Winning an award is always a reason to celebrate, but last weekend Iris Van Herpen had a double reason to celebrate. The fashion designer won indeed two prizes at the Dutch Design Awards.
The flexible 3-D printed garments in her "Voltage" Haute Couture collection, showcased in Paris in January 2013, won her the "Product - Best Fashion" category (Irenebrination readers will be happy to know that Christien Meindertsma's book The Collected Knitwork of Loes Veenstra won the "Product - Best Autonomous Design" category; you can check out all the winners here).
Van Herpen also won the Golden Eye Award. The selection committee stated about the Dutch designer's "Voltage": "With this collection, Iris van Herpen once again unites different worlds: architecture, technology, fashion and 3D printing. The committee highly appreciates her connective strength and crossover approach. This is what we want to see in the world: designers working together. Moreover, the result is stunning."
As highlighted in this statement, the award could be considered as "a collective prize" since the "Voltage" designs are the result of a collaboration with architects Philip Beesley and Julia Koerner, and Neri Oxman, assistant professor of media arts and sciences at the MIT Media Lab.
"Iris’s Golden Eye Award is particularly encouraging, because it implies that the risk of opening up to other disciplines can be a source of growth and refreshment; it invites an optimism of spirit," Canadian architect and sculptor Beesley told Irenebrination via email.
"Of course working with hybrids and multiple technologies requires you to carefully listen, and tread carefully as well. But that still seems contrary to the sense that we are only consumers and that we damage and that we use and that every step that we take is somehow at the expense of something else. Fertility seems to define this new couture."
In "Voltage" Iris van Herpen explored the "electricity of the body" and topics such as strength and movement, but also space and therefore the relationship of the body with what surrounds us.
"In our conversations, I found myself relating to vestment in Iris's studio as being a kind of 'possibility space' that wraps in multiple layers around a body and reaches outward into multiple octaves of space," Beesley recounts.
"We tend to speak of hovering and resonating, and seething and hardening and cloaking. Recently, we’ve been speaking of making clothing and buildings by controlling energy charges. The greatest intimacy seems wound up in touches of trembling exposure. That movement starts to be not just outward but also inward, suggesting traffic under and above the skin, implying both intimate play and also emotional wrenching."
While fans of Beesley may easily spot in Van Herpen's "Voltage" references to his fascinating and fantastically futuristic structures, the architect says his recent work has been directly influenced by the dialogue with Iris.
"This past year, the exchanges motivated practical development of new fabrics that went into the 'Voltage' collection, including a halo-like cloud of delicate translucent fronds softly wrapping around our bodies, and a new 3D lace made from acrylic and silicone that inverted a normal architecture where you have rigid skeletons and then tension elements inserted within that. Our own bodies have a network of sinews and muscular fascia around a skeletal structure, suggesting a hovering, vitally poised system of interlinked components. Similarly, the new fabrics worked to create shivering cross-currents responding to intimate touch."
The two awards won by Van Herpen prove that hybrid researches into the architecture and fashion fields can lead to stimulating results, and help designing innovative fabrics, structures and materials. Hopefully in future we will see more clever collaborations along these lines.
The vapid society we live in has produced in the last few years too many supposed style icons whose main occupation in life seems that of attracting the attention of the photographers by showing off their designer outfits (usually borrowed with the help of some complacent PR agent) at grand events and glamorous fashion shows.
Yet take away from them the carefully assembled layers of clothes and accessories, and you will struggle to find any real substance and any real purpose in life. History has proved, though, that there have been some genuinely eccentric, glamorous and bizarre characters worth of being remembered throughout the decades as real icons of style; one of them was Marchioness Casati.
A graphic novel by Italian artist Vanna Vinci, published a few months ago in both French and Italian as La Casati - La muse égoiste/La musa egoista by Dargaud and Rizzoli Lizard (the title in English means The Selfish Muse; non-French/Italian speakers don't be put off, because the drawings are absolutely magnificent) currently celebrates the heiress, muse, and living work of art.
Vinci starts the story with the birth of Luisa Adele Rosa Maria von Amman in Milan in 1881 into a family of cotton magnates of Austrian origin. Luisa and her older sister Francesca were still in their teens when, at the premature death of both their parents, they inherited an enormous fortune.
