Henestrosa: Her sunglasses and shoes. These items really reveal how avant-garde she was for her time. But I really like the whole archive - as a whole it is very beautiful and shows Mexico's textile heritage, combined with some American, European and Chinese pieces as well.

According to you, what’s the most beautiful or most touching item exhibited?
Circe Henestrosa: Her prosthetic leg from 1953. This is the leg she wore almost at the end of her life when she got her right leg amputed. If you read the last pages of her diary you will realise not only the physical trauma this event caused to her, but you will also see the traces of the psychological trauma. Kahlo dealt with her physical imperfections through dress and adornment all her life, but by 1953 when she lost her leg she could not recover from this physical loss.

What fascinates you personally about Frida Kahlo's dresses: the patterns, colours, silhouettes, use of materials or the construction employed to adapt the clothes to her body?
Circe Henestrosa: Everything, even though as I said, I have a personal fascination with the Tehuana dress - that is a very special one for me. When you wear it you feel like a queen. I can understand why Kahlo chose this particular dress for herself. Apart from its adornment and construction from the torso up, with these necklaces and amazing crown of flowers on her head, it truly looks like a unique dress.

What did you learn while researching for this exhibition that you didn’t know about Frida Kahlo?
Circe Henestrosa: I understood how she developed her distinctive style as an amalgam of traditional Mexican and European fashion as well as the fundamental effects of her disabilities.

In which way do you think that Frida Kahlo's dresses influenced fashion designers decade after decade?
Circe Henestrosa: I think what has influenced different designers and artists is her style. She was a very forward-looking woman, she chose to wear a traditional ethnic dress in a time when fashion was looking at Europe and Hollywood and when everything 'foreign' was appreciated in Mexico. She instead chose a style that helped her portray her political beliefs and 'mexicanidad', a dress that made her look very Mexican, but that also helped her disguise her physical imperfections.

What do you think visitors who will see this exhibition will bring back home?
Circe Henestrosa: I hope our visitors will learn more about Kahlo as a person through her intimate universe. She was a very delicate, feminine and sophisticated woman. The artist who has left long lasting impressions of herself through her art, has also left long lasting impressions in our minds through her persona. This show tells us a little bit more about that, Kahlo as a person, as a woman.

With many thanks to Patricia Cordero, Coordinadora de Difusión y Contenidos Digitales, Museo Frida Kahlo | Museo Dolores Olmedo | Museo Diego Rivera-Anahuacalli, for co-ordinating this interview.

Image credits:

1. Las Apariencias Engañan, Drawing by Frida Kahlo
2./3. Displays in Room 2, Casa Azul
4. Right leg prosthesis with red boot in Chinese style, 1953
5. Plaster cast corset, 1954
6. Mi vestido cuelga ahí (1933), Frida Kahlo
7. Portrait of Frida Kahlo by Nickolas Muray
8. Cabinet of curiosities: tiara with aluminum roses and green linen leaves; Chinese style boot; Pre-Hispanic necklace in jadeite and green stones; black suede shoes
9. Hairdo by Angelo Seminara
10. Black suede shoes
11. Jewellery: Pre-hispanic necklace with zoomorphic figure from Campeche or Yucatán; cameo with pill box with floral motifs and river pearls, Colombia; necklace with twisted gold thread and pill box with floral motifs and river pearls.
12. Dai Rees, Natural leather corset, 2012
13. Orthopaedic corset over silk dress, Jean-Paul Gaultier, Spring/Summer 2004
14. Silk georgette embroidered evening gown and goat hair jacket, Givenchy Haute Couture Autumn/Winter 2010
15. Hairdo by Angelo Seminara

Images 2-5 and 8-15 by Miguel Tovar

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Book Alert: Windows at Bergdorf Goodman (Assouline)

Storytelling is an art and it can be practiced using both words and images. Even window shops can tell stories, especially when they are carefully thought and put together like the ones at Bergdorf Goodman.

A recently published volume by Assouline, Windows at Bergdorf Goodman, celebrates the grand, glamorous, extravagant and at times minimalist displays that every fifteen days attract the attention of crowds of locals and tourists in New York.

Founded by master tailors Edwin Goodman and Herman Bergdorf around the corner of New York's Fifth Avenue and Fifty-eight Street, the department store has been going since 1901, becoming well-known for its imaginatively magnetic windows.

Finding an idea and the proper objects to develop it is certainly not easy, but the tradition of orchestrating the perfect window shop goes a long way, having started in Paris in 1894 with wax dummies. Bergdorf Goodman transformed and innovated this art taking it to the next level.

Conceived as a theatre stage, the displays are put together with the same care a set designer would have in creating the perfect backdrop for a movie: in a way clothes and accessories complement a puzzle-like scene, becoming the punctuation marks in the story told by the windows.

One of the secrets of the Bergdorf Goodman team is coming up with a “silly yet scholarly” display that integrates real objects (sometimes the team even looks on eBay for rare pieces to complete a window) in an entertaining way.

