Artist and designer Arne Quinze is known for creating structural architectures, abstract sculptures for public spaces and monumental pieces.
His works usually interact with people, providing them bridges, roofs or canopies under which passers by can meet, talk, meditate or relax.
In the last few months Quinze has been experimenting with new themes and topics, creating smaller pieces exhibited in galleries or in other public spaces.
A couple of months ago his bright red metal installation comprising 14 wings and entitled "Chaos Wind" was successfully installed at the Jing’An Kerry Centre in Shanghai.
In the meantime, Quinze developed a series of works inspired by chaos and made using wooden sticks trapped in glass boxes representing small visions of chaos, of the confusion that goes on into his mind and in the society surrounding him.
While analysing this concept the artist and designer understood that chaos means life and reinterpreted the main theme from an architectural point of view, translating confusion into structures.
As he moved on, Quinze decided to explore chaos through different materials, with brass works trapping pieces of coloured glass that actually look a bit like minerals or precious stones.
Some of these works call to mind Alexander Calder's mobiles as they are created to be suspended from the ceiling; others hung on walls like paintings, but all are characterised by strong dynamic forces.
The new pieces will be part of the Chaos in Motion exhibition, scheduled to open in October At The Gallery, in Antwerp.
In his works Pierres (Stones) and L'Écriture des pierres (The Writing of Stones), Roger Caillois wrote about stones that appear to depict landscapes, glyphic writing, or just a beautiful pattern.
The French intellectual and writer who was associated for a period of his life with Surrealism, was overcome not just by the beauty of stones, but also by their philosophical significance: according to him, stones possess gravitas, something ultimate and unchanging, and they are very mysterious since they stand outside history, representing the primordial.
Many of the stones he wrote about were taken from his own extensive collection. The latter, held at the Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle in Paris (some pieces are currently exhibited at the 55th International Venice Art Biennale) features over one hundred rare and well sourced specimens. Some of these stones have beautiful patterns and Caillois stated in his works that their forms were actually examples of a cryptic universal syntax. The wonder of the mineral world which inspired Roger Caillois, also fascinated Phillip Lim.
3.1 Phillip Lim's Spring/Summer 2014 collection - showcased on a runway covered in salt crystals – was indeed conceived as an ode to stones and minerals. The geode, a spherical rock formation with a core containing inner lining of crystals projecting inward or layers of concentric banding, triumphed a bit everywhere in the collection, being reinterpreted in various ways.
Decorative effects and embroidered motifs appliqued on organza were employed to mimick the internal patterns of geodes; marble-like prints and cracked suede vests reproduced instead their plain limestone exterior; surface manipulations on knits and appliqued fringes called to mind the structure of more rough stones, while glittering metallic fabrics hinted at more precious minerals or at the rich colours of halved and open geodes.
Silhouettes remained urban and included sharp pants and functional boxy jackets, suede vests, and organza bombers. The colour palette - including bright blues, yellows and ochres - were also reminiscent of the mineral world, and so were the shoulder bags in a crackled pattern.
You may argue that, as a whole, the collection wasn't extremely new, but the main inspiration was carried out in a coherent way (and there weren't too many coherent collections during New York Fashion Week - think Rodarte...). While keeping his main inspiration firmly in mind, the designer also managed to avoid being too literal in his exploration of the mineral and stone world, and this allowed him to provide enough pieces (in particular the designs inspired by geode formations) with commercial appeal.
The invitation card to Y-3's runway show was emblazoned with the words "Meaningless Excitement" in holographic print. This is probably the best motto to define the fashion industry at the moment, but also the relentless fashion weeks. The slogan wasn't actually created by Yohji Yamamoto for his collaboration with Adidas (that celebrated its 10th anniversary this year), but by Peter Saville.
Considered as one the most influential graphic designers in Great Britain (but also the most reluctant since he often stated in interviews that he never set to become a graphic designer), Saville is well known for his Haçienda posters and Factory Records covers such as Joy Division and New Order’s albums, including "Unknown Pleasures" (1979) based on an image of radio waves from pulsar CP 1919, "Movement" (1981), with its art plagiarised from the cover of a 1932 essay by Italian Futurist Fortunato Depero in honour of Marinetti's visit to the Trentino Region, and "Power Corruption and Lies" (1983), based on the painting "A Basket of Roses" by Henri Fantin-Latour.