In 1900 Luisa married Marquis Camillo Casati Stampa of Soncino, giving birth to their only child, Cristina. The couple legally separated in 1914, but by then Luisa had already started recreating her persona and leading an extravagant life.
Vinci adopts a sort of documentary style to tell the story, interviewing the people who met Luisa Casati, from famous artists to writers and socialites. Muse and lover of Gabriele D'Annunzio who called her "Coré" and took inspiration from her in Forse che sì forse che no (Maybe Yes, Maybe No) and in the unfinished La Figure de Cire; made immortal in the artworks of numerous artists, including painters Giovanni Boldini, Kees van Dongen, Augustus John, and by the Futurists Giacomo Balla, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti and Fortunato Depero, Luisa Casati spent most of her life moving between Rome, Paris, Capri and Venice.
Furnishing her lavish houses, buying extraordinary fashion creations, organising magnificent balls and dinners (populated at times by disturbing life-size wax replicas of herself and other guests), were just some of her hobbies.
Her main aim in life was indeed just one - becoming a living work of art. The epitome of female dandyism, La Casati is often portrayed in the pages of this graphic novel as a dominant character who shocked, provoked and astonished people: Vinci draws her walking around Venice (where she took up residence in Palazzo Venier dei Leoni, today the Peggy Guggenheim Museum) wearing just a fur coat, accompanied by a black manservant, and a cheetah on a bejewelled leash, or staying at the Villa San Michele in Capri (where she shocked many with her exotic animals including a snake that she also used to adorn herself...) and posing naked for painter Romaine Brooks.
The life of Luisa Casati offers Vinci the chance to create a sort of visually intriguing summary of the early 1900s: while leafing through the pages of this book readers will meet key figures, including Paul Poiret, Serge Diaghilev, Nijinsky, Isadora Duncan, Romain de Tirtoff (Erté), Man Ray and Cecil Beaton.
Vinci's attention to details in the carefully assembled outfits favoured by La Casati is obsessive: though Mariano Fortuny's gowns are missing, there are lavish Oriental designs by Paul Poiret and Léon Bakst, iconic costumes that the marchioness donned at balls (the armoured Saint Sebastian costume for a ball organised by Count Etienne de Beaumont entered history since it accidentally eletrocuted her...) or drawings directly inspired by famous images of the rebel muse (in one page Casati wears the White Arlequin costume, appearing as a vision out of her portrait by Giulio De Blaas), characterised throughout the book by her cadaverous pallor, scarlet lips and disorderly red or green dyed hair.
Unfortunately, Luisa Casati's life of grand excesses, ruined her: with a debt of 25 million dollars and the impossibility of paying back her creditors, she declared bankruptcy, sold all of her estate and moved to London where her daughter Cristina was living.
Vinci chronicles also the last few years lived in poverty when Casati walked around the English capital in a shabby fur coat, veiled hat, red hair and inseparable fake eyelashes, a haunting ghost of a glorious past that was no more.
The graphic novel artist also shows her at lunch with her grandchild Moorea (the wife of politician and diarist Woodrow Wyatt; she later married the adman Brinsley Black, named as one of the best-dressed Englishmen in the inaugural issue of Men in Vogue in 1965), shortly before she died in 1957.
Luisa Casati was buried in Brompton Cemetery with her leopard-trimmed cape and false eyelashes; one of her embalmed Pekinese dog also accompanied her in the coffin. The epitaph on her gravestone, taken from Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra, read "Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale her infinite variety".
The last two words on the epitaph perfectly summarised La Casati's life and her will to constantly reinvent herself: after dominating European society in the early 1900s with her peculiar style in which she mixed the sumptuous and the noir, the feminine and the masculine, Luisa Casati kept on inspiring artists and fashion designers, including John Galliano (Dior's Spring/Summer 1998 and Autumn/Winter 2007-2008 Haute Couture collections), Alexander McQueen (Spring/Summer 2007) and Karl Lagerfeld (Chanel Cruise 2009-10 collection). You can bet that not many modern icons from our times will manage to do the same in 50 years' time.
A larger-than-life individual, Casati granted herself and the artists who surrounded her immortality, but in her life of grand excesses there is a warning: Casati dilapidated her fortune on herself, the tangible proof that, in this constant process of blurring the edges between fashion and art, it was her heart and not her head that ruled.
