Roughly a month ago the Museo San Telmo in San Sebastián, Spain, opened the exhibition "Frivolité" (until 28th September 2014) that analyses fashion at the court in the 18th century, tackling different aspects of French garments in those times.
The 42 pieces on display - most of them donned by the high society - are pretty rare to find even in institutions specialised in fashion. Quite a few of the pieces included (all recently restored) come in fact from a private collection and were donated by Concepción Cuadra y Viteri, wife of Chilean painter Santiago Arcos.
The luxurious silk fabrics, decorations and embroideries employed for dresses, shirts, trousers and jackets (matched with exquisite accessories such as bags and fans), evoke the elegance, style and frivolity of the courtesans, providing insights about their lives.
In some cases it was even possible to track down the owner of a specific piece: one undergarment is for example embroidered with the letters "The(át)re V. Déjazet", standing for Virginie Déjazet, a Parisian actress famous for the love song "La Lisette de Béranger", written by Frédéric Bérat.
Though the pastel colours for these designs are quite beautiful, curators also tried to look at quite funny aspects linked with these palettes such as the unusual names employed to describe different shades of yellows and greens ("kitchen green", "nymph legs" and "poisoned monkey", just to mention a few, but the list is pretty long...).
To contextualise the pieces, the curators included in the event prints, paintings and fashion magazines, documents that illustrate the evolution throughout the decades of key garments.
A few days ago the museum added another rare piece to the exhibition, a dress lent by the Getaria-based Cristóbal Balenciaga Museum.
Designed in 1956, the cocktail dress in a striking turquoise shade clearly shows the historical and artistic (Zurbarán, Velázquez, Goya, Picasso...) inspirations borrowed by Balenciaga for his own designs.
Donated by Carmen Beramonte Cominges, the dress is characterised by a rather traditional silhouette, a fitted bodice and voluminous skirt, but the latter features beautiful sculpted draped motifs that call to mind the polonaises from the 1770s-1780s.
The two museums involved in this exhibition see this opportunity as a way to collaborate together on a practical level: people who will visit one of the institutions will get a discount on the admission to the second museum.
These exchanges and collaborations between different cultural institutions should actually be encouraged and, hopefully, further museums all over the world will follow this example.
Superhero suits may have dominated at San Diego's Comic-Con last week, but it wasn't all spandex and pop culture heroes - there were also thick tartans and kilts. One of the events was indeed dedicated to Outlander, a 16-part series launching this August on American network, Startz.
Adapted from Diana Gabaldon's eponymous romantic novel set in Scotland (the book was actually released in the UK with the title Cross Stitch), the epic drama recounts the story of Claire (Caitriona Balfe), a World War II nurse who, through a stone circle she discovers during her second honeymoon with husband Frank, travels back in time to 18th century Scotland.
Claire finds herself in a battlefield, meets her husband's ancestor Black Jack Randall (Tobias Menzies) and gets kidnapped by the men from Clan McKenzie who believe she is an English spy. Forced to marry Scottish warrior Jamie Fraser (Sam Heughan), Claire genuinely falls in love with him and eventually finds her place in history and time, among castles, villages, wild woods, prisons and abbeys.
Directed by Brian Kelly, John Dahl, Anna Foerster and Richard Clark, the episodes were shot in a production facility in Cumbernauld, outside Glasgow. The costumes were designed by Glenne Campbell and Terry Dresbach, but were made by an outpost of Venetian tailoring house Atelier Nicolao.
Last year Stefano Nicolao decamped indeed to Scotland to work on the costumes and accessories for the series. In a few days' time Gabaldon's fans will be able to see on their TV screens not only Jamie Fraser's tartan and kilts, but also heavy capes, stiff corsets, red coats matched with black tricorn hats and feathers and furs decorating the attire of "witch" Geillis Duncan (Lotte Verbeek).
Startz hope the story will rival HBO's Game of Thrones (from George R. R. Martin's novels) and Scotland would instead like with this series to confirm itself as the perfect destination for further successful film productions. But, for the time being, only one thing's for certain: if they will ever be looking for a tricorn hat like the ones sported in the series by the English troops, fans will have to travel as far as Venice.
How did you get involved with this TV series? Stefano Nicolao: I worked in the past on other productions by David Brown, the UK producer of Outlander. They contacted me and explained they had a team of cutters and tailors, but it wasn't big enough to support the production and make sure the costumes were ready by September 2013, when they were supposed to start filming. They felt they were a bit behind with the making of the costumes, so I joined them with roughly ten people from my own atelier. I left just a few hours after they contacted me to try and understand a bit better how to get organised for this job. During the first days I just worked on setting up tables and machines as the facilities were really new and they had originally thought they would have been able to work with pre-existing garments from specific repertoires. Little by little, we realised there was a lot of work to do as the series starts in the 1940s and then goes back to the 1700s. This meant I had to get more acquainted with 18th century fashion in Scotland. After organising the workshop, my team and I worked on cutting and co-ordinating the collaborators. We did many costumes for both the male and female characters and we also did the lingerie.