In the '90s, after returning from Los Angeles (where he had tried to launch a multimedia practice that eventually reveled unsuccessful) to Great Britain, he started working with various designers, including Yohji Yamamoto, Jil Sander, John Galliano, Christian Dior, and Raf Simons.
Inspired by freedom, provocation and a post-modern vocation, Saville created fresh and timeless designs for famous fashion houses and brands, yet he also retained a sort of disilluded position about the industry, that he sees as a trap that pushes people to spend, spend, spend.
This collection - based on sporty and functional yet elegant silhouettes - was conceived by Yamamoto as a reaction to fast and useless fashion that "uses" people. Saville came up with the ironic slogans "Meaningless excitement" and "For further advice please contact our fashion advisors" that were printed on T-shirts, but also with the multicoloured graphic stripes for micro-mesh T-shirt dresses.
Saville hates logos that easily identify a brand imposing a sort of livestock mark on the wearer, this is the main reason why the traditional Adidas triple stripe was either turned into an abstract multi-coloured rainbow or into a series of black and white graphic lines crossing T-shirts and stockings. One perfect example of logo deconstruction came up in a ball gown made with stretch material, decorated with three ribbon-like white stripes appliqued around the bodice and the hem.
The combination of different creative forces such as image, music and fashion may inform both Saville and Yamamoto's careers, but the most important point about them is that they both see fashion as something that becomes powerful when people uses it to create their own personal image, vocabulary and world, and not when people are used by it.
The merit (and the fault) of this collection stands in having turned the commonplace into the desirable (the menswear looks were mainly borrowed from street styles...), but that in many ways is also the merit (and the fault) of Peter Saville's work in general.
So far, though, this one remains the collection with the best motto of the current New York Fashion Week and also the best timed collaboration. Homaged in 2011 during the "Postmodernism" exhibition at the Victoria & Albert Museum, Saville was recently awarded the prestigious London Design medal, and will appear at the Global Design Forum on 16 September, as part of the London Design Festival (until 22nd September 2013). That's a good enough reason for some "meaningful excitement" for Saville's fans.
The fast rhythms of our lives quite often mean that we see an image, look at a drawing, hear a new word and we instantly forget about it, store it in our minds only to reference it later, when, having forgotten we already saw/heard it, we suddenly think we actually created it. Rather than "creators", we should therefore consider ourselves as "borrowers", though there are "borrowing minds" among us with enough skills to reinvent a theme and take it to the next level.
A clear example of this phenomenon manifested for example last year at the Architecture Biennale in Venice: there were so many designs, projects and buildings that seemed to move, borrow or reinvent Zaha Hadid's futurism, her forms, shapes and fondness for parametric patterns, that you wondered if all our cities are going to look the same in a few decades' time.
A year has gone since then, in the meantime this process of borrowing and appropriating has become the rule in many different disciplines. From what we have so far seen on the New York runways, the Spring/Summer 2014 collections are not immune from the borrowing exercise, with some collections displaying on top of that the so-called Zaha Hadid syndrome, consisting in indirectly referencing architectural themes and motifs that by now have entered our minds and imaginations.
The shape of the female body may have been Victoria Beckham's preoccupation when she first started producing her designs, but the focus of her new collection moved onto shape in general involving rigid ruffle hems, diagonal lines and boxy tunics. Yet the geometric form that linked her the most to Zaha Hadid was the architectural triangle, a motif many designers rediscovered in the last few years.
In her case, the triangle was replicated in double-crepe and bonded to organza tops and blouses, reminding of the spatial folded plate triangular lattice structure employed by Hadid in the design of Guangzhou Opera House to provide a sense of seamlessness that emphasises the crystalline nature of the design including in its perimeter structure 64 spatially oblique triangular or quadrangular plates, generating 104 spatial ridge lines.