Yet Vinci does not judge the indomitable muse and rebel as a self-centred and selfish individual, but provides the readers with a terrific story told through wonderful drawings. It doesn't matter if you can actually speak French or Italian - La Casati by Vanna Vinci is definitely a must.
A quick reminder for the readers who are or may find themselves in Paris this week. The exhibition "Jean Dubuffet. Coucou Bazar" opens indeed on Thursday at Les Arts Décoratifs.
We already looked in a previous post at this event, developed in collaboration with the Fondation Dubuffet to celebrate the 40th anniversary of this iconic animated painting created in the '70s, but this reminder is also a very good excuse to publish a couple of lovely pictures about the costume restoration.
"Jean Dubuffet. Coucou Bazar", 24th October - 1st December 2013,Les Arts Décoratifs, 107 rue de Rivoli, 75001 Paris, France.
In previous posts we looked at the work of illustrator, accessory designers and print lover Pierre-Louis Mascia for his own brand and his production of scarves, blankets, bags, small accessories and knits. Let's look today at his contribution as Art Director of Italian brand Franco Ferrari. Founded in 1978 this leading company in the high-end fabric accessories sector is known for its high-quality products and for being one of the first ones to use digital systems to print on fabrics. In 2002, Franco Ferrari became part of the Achille Pinto S.p.A.Group, but maintained its independence, name and high-level garment making. While the company does embrace new technologies, manual processes are indeed still employed - the hemmings of its pieces for examples are still made by hand and the company focuses its production on exclusive designs that cannot be replicated by other clothing manufacturers.
Mascia became Franco Ferrari's Art Director in 2011, and since then he has been innovating it, combining his own visionary prints and patterns with the company's original archival patterns and know-how. The Autumn/Winter 2013-14 collection features brightly coloured graphic motifs and cartoon inspired macro prints mixed with classic silk tie patterns. The size of the silk scarves has also been maximised (90cmx90cm; 70cmx70cm) to guarantee a fun and hyper-real effect. One of the scarves features for example an image of a colourful tartan suit, with matching hat, gloves and bags and a book of fairy tales, and could be interpreted as Mascia's ironic answer to the persistent "look at my outfit" mania.
The palette of the new collection - in luxurious materials like ultra soft silk and cashmere - goes from Autumnal shades like dark grey to soft neutrals and brighter and fun nuances such as bright red and blues. Mascia is not interested in trends, but in timeless pieces that show his passion for prints and juxtapositions of motifs and materials. Conforming to his own principles, this capsule collection of hand-printed designs, made employing multiple dyeing techniques, features investment pieces that will never go out of fashion.
The collection is distributed in Milan, Paris and New York in shops and boutiques including La Rinascente, l'Eclaireur, Saks Fifth Avenue and Harvey Nichols.
The latest project of imaginative director Wes Anderson may be due in March 2014, yet, as the trailer was released just a few days ago, news about its impressive cast quickly spread on the Internet.
His fans may be undoubtedly excited to know that the movie will feature a long list of stars, including Ralph Fiennes, Edward Norton, Adrien Brody, Willem Dafoe, Léa Seydoux, Jason Schwartzman, Jude Law, Tilda Swinton, Harvey Keitel, Bill Murray, and Owen Wilson among the others, but there are some glorious news for costume design fans as well. The costume designer on The Grand Budapest Hotel is indeed Milena Canonero who turned to the historical Tirelli tailoring house to make the costumes.
Set in the late '20s, the film follows the vicissitudes of Gustave (Fiennes), the much-loved concierge working at a famous European hotel, and lobby boy Zero Moustafa (Revolori). Trouble starts when Madame D. (an aged Swinton rendered unrecognisable thanks to heavy make up that includes a massive grey beehive, wrinkles and age spots) is found murdered. The concierge becomes the prime suspect after he inherits a famous painting. While Gustave and Zero run away from the law and from Madame D.'s angry son, the young boy falls in love with Agatha (Saoirse Ronan), a fellow hotel worker with an enigmatic birth mark on her face.