Marcel Duchamps in 1913 said that gazing through a store window at a desirable object was “coition through a sheet of glass”, and this volume proves he was right.

The windows included in the Assouline volume go from minimal to maxi-maximalist: they may feature a dummy in a designer dress staring in a bare set at a gorilla, at an alien, at Frankenstein's monster or at a dinosaur; they may be tackling phobias or evoking dreams and visions; they may be crammed with exotic animals, gigantic sewing machines, musical instruments, kitsch crystal or mosaic-encrusted creatures, maps, candies and popcorn, vintage dummies and marionettes, porcelain tea sets, carousel horses, wheels of fortune, gigantic insects, wood veneer sculptures, balloon artworks, Halloween masks and cabinets of curiosities; they may include installations made out of hair, beards, moustaches, or be decorated with thousands of Barbie outfits hanging from laundry lines, foamcore or paper sculptures, polar bear boxing or wolves playing billiards.

Some of these scenes may celebrate festive periods such as Christmas, others are tributes to specific fashion, art, history or photographic exhibitions, they may be honouring institutions such as the American Folk Art Museum, or marking a book release; they may be conceived as mini-retrospectives made in collaboration with other institutions such as the International Center for Photography in New York, or may be inspired by pre-auction exhibits of fine art and therefore include works by Richard Prince, Takashi Murakami and Jeff Koons.

The key to the perfect and most successful window is revealed in the preface by David Hoey. As Senior Director of Visual Presentation, Hoey states that he draws from different sources including Frank Baum's (of Wizard of Oz fame) monthly trade journal The Show Window: A Journal of Practical Window Trimming for the Merchant and the Professional, that the author started in 1897 (before turning into a children's author, Baum designed phantasmagoric store windows...), MGM musicals, the architectures of Robert Venturi and circus shows.

This becomes clear as you leaf through the volume and look at displays inspired by astronomy and travelling, Salvador Dalí or Georges Méliès and including oversized sculptures, rotating backdrops or mind-altering long corridors and impossibly steep staircases, skeleton animals stopping outside the door of a mysterious mansion, time machines or entire upside down displays to mark the Dada exhibition at the Moma (2006).

The Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art Curator in Charge Harold Koda makes a point when he states in the book that the windows engage the mind and the eye: while the display as a whole is usually amazing, the micro-details including real artworks, rare books or photographs elevate the windows from the product of a capitalistic society producing desire in the name of profit to musem display.

The windows dedicated to Hollywood's designer Edith Head are excellent examples as they included original pieces from films such as Sabrina, The Rear Window and The Birds, while the ones that homage Bill Cunningham are perfect tributes to a local artist and photojournalist.

Windows at Bergdorf Goodman - published on the 111th anniversary of the department store - is highly recommended to students of any fashion-related subject, but also to museum curators and installation designers: the visual information and inspirations featured (though you wish they had added more texts and at least a couple of essays about the making of some of the most beautiful windows...) will indeed inspire many ideas and solutions for further striking displays.

Image credits:

Random Words, Stencil, Show Dogs, Beards and Moustaches, Billiards Game, Cotton Candy, Kicking Up Heels, Carnival of the Animals, Strange Bedfellows, Vintage Display Heads, A Compendium of Curiosities II- Reflected and Meticulous Metronomes. All images by Ricky Zehavi & John Cordes, courtesy of Assouline.

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Space Vs Vanity: Anna Hunt's Arty (and Fashionable) Embroideries

In yesterday's post we visited space and the future, via fashion and a dystopian film, so let's continue the thread by very briefly looking at a work of art that reunites themes such as space and death and employs a technique borrowed from the world of crafts.

The work in question is "Vanitas" (2004) by Anna Hunt (part of the Paisley Museum collection): this piece shows on one side the Sputnik and on the other a skull, hinting at man's mortality. The artist created in this way a sort of juxtaposition of images, a subversive hybrid: Vanitas means in Latin “vanity” and refers to paintings - mainly still life ones - symbolising the transience of earthly pleasures and achievements. Hunt reminds us therefore about the limits of human endeavours by placing a skull, a memento mori symbol next to a modern machine like the Sputnik.

Despite Hunt using in her works embroidery as the main medium to recreate photographic images - her artworks featuring iconic architectures and buildings in six-by-eight inch satin-stitch embroideries, but also her series about the history of flight are well-known - she never considered herself an artisan but an artist.

You may argue that the precise details she employed for this work could make Hunt's thread on canvas works easily conceived as high fashion pieces as well (you could somehow imagine Prada stealing Hunt's idea of architectural embroideries in striking colours and details and maybe launching its own Rem Koolhaas/OMA buildings embroidered line...). Yet this work has also got an important message that could be applied to fashion: the glamorous pleasures of life are abruptly wiped out by death, so it wouldn't be a bad idea if, every now and then, the fashion industry and the many people connected to it would maybe take themselves less seriously...