Threeasfour explored the possibilities of 3D effects, at times coming up with three-dimensional geometric forms, at others laser cutting them into white silk, leggings and coats or 3D printingIris van Herpen-evoking cocooning structures around the body of the models.
The design trio developed their 3D printing designs in white resin (also employed to create overstructures for the footwear) with architect Bradley Rothenberg. Sculptural and geometric shapes and platonic solids prevailed in most of the dresses, triumphing in the final one with cubes and octahedrons that seemed as if they were growing from the fabric.
The collection - entitled "Mer Ka Ba" and aimed at promoting unity among religions - integrated elements of mosques, churches, and synagogues. The patterns borrowed from religious places called to mind a futuristic structure by Hadid, King Adbullah Petroleum Studies & Research centre in Riyadh. The latter is a cellular structure of crystalline forms that emerges from the desert landscape, shifting and evolving, and its research room represents a sort of modern take on Islamic mosque architectures.
There is an interesting dichotomy in this structure that calls to mind the concept behind Threeasfour's collection. The structure is indeed strong and protective outside and porous on the inside with a series of sheltered courtyards providing soft light and a system of layered zones that creates transitions from the hot exterior to the cool interior. Threeasfour's designs have that same "protective Vs soft" dichotomy, apart from being based on the layered principle.
Carolina Herrera may have visited the Zaha Hadid exhibition that took place in Philadelphia between 2011 and 2012, and that featured complex architectures and fluid geometries, furniture, objects, accessories and footwear in a dynamic setting and a sculptural environment.
Herrera's dresses featured undulating graphic lines, based on curvilinear geometries and replicated on soft fabrics that completed the language of fluid movement. The lines were replicated on both day and evening wear, but it was a shame that these architectural curves suspended between the optical à la Germana Marucelli and the kinetic à la Carlos Cruz-Diez and Jesús Rafael Soto looked a bit dated silhouette-wise and weren't accompanied by Hadid-esque jewellery and accessories.
Moving from tennis Louise Goldin went instead high on a smoothly parametric curve, creating the most saleable and wearable collection seen on the New York Fashion Week runways so far. Goldin took indeed the classic tennis dress, curved its edges, added sinuous cutout motifs, or layered it on top of shirts and skirts.
The smooth, dynamic and curvilinear shapes of seamless designs called to mind the silhouette of the Abu Dhabi Peforming Arts Centre with its biology inspired abstract forms developing in space, or the unbroken curves of the Heydar Aliyev Centre, in Baku, Azerbaijan (a controversial project since it was commissioned by the local regime well known for human rights abuses; this project will be opening in a couple of week's time). The centre is characterised by a fluid form that, emerging from the landscape, folds and merges with it, falling into a curve-like wave, blurring the boundary between building and ground.
The architectural theme was infused also in the knits with waffled and piped motifs, graphic webs inspired by tennis rackets or green courts, abstract patterns based on photographs taken at the Coachella festival and unbroken stitches.
There seemed to be another theme instead in the lasered lace skirts, in this case they were more to do with a bird's eye view of an architectural plan or with renderings like the ones for the Kartal Pendik Masterplan, a winning competition proposal by Zaha Hadid for a new city centre on the East Bank of Istanbul, a sort of urban grid formed by interconnected networks of open spaces meandering through the city.
Who knows, maybe we have become so familiar with certain shapes and forms surrounding us that we are indirectly referencing them in clothes and accessories. Or maybe we are doing it on purpose hoping that, if spectacular architecture brought regenerative miracles to cities, it may as well help designers bringing miracles on the shop floor (and in our wardrobes). In the meantime, as the fashion weeks continue, feel free to spot symptoms of the Zaha Hadid syndrome by yourself, I can assure you it can be a fun game.
The contemporary fascination with worlds in miniature may have a lot to do with our collective dissatisfaction with our modern lives, but there is also something else behind Lori Nix's tiny universes of apocalypse and destruction.