Apparently, the film will be a bit of a clever assemblage (the poster seems to hint towards a sort of pastel kitsch with some sublime added via Caspar David Friedrich's The Watzmann) with references to Hollywood comedies, vintage moods and the usually bizarre characters who populate Anderson's universe.
Though the director won't rely on the costumes alone to move the story forward, the trailer features quite a few eye-catching scenes with unusual colour pairing such as tomato red and violet or ochre and purple (the latter slightly reminiscent - especially when employed for the hotel staff costumes - of the uniforms in Valerio Zurlini's 1976 film The Desert of the Tartars), while the film poster with that emphasis on pink shades somehow calls to mind the palette favoured by Jean Claude-Duplessis in his porcelain vases and vessels (View this photo).
Milena Canonero - nominated to five Oscars and winner of three Academy Awards - already worked with Anderson on The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (2004) and The Darjeeling Limited (2007) and collaborated with the Tirelli costume house on Sofia Coppola's Marie Antoinette (2006). The latter won her an Oscar for best costume designer, inspiring multiple fashion collections, photo shoots and covers on glossy magazines and a barrage of useless ramblings about cute pastel colours on your average style blog.
We may not know what to expect from this film, but you can bet there will be an Oscar nomination for Canonero's costumes. Ah, yes, expect also some Prada pilfering in the S/S 2015 menswear collections and A/W 2014-15 womenswear, almost too probable given that there are already some links with Anderson in previous Prada collections and that he co-directed with Roman Coppola's the advert for the fashion house perfume Candy (starring Léa Seydoux).
PS Thank you, Anna Dello Russo, for copying and pasting on Vogue Japan (25th october 2013) and on your own blog (15 Mach 2014) part of this post (the section about Milena Canonero) without acknowledging it. I know this was probably one of the first posts that came out when you Googled this film, but I thought your 'editing' and consulting jobs would give you enough money to cover time for your own researches online (and I hoped you would do better and more in depth researches). Damn it, if they don't pay you enough to research your pieces and write them in a more original way, do let us know it, because we perfectly understand you may then be in the desperate need of some pocket money for your next Chanel/Fendi bag.
During the last few days we looked at the possibilities that the aerial perspective and a humble material such as cardboard can offer us in fashion. Let's continue our architecturally fashionable explorations by looking this time not at a collection for the next Spring, but at the current Autumn/Winter season.
Italian designer Roberta Redaelli combined art and architecture in her A/W 1013-14 "In Prospettiva" (In Perspective) collection. The latter includes designs incorporating bits and pieces of paintings by Italian artist Ester Maria Negretti and of Palladio's studies for his Olympic Theatre.
Redaelli also played with another dichotomy, combining '50s silhouettes with high-tech materials such as the Sensitive Ultra Light Firming textile, a light yet compact fabric by Italian warp knitter Eurojersey that mainly produces experimental textiles integrating active ingredients capable of improving the elasticity and brightness of the skin.
The main concept behind the collection - perspective - is intriguing since looking at something from a different angle can offer us refreshing views (and in fashion we should all try and make an effort to looks at things from a less passive perspective, without accepting everything we get thrown at...). In the case of Redaelli's collection, the designer prompts us to look at the details hidden away in her pieces and grasp a few Palladian notions as well.
Andrea Palladio's Olympic Theatre in Vicenza draws inspiration from the Roman theatres described by Vitruvius. The first play staged there in 1585 was a production of Sophocles' Oedipus the King, with a scenery created by architect Vincenzo Scamozzi that was meant to represent the streets of Thebes.
The scenery was characterised by an amazing perspective view with beautifully decorated hallways that gave the illusion of looking down the streets of this city. The five doors of the Palladian scaenae frons were indeed fitted with perspective vistas by Scamozzi representing the finest examples of architectures in Thebes, including houses, palaces, temples, and altars.
To modern tastes that performance was maybe lavishly produced, but the result was so stunning that the wooden structures and stuccos were never removed. They can indeed be still admired and, as this collection proves, they can still be used as inspiration.
All images of Roberta Redaelli's collection in this post by Guido Taroni.
A monolithic mass of stacked cardboard and delicate strings burgeoning into the ceiling vaults welcomed the visitors inside the Taiwan Pavilion at last year's Venice International Architecture Biennale.