Did you enjoy working away from Venice? Stefano Nicolao: We worked for longer hours, roughly 14 hours a day, and that was stressful, but it was a great experience. The early days were a bit harder as we had to get to know each other, and at the beginning we thought my team was assigned to the extras and the secondary characters, but then things changed and they honoured us with a much more rewarding assignment - the costumes for the main characters. We ended up developing a lovely relationship with the local team of cutters and costume makers, we really respected each other, so everything went smoothly.
Did you finish any costumes in Venice? Stefano Nicolao: When the production stopped for the Christmas holidays at the end of last year I worked on some garments in Venice and then went back to Glasgow in January. Two costumes for Callum (Gary Lewis) were also made in my atelier in Venice.
We usually talk about luxury in conjunction with famous fashion houses. Can we talk about luxury also in your work and costumes for films, theatre, opera and ballet? Stefano Nicolao: In my work and atelier I often employ very expensive textiles such as Rubelli fabrics that at times cost 350 Euros per metre. You usually employ 5-6 metres of this fabric to make a woman's costume, so you can imagine that costs are extremely high once you add the manufacturing, decorations and embroidering. But I always say that luxury is not represented by extremely high prices. You see, luxury in my life means being able to showcase through a costume historical and artisanal knowledge. For example, a garment that may not be by a famous designer but is entirely made by hand, can be considered as a prestigious piece if it is made following the highest tailoring standards. Besides, I have extremely talented and skilled collaborators who manage to inject in the pieces they make all their passion and I consider the latter as an added value to a costume or a garment. There are small accessories we make at my atelier that cost maybe between 30-50 Euros, but they are still luxurious pieces since they were made by expert people.
Are there any small and affordable luxurious pieces in Outlander? Stefano Nicolao: We actually had to send quite a few tricorn hats on the set since they couldn't find the same high quality we could offer.
As a whole how do you feel about this production? Stefano Nicolao: Very happy and satisfied: there are quite a few images of the series out at the moment and the trailer has also been online for a while. The costumes look amazing and I'm also very happy for the fans of Diana Gabaldon's books: there are quite a few ones in Italy as well and they're all eagerly awaiting for this series.
Which was the most challenging production you worked on in your career? Stefano Nicolao: Quite a few, including Michael Radford's The Merchant of Venice and Lasse Hallström's Casanova, but I have amazing memories of Giuliano Montaldo's Marco Polo. This was way back in 1982 and I was asked by Enrico Sabbatini to assist him for a period of time in Rome. Then one day he sent me to the Himalayan chain to work on the costumes for the scenes chronicling the passage from Persia to China. We ended up working at 3,000-4,000 metres with no electricity but with a team of tailors and dressmakers and sherpas. As you may guess, this was a rather unusual situation and quite often we ended up using archaic methods to find solutions to certain problems. Luckily, the situation in Scotland was quite different and definitely less challenging!
Which was the latest production you worked on fashion-wise? Stefano Nicolao: We lent some costumes for the Louis Vuitton's "L'invitation au Voyage" campaign, the advert that came out last year featuring David Bowie and Arizona Muse, directed by Romain Gavras. As you may remember, Bowie plays the harpsichord in it amid a grand and confusing Venetian masked ball. Muse arrives in Venice's St Mark's Square in the same hot air balloon she used to leave from the Louvre in the previous instalment of the advert and enters the palazzo where Bowie is singing. In this rich and mad environment full of fragrances, smells and colours, and crowded with people, Muse has a sort of Stendhal syndrome and re-evokes in her mind balls and historical costumes. They borrowed from us a lof of costumes in pastel colours that worked pretty well with the hairstyles they had chosen, mainly wigs decorated with horns and other extravagant and eccentric elements and pieces. There were also some Louis Vuitton designs that had been contaminated by reinvented Venetian elements that called to mind Carnivalesque or masked ball atmospheres.
Did you find it difficult to co-ordinate your atelier in Venice while you were working in Scotland? Stefano Nicolao: It was terribly difficult, but in the end we managed to. I sort of went back and forth between last year and this year a few times to work on other commissions, among them an exhibition of costumes in Trieste, an event about fragrances at Palazzo Mocenigo in Venice that also included garments from their archives that we had restored, and then a staging of The Inspector General by Gogol adapted by Damiano Michieletto and with costumes by Carla Teti for the Teatro Stabile Carlo Goldoni, it was unusually set in the '60s, so the costumes had a sort of Eastern vintage mood about them. We also worked on a staging of Verdi's s Nabucco and Ballo in maschera, the latter with costumes by Alessandro Ciammarughi, and on Puccini's La Bohème in Ferrara. More recently we collaborated on the Goldoni Experience, a representation of Venice in the 1700s and homage to Carlo Goldoni in Venice. Our costumes will also appear in September in a representation of Mozart’s masterpiece Così fan tutte in Cyprus. You can keep updated on our future events and collaborations on the atelier's Facebook page or new site.
Italians are stereotypically famous in Scotland for cafes, fish and chip shops and ice cream parlours, but you managed to take to Glasgow your traditional tailoring skills and costume knowledge - will Scotland miss you? Stefano Nicolao: Well, we can always open a branch of the atelier in Scotland...
Italian jazz musician Giorgio Gaslini - known for his collaborations with famous Italian directors such as Antonioni, Lizzani and Argento