As writer, critic, artist, and educator Barbara Pollack highlights in the opening essay to the recently released volume The City (Decode Books), Nix was born in a small town in western Kansas, witnessing as a child tornadoes, blizzards, snow storms, floods and other assorted disasters. As a young girl, Nix also developed a passion for sci-fi and disaster films from the '60s and '70s that filled her imagination with dystopian visions of the future.
When she grew up Nix studied photography and ceramics, creating her first apocalyptic dioramas in 1998 and developing a series of images entitled "Accidentally Kansas". Nix's works are indeed not made to be admired, but to be photographed, challenging in this way the viewers' presumption of reality while prompting people to confront (and exorcise maybe...) apocalyptic scenes caused by catastrophes we do not even want to talk about.
The volume The City focuses on Nix's latest project, a city of the future emptied of its human inhabitants. Nix has been working on this new work for eight years, shifting her point of view from the outside onto the dilapidated architectural interiors of different buildings and spaces.
We don't know what happened to the city in question - it may have been a nuclear disaster, a natural calamity, or a "Day of the Triffids" case - what we do know is that there aren't any survivors populating the local library, an anatomy classroom with its miniature models of the human body, a large shopping mall and a beauty salon, an aquarium and a theatre, a space centre, a museum and a church.
Computer machines are rusting in a control rooms, an eery silence fills a busy laundromat, the walls of pretty buildings are deteriorating, and vegetation is triumphing in most cases, with plants and trees growing among the ruins, and sand dunes invading the subway, giving the impression that this may be the scene that Logan saw in his run from his futuristic city sealed off from the outside world on his way to Sanctuary.
Nix creates her meticulously detailed scenes and sets with Kathleen Gerber: it takes months to actually build them and weeks to photograph them, but the effort is worth. Her work won the artist and photographer many honours including a 2010 and 2004 New York Foundation for the Arts Individual Artist Grant, while her images have been on display during different exhibitions and are also represented in the permanent collections of various museums.
Nix explains on her site that she is inspired in her work by landscape painting - particularly the Hudson River School of Painting and artists Thomas Cole, Asher Brown Durand, Frederich Edwin Church, Martin Johnson Heade, and the Romantic painter Casper David Friedrich - but also by the concept of sublime expressed by Edmund Burke.
Though threatened by what we see in her dioramas, we are indeed attracted and fascinated, feeling the same degree of astonishment that Burke identified as that state of the soul in which all its emotions are suspended with some degree of horror. And while we may not be too sure about our future reserving us the same endless scenes of dystopic apocalypse, for the time being seeing them in a photograph or printed on the page of a book, is enough to shake our indifference, awaken our imagination and give us a taste of the great power of sublime.
The City by Lori Nix is available from Decode Books.
All images in this post courtesy Lori Nix/Decode Books.
If you asked several fashion critics what they dislike about the industry at the moment, they would probably provide you with the same answer - the relentlessly fast rhythms that are destroying it, while also ruining the mental sanity of many people involved in it. As sponsors spread their tentacles on the various fashion weeks turning fashion into an empty branding exercise, it becomes evident that one thing is missing from many fashion collections (if we do not count the lack of research in general...) – a coherent narration. But could fashion learn a lesson from art? Let's see.
Chinese artist Kan Xuan mainly works with videos, photography and installations. Quite often she focuses on repetitions, creating short vignettes focused on certain objects. At times they have a humorous and ironic twist, at others they explore issues regarding personal identity (like her 1999 "Kanxuan, Ai!" video in which she ran through the Beijing subway tunnels calling out her name) or they are casual and almost meangingless, analysing the futility of carrying out certain actions (her 2002 video "Onion", looks at the futility of peeling apart a pair of onions and trying to reassemble them).
For "Millet Mounds" (2012), currently on display at the 55th International Venice Art Biennale, the artist assembled a series of 207 brief videos looking at Chinese history. The name of the work refers to the nickname given to burial mounds by Northern Chinese villagers (as they resemble harvest-time grain piles).
The videos document imperial tombs in China with a stop-motion technique that consists in stitching together hundreds of individual still photographs. While being a compendium of the ancient past and a catalogue of events seen through a very personal point of view, the assembled videos (shot in hundreds of days during an on-the-road research) represent also a trivial attempt to recover the past.