Architect and designer Ming-Pin Liao reused for this installation corrugated cardboard as a solidly consistent material to create a sort of linking space for the design concepts and works of two architects, Wei-Li Liao and Yu-Han Michael Lin.
Stacking cardboard, Ming-Pin Liao built an entire house, the sort of flat typically inhabited by the members of the middle-class in Taiwan - including foyer, living and dining room, kitchen, bathroom, studio and a bedroom - inside the Palazzo delle Prigioni. Some spaces even featured interior design elements such as a desk, a table and chairs, a sink and a shower.
Ming-Pin Liao employed cardboard to experiment with a new aesthetic, emphasising the relationship between environment and architecture, while recreating a symbolic island inside another building, hinting at the relationship between different yet similar places such as Taiwan and Venice. The construction process became vitally important in that case with the corrugated cardboard - accumulated, amassed and stacked - used to shape a new space inside an old one.
The idea of basic cardboard sheets forming appealing surfaces has appeared in fashion as a micro trend for the next season.
Giambattista Valli's Spring/Summer 2014 collection includes for example silk tunic dresses, tops and skirts featuring a print of what looks like rough and basic cardboard. Apparently, the inspiration for this collection came from a combination of Pier Paolo Pasolini's films and the works of Arte Povera artist Alighiero Boetti.
J.W. Anderson focused instead on surfaces: from basic (and slightly unwearable unless you want to reveal too much...) paper-like strips of textiles employed as tops to draped, twisted, gathered, sculpted, densely folded and chevroned materials including leather, silk, nylon and pleather; from three-dimensional pleats to stiff tops and wrap skirts that fold over the body.
Critics saw in some of Anderson's more conceptual shapes hints at Comme des Garçons, and in his textural architectures references to Issey Miyake. But if you're Italian and familiar with the work of Nanni Strada (a firm reference point of Miyake as well...) you may have easily identified the real origins of the densely pleated designs in experimental fabric surfaces such as Strada's Matrix.
As this microtrend spreads, starting to think how it may be possible to integrate and assemble bits and pieces of cardboard in unique and striking accessories may be a fun, and definitely very affordable, option.
Let's continue the architecture and fashion thread that started with yesterday's post by looking at Clover Canyon's Spring/Summer 2014 collection.
L.A.-based designer Rozae Nichols rediscovered in her designs for the next season the Southern California landscape, light and architecture. The collection, entitled "Local Light", features indeed a series of references pointing towards California, and including John Lautner’s iconic building known as the "Chemosphere", in Los Angeles, the work of household modernists Charles and Ray Eames, and light and space artists Robert Irwin, Dan Flavin, and James Turrell.
The collection could be defined as "architectural exotica" since it features engineered prints of indoor spaces mixed with outdoor elements, including swimming pools and gardens. This could be interpreted as a further reference to what architect Rudolph Schindler stated in the '20s in one of his articles for the Los Angeles Times: "Our rooms will descend close to the ground and the garden will become an integral part of the house. The distinction between the indoors and the out-of-doors will disappear."
Silhouettes include Clover Canyon's trademark fitted dresses, bell-shaped crop tops and neoprene bra tops, full skirts, shorts and coats. The theme of light is also tackled via materials such as printed laser cut and perforated neoprene, embossed Latex, see-through organza, silk shantung and burlap.
While working on architectural inspirations, Nichols seemed to focus mainly on structures that project out of a slope or are tucked in sidelong into a slope, hinting at a sort of gravity-defying lightness.
Coats, tops and skirts integrate architectural blueprints by the L.A. firm Escher GuneWardena (Frank Escher is the editor of the monograph John Lautner, Architect and serves on the Board of Directors of the John Lautner Foundation, so Nichols turned to a proper authority in the field).
One of the blueprints is a graphite rendering screen-printed onto linen of Escher GuneWardena's Jamie Residence, a 2,000 square foot single-family house lofted on two concrete towers above a steeply sloping lot in Pasadena. The public areas in this house form a continuous open space, extending through the entire length of the building and providing a 180-degree view of the cityscape beyond.
The Jamie Residence actually brings to mind Lautner's "Chemosphere". Lautner, who trained with Frank Lloyd Wright before opening his Los Angeles office in 1940, mainly designed in his career private houses characterised by experimentation, innovation and a marked individuality. His main construction principles remained harmony and balance. The latter was the key point for the octagonal structure known as Malin House or "Chemosphere".