Xuan's "Millet Mounds" could be interpreted as a sort of narration of sketches in movement, a video tapestry that - though complex and characterised by extremely fast rhythms - still retains a narrative thread and a meaning. Would it be possible for fashion to regain its narrative power even at its fast-paced nature?
In the end it was an Italian documentary - Sacro GRA by Gianfranco Rosi - that won the Golden Lion at the 70th Venice International Film Festival. The Golden Lion going to Sacro GRA represented a bit of a surprise among the films that populated this edition of the competition, characterised by refined animation (Kaze tachinu by Hayao Miyazaki), dystopia (The Zero Theorem by Terry Gilliam), aliens walking in Glasgow's city centre (Under the Skin by Jonathan Glazer), children's exploitation (Miss Violence by Alexandros Avranas) and necrophilia (Child of God by James Franco).
The documentary was shot around the Grande Raccordo Anulare (GRA), the ring road enclosing Rome in a deadly embrace that runs for roughly 70 km, and that easily turns into a trap for many inexperienced drivers.
Rosi unveils in his documentary a series of micro worlds populating the Raccordo, discovering life behind the cars and the noises, spotting among the others a botanist making audio recordings of the interiors of palm trees to detect and then poison the insects that are devouring them; a kitsch cigar-smoking prince doing gymnastics on the roof of his castle and a paramedic in an ambulance eternally on duty treating car accident victims along the vast road.
One of the best dialogues - or rather monologues - remains the one by the eel fisherman living on a houseboat beneath an overpass along the Tiber River who launches into a tirade against a newspaper article about imported eels in Italy.
The power of the film stands in that mixture of humanity (that also represents various states of mind) behind the concrete and in the way the director gives it a voice.
Director Rosi claimed in the official statement accompanying his film: "I carried Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities with me as I was scouting locations for the film. It is a book about travel, which I see as a relationship between a place and its inhabitants in the desires and the confusion that are generated by city life, and that we ultimately draw into ourselves. The book advances along myriad paths and allows itself to be carried along by a series of mental states that overtake and overlap one another. It has a complex structure that the reader can navigate depending on his state of mind and life circumstances. The book led me forward during the many months working on the film when the real GRA seemed to elude me, more invisible than ever."
Sacro GRA may not mark the final Renaissance of Italian cinema, but it shows that something is stirring: the 70th Venice Film Festival was indeed the first edition that admitted documentaries to the main competition and it's somehow symbolical that an Italian documentary won the prestigious award (besides no Italian film has won the Golden Lion since 1998).
Rosi's documentary may also be pointing wannabe directors towards a new genre: the architectural documentary or the architecturally oriented fiction film.
Foreign tourists who may be looking for your typical Rome locations will be disappointed, but cinema goers interested in spotting the real people living hidden away in our cities will love it. The Grande Raccordo Anulare becomes indeed a place where connections become possible, where histories, experiences and personal tales meet and combine, and where certain characters leave behind the sphere of liminality they are inhabiting to take centre stage.
The complex and iterative patterns of the late Los Angeles artist Channa Horwitz were already mentioned in a previous post linking art and fashion. Horwitz's motifs come back to mind today in connection with a Spring/Summer 2014 collection, Tanya Taylor's, presented during the first day of New York Fashion Week (this was also Taylor's first proper runway show for Spring).
Though the designer was inspired by Caro Niederer’s landscape paintings in the pieces showcased in the second part of her collection and in particular by Niederer's combinations of pinks, oranges and blues - shades that Taylor transformed into floral motifs that she hand-painted (Taylor is also a painter) on white leather pieces - the first stripy looks that alternated white and blue with colourful elements indirectly called to mind Horwitz's contemplations of minute fractions of colours.
In Horwitz's diagram-like works such as "Sonakinatography", "Canon" and "Variations and Inversions on a Rhythm", there is sort of numeric progression. The artist often reduced each square inch of graph paper into sixty-four squares, limiting herself to using just eight colours. In some of her works blocks of colours represent movements or sounds, and, in some cases, her compositions look a bit like scores for player pianos.