Built in the Hollywood Hills off Mulholland Drive on a 45 degree slope, the structure appears to defy gravity. The roof of the house has an umbrella or unidentified flying object-like shape and rests on concrete pillars. Some of the dresses in the collection seem to reference both the external part of the structure and its interior with its wood beams vault.
There are other buildings in this collection: a print on a long evening gown calls to mind the Mondrian-evoking façade of the Eames House also known as Case Study House No. 8, though the bright and orange colours that characterise this design seem to be borrowed from Dan Flavin's neon tubing installations.
Frank Gehry’s music hall in L.A. with its metal sheets turning into light, free-flowing forms reappears on short sleeveless dresses, while the grid-like curving shapes printed on some of the designs remind of Harry Bertoia's chairs.
Combining too many references was maybe Nichols' fault, though it proved at the same time she did her own research and knows the themes she employed as main references. And while a blueprint on a skirt or a coat may be a very literal interpretation of the architectural theme, it actually points towards a key fashion issue: iconic buildings last (almost) forever, but, for trend and quality reasons, our clothes only last a few months. Hopefully, rather than just prints, the current interest for architecture will bring back into fashion also the concept of timelessness.
During the 1900s, quite a few architects and architecture critics pondered about the possibilities offered by the aerial view: in January 1934, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Angiolo Mazzoni and Mino Somenzi, penned the "Manifesto of Aerial Architecture".
Though the document had its faults and preached destruction in favour of an improbable and at times dystopic vision, it made an interesting point - cities are usually built by architects who plan them from the ground and not from the sky. In a nutshell, cities are not built to be admired while in flight: according to the futurist authors of the manifesto, a truly aerial city would have been a linear one with continuous lines that displayed certain parallels to the sky.
A year later, in 1935, Le Corbusier published Aircraft in which he stated he was grateful for the archtectural lesson the aerial view gave him, and used it to call for a mechanical design of cities that implied the total control of their form and design.
Before that, in the early '30s, painters from the aero-futurist movement interpreted specific landscapes experimenting with the aerial point of view in movement.
Themes such as the exploration of everyday life from a bird's eye view and the first experiments of avant-garde architects advocating a unique city made of continuous lines to be admired in flight, came back in Marga Weimans' Spring/Summer 2014 collection.
Conceived as a development of her "Fashion House: The Most Beautiful Dress in the World" installation and entitled "Aerial", the collection includes designs characterised by prints inspired by aerial architecture and interior design.
All these graphic prints - from images of the façade of a skyscraper on a simple dress, of a bird's eye view over a series of identical buildings that may or may not be factories on coats, and pictures of modern chairs on functionally elegant suits - are a way for the Dutch designer to take distance from her own pieces and ponder about the life of the wearer and in particular of all those modern women immersed in a urban environment and living in a complex society.
According to Weimans, if architecture protects us with solid buildings and structures, garments envelop us in cocoons with their shapes, folds and pleats, created with experimental and structured fabrics.
With this collection Weimans continues to explore the possibity of combining fashion with other artistic disciplines: for her "Aerial" designs she collaborated indeed with visual artist Jeroen Koolhaas, architect Barend Koolhaas and interior designer Aura Luz Melis.
What's the story behind your Spring/Summer 2014 collection? Marga Weimans: The collection is a continuation, a sort of logical progression, of the previous installation - "Fashion House: The Most Beautiful Dress in the World". In that case I had all these different functional spaces connected with the career of a fashion designer. The new collection is instead about making a sort of fictional archive of a fashion house, or about being an established designer and looking back at your career, taking stock of the house you have built. Through this collection I also wanted to ponder a bit about issues of wearability and about women in general and how a designer creates a space for different women out there.
Is this collection also linked with interior design? Marga Weimans: The previous installation - "Fashion House: The Most Beautiful Dress in the World", the starting point for this collection - was about creating the skeleton of a fashion house, from the basic outlines of a building. With the new collection I'm entering the building, to provide the content to this structure: the apartment gets therefore furnished with fabrics that tell a story turning into personal artefacts. To come up with this collection I mixed two apartments of creative people who fascinate me - Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Coco Chanel's - creating a hyper personal, hyper eccentric apartment and looking through this eccentricity at women in general, trying to understand what fits them or what they would like to wear. I employed different garments to tell different stories, from the tale of a woman with a child to the story of a woman who lives and works in a city. I also referenced multiculturalism in the catwalk show that featured models from different ethnic backgrounds.
Do you feel that multiculturalism is still missing in fashion? Marga Weimans: I really really love fashion, but there are moments when I feel skeptical about it. Fashion isn't a total multicultural environment yet. I'm usually subtly political, but in this case I thought 'if I have a concept about women in general, and I'm really designing for all women, I can't put on the runway only white models, that would be ridiculous!' I work in a conceptual way and try to be true to my personal ideals and not to the business ideals. While working on the collection and presentation I also had firmly in mind the women who work in my company, realising it would have been ridiculous to refer to just one type of woman on the runway.
Do you feel that things are changing in fashion with designers blurring the boundaries between genders and trying to bring up a new kind of representation of women also on the runway? Marga Weimans: There is definitely a shift when it comes to gender blurring, especially when we talk about young designers. More designers are putting men in female clothes and viceversa. I think we are living in very poignant times gender-wise - think about homophobic laws in Russia - and I believe that, as designers, we must try and tackle these issues whenever we can. There may be people at home watching a show and masochistically yearning to be someone they are not, like a young and healthy teenage girl hoping to transform herself into a model. You have to start wondering not just what people want to see during a show, but also what's their final perception of that show. As designers, I think we must try and avoid conditioning the general public - the final receivers of the show - in the wrong way.
Fashion fans are quite familiar with the works of architect Rem Koolhaas, but you collaborated on this collection with other members of his family, such as artist and illustrator Jeroen Koolhaas. Can you tell us more about the other side of the Koolhaas family? Marga Weimans: I had been reading about Rem Koolhaas for a while and I checked Jeroen's work on the Internet after stumbling upon his name. I became a fan of his work for Prada, but also of his "Favela Painting" project that involved him going to the favelas and painting for and with the local people. I liked it since it had a sort of punk or hip hop attitude about it, so I started following his work. We then bumped into each others since he also lives in Rotterdam. We collaborated together for the first time when he did a black and white panorama for last year's installation and the graphic material for the invitation cards. He is a very intense and critical person, so the collaboration went really well.
In which ways has this collaboration changed the way you work or influenced it? Marga Weimans: Conceptually my ideas never change while I'm working on something. What changed with Jeroen was learning how to communicate the concept and how to put the concept into shape or print. He works with the images I send him and when we collaborated for the first time I sent him a lot of material - hundreds of images - and he had to go through all of them. The second time I started to think and work in a more efficient way. Jeroen is a painter, so we also worked on prints trying to understand what he could do with flat surfaces. At the time I was also tired of excessive ornaments on dresses and wanted to strip off some designs, so we worked along the idea of raw images and collages. I guess we influenced each other a lot bouncing ideas off each other, but I never felt threatened by the fact that he also does work for Prada - in fact I wasn't interested in his designs because he collaborates with them, but because of his raw and free design aesthetic. Through him I also got to work on the textile prints with Barend Koolhaas and Aura Luz Melis. It was great to collaborate with a very hard working - but at the same time relaxed and unpretentious - team.
Quite a few garments in the collection feature prints, but the last dress on the runway - a sculpturally draped creation - came in stark white, which fabric did you employ on that one? Marga Weimans: It's just hand-painted white cotton, but there was actually a long process of preparation behind that one dress. The piece looks as if it featured a lot of pleats, but it is actually composed of a lot of seams. It was actually a kind of moulage of pieces of spray foam, an attempt at rendering 2D into 3D.
Are you planning to take your collections to any big fashion capital? Marga Weimans: Fashion is international and I would love to make the next step and go to London or Paris, but I need to prepare for such move really well. Production in these cases is very different from the way I work and you have to find investors. On the other hand I'm happy with the place I am and the way I am at the moment. I may sound like I'm hesitating, but I'm setting this up at the moment.