Taylor avoided the risk of falling into the “nautical-meets-childish-rainbow-stripes” trap by playing with symmetries and asymmetries, a trick that allowed her to get a sense of movement through colours, while giving some of her pieces the player piano score look. The rigid geometry of some of the looks was broken by the stilettos with pointy vamps made in collaboration with Paul Andrew and designed to extend up the foot.
In the last couple of years the connection between architecture and fashion became stronger and most of the designers, themes and topics explored in the "Intimate Architecture" exhibition (1982, Massachusetts Institute of Technology) were rediscovered.
The latest one was Ronaldus Shamask, but there is one left (as highlighted in posts here and there) - Stephen Manniello, the only American-born designer part of that exhibition.
Born in 1953 in Brooklyn, New York, Manniello first started his career making handbags and jewellery that also captured the attention of Letitia Baldridge, social secretary to the White House during the Kennedy administration (it was Baldridge who introduced Manniello to Nancy Reagan insisting he made her some bags).
Manniello was known for creating garments and accessories based on geometrical forms, in an attempt to find the "Golden Mean of Design". Firmly believing that clean lines are the starting point of fashion, Manniello would reduce garments and accessories to a primal shape that he then turned into a lively piece through colours and structural simplicity.
In the '80s he created for example a series of triangle/cylinder handle-bags based on the ancient arrow case, the quiver (the bags were made in Italy by Rossi Moda; Manniello also made some signature cylinder quiver bags for Mrs Reagan).
In 1986 a jury comprising Carolina Herrera and Giorgio Sant'Angelo among the others awarded him the More Fashion Award for his collection comprising tight jersey skits and lattice-decorated jackets.
Manniello died in 2009 and to remember him I'm republishing today a poem (it seems apt since New York Fashion Week has just started - ah, if only the "reduce" mantra of this poem would inspire a reduction of the schedule or of the amount of designs in the collections...) that was part of the "Intimate Architecture" catalogue and that summarised Manniello's geometry-related beliefs in fashion (style-wise it reminds a bit of Alexander Trocchi's poetry). Enjoy!
Reductionist American Fashion Begin. Reduce. Circle. Square. Triangle. Classical symmetry. Ancient geometry. Ahaxagoras, Poseidonius, Pythagoras; 2 2 2 C equals A plus B Circle: 44 inch diameter. Square: 44 inches by 44 inches Triangle: 44 inches by 44 inches by 44 inches. Equilateral symmetry. Reduce Geometric form To softness. Reduce. With charmeuse. Create the perfect circle within circle, create the perfect square within square, create the perfect triangle triangle. Beat an empty barrel with the handle of a broom. 44, 22, boom, boom, boom No buttons. No zippers. Take a perfect shape And make it soft. Hand finish. Replenish. Drink plenty of liquids. Take two aspirins every two hours. And get lots of two, two, two. Reduce, reduce, reduce. With charmeuse. Reductionist American Fashion quivers, it's so new Quivers. Cylinders. The new old new bag quivers, Quivers for arrows. Cylinders for Euclid. Quivers for Nancy. Reduce, reduce, reduce. Quantum nathematics. Reductionist American Fashion. REDUCTIONIST AMERICAN FASHION reductionist american fashion. Reduce. Reduce. Reduce, reduce, reduce. With charmeuse Begin. Reduce.
"The greatest designer of them all", this is how Balenciaga described Charles James. An inspiration for many contemporary fashion designers, and famous for draping fabrics directly on the body, James could be considered as the couturier that fashion history forgot.
Maybe not a genius, but one of the genuine "architects" in the history of fashion, James was known for his designs that, though characterised by sculpted fabrics, strategic horsehair paddings, layers of stiffened tulle, crinoline-style boning and abstract and complex shapes produced through experimentation with different textiles, were still quite light, a trick he probably learnt from the early years of his career when he worked as a milliner.
Born in 1906 near London from an upper-class family, James was sent to Chicago to work in the architectural design department of a utilities company after he was expelled from school in the early '20s for a sexual escapade.
He eventually moved on and worked for a local newspaper, but, in 1926, opened a hat shop, followed in 1928 by another shop in New York where he also made dresses.
In 1930 he opened a couture house in London under the name E. Haweis (his father's middle names) James, but went brankrupt and quickly had to start in new premises.
Though he apparead for the first time in Vogue in 1932, his business wasn't too solid and James was struck by another financial crisis in 1934.
From 1937 he started showing his collections first in Paris and then in London, while selling his creations to American stores including Bergdorf Goodman.
Three years later he moved to New York opening Charles James Inc on East 57 Street. For a few years he designed couture for Elizabeth Arden, then opened another house in his own name on Madison Avenue and returned to Paris in 1947.
Many prominent women became James' clients and for them he created dramatic shapes and silhouettes that quite often moved from historical references, gowns that featured complicated understructures, combinations of fabrics of different colours and textures that could give his pieces a special sense of movement and vitality.
His "Butterfly" dress featured for example a tight fitted bodice with an enormous skirt that formed huge tulle wings (twenty five yards of tulle were employed for this design).
James's most famous dress is probably the "Sirene" in which silk was wrapped, draped and gathered round a slender rigid inner sheath, even though the designer himself regarded the "Four-Leaf Clover" gown as the best he ever did.
The dress was originally commissioned to James by Augustine Hearst, wife of William Randolph Hearts Jr, for the Eisenhower Inaugural Ball in 1953.
James didn't complete it in time for the function (being late in completing his orders became in later years one of the main reasons behind James' fall from grace), but the gown turned into an iconic piece for its construction and for being the embodiment of James' fascination with mathematics and geometry. The garment was indeed constructed from thirty pattern pieces, twenty-eight of them cut in duplicate.
The design was based on a reworked lobed hemline from the '30s combined with a quatrefoil millinery model from 1948. The result was a gown made with four layers and an inner taffeta slip, a structured under petticoat, a petticoat flare and an overdress. Interestingly enough, the four lobes are not of equal dimensions, even though they fit within a circle.
A perfect visual summary of James' best pieces is probably offered by the picture known as "The James Encyclopaedia", taken in 1948 by Cecil Beaton who remained James' friend throughout his life. The image shows nine models wearing elegant gowns in pastel colours posing in an ample salon with neutral walls.
An exhibition entitled "Decade of Design" organised at the Brooklyn Museum in 1948 also featured a collection of pieces created by James for Millicent Rogers (an important client for James for whom he designed from the '30s until her death in 1953; Rogers often suggested him fabric, colour and cut of her gowns), but, as the years passed, his star began to wane.
In 1961, three years after he went bankrupt, his marriage ended (he had married in the '50s, though he was known to be gay), and, in 1964, he moved to the Chelsea Hotel where he opened a small studio.
While his reputation fell, illustrator Antonio Lopez became his friend and tried to draw James' best designs.
James died alone at the Chelsea Hotel in 1978; a solo exhibition had paid homage to him in 1975, and this event was followed by a posthumous retrospective held at the Brooklyn Museum in the early '80s.
The most recent event about Charles James was an exhibition at Kent State University in 2007, even though his designs reappeared here and there throughout the years in collective exhibitions.
Named after James’ provisional title for his own autobiography, "Charles James: Beyond Fashion", the Metropolitan Museum exhibition will open in May 2014 and will feature around 100 pieces including ball gowns and iconic designs like the "Four-Leaf Clover", the "Butterfly" and the "Taxi" dress, while the white quilted satin "Swan" down jacket with tubular shapes constructing a muscular exoskeleton around the garment (a design that inspired a few seasons ago also Rick Owens) may have to be requested on loan from the Victoria & Albert Museum in London.
In the last few years the Costume Institute opted for events that could attract high numbers of people that were dedicated to contemporary fashion designers, brands and trends (Alexander McQueen, Prada and Schiaparelli, and Punk).
This event may mark a return to form and to in-depth research for the museum. Hopefully the exhibition will feature interesting studies on architectural shapes and silhouettes that may also shed new light on Charles James' less known pieces.