What do you like about Amsterdam Fashion Week, the fact that it's smaller and experimental? Marga Weimans: The fact that you can have zero production, but still showcase your work! I do have a market, but my market is completely different from the market you may find abroad. I have two or three major buyers, but I also make one-offs, and work on different projects, so I have a different modus operandi. Amsterdam Fashion Week offers me a platform to show regularly and the organisers are also open to every kind of presentation. For the latest collection I had three shows in one night - one was an installation, the second a regular catwalk show and the third one was for people to look at the clothes more closely. They were perfectly fine with this format and as designers we also worked well with sponsors such as Samsung or Vodaphone. I would say that the best thing about Amsterdam Fashion Week is the fact that it's kind of local, but it's still a big platform. For example, my latest collection worked really well in The Netherlands and got a lot of coverage. I was in Milan in January and then June for both the women's and men's shows and that's a completely different context, Milan is more commercial but with not much happening when it comes to young designers.
Would you like to expand also in the accessory market? Marga Weimans: The whole idea of a fashion house - its complexity of operations and different fields and skills it involves - fascinates me. You have a beautiful idea and translate it into something beautiful, but then you have to market and sell it. As I pointed out also with my fashion house installation all these aspects genuinely fascinate me, so one day I would love to carry on with the project and move also onto accessories.
What are you working on at the moment? Marga Weimans: In September I took part in Vogues's Night Out in Amsterdam with an installation in a hotel suite, and curated the art direction of a five star hotel. My S/S 14 collection was then part of "XS Architecture", an Amsterdam-based exhibition that mixed artists and architects and showcased products made with the architectural practice in mind. In my case we focused on the print collaboration with Jeroen Koolhaas, Barend Koolhaas and Aura Luz Melis. At the moment I'm working on a retrospective, a book and a documentary about my designs and the way I work, maybe I'll be doing a project with fabric company Vlisco and with Woolmark, the latter may focus on using felts.
What will your next collection be about? Marga Weimans: I will keep on exploring the fashion house spaces, focusing this time on the designer's studio or workspace, and the store. My collections look very different one from the other, but one of the most intriguing things about fashion is that it allows you to tell a longer story, a tale you can develop over time and that makes you feel a bit like a writer or an architect, because you get the chance of choosing your own degree of complexity and your own language to tell it.
First image in this post: aerial view of Le Corbusier's Plan Voisin (Paris, 1925); all other images in this post: Marga Weimans' "Aerial" (S/S 2014), courtesy Marga Weimans.
Let's continue the prints and patterns thread reinterpreting it from the art point of view by looking at the work of two different artists. The first one is Wade Guyton who mainly focuses in his work on modernist and minimalist art, playing with glitches, deformations and distortions.
For a few years now he has been developing inkjet printed drawings. In the first ones he used a desktop printer to overlay graphic patterns and typographic symbols (mainly "X" and "U") on the pages of magazines and art catalogues.
He then moved onto different inkjet works, feeding pre-primed canvas through printers and therefore producing errors. More recently he took to creating series of works by feeding a folded canvas into a printer to paint both sides with a black TIFF file.
Some of his untitled works on display at the 55th International Venice Art Biennale are the results of Guyton's efforts to print (with an Epson UltraChrome K3 on linen) a bitmap file converted from a fifty percent black TIFF. While being the embodiment of binary codes, the resulting "paintings" also show the fallibility of digital technology.
The second artist is sculptor Alice Channer who employs clothing and fashion as the means to explore various themes, such as the human body, issues linked to labour or to the translation of materials and shapes into different dimensions.
The human form is represented in her work through bits and pieces of garments like elastic waistbands or shirt cuffs, elements that hint at the body through its absence.
Channer mainly uses post-industrial processes including retouching images and digital printing, combining them with handmade techniques like hand-carving marble and machine-cutting steel.
In one of her previous works for example she digitally printed on fabric an imprint of her arm in ink and then wrapped it around handmade distorted aluminum forms based on the shapes of Yves Saint Laurent's drawings for his iconic "Le Smoking" tuxedo jacket.
Some of her most famous works include enlarged images digitally printed on ten-metre-long bolts of crêpe de chine that, when showcased in galleries, are suspended from the ceiling and anchored to the floor via slabs of marble.
Channer's works will be on display at The Approach gallery booth (B6) at the Frieze London event (17th - 20th October 2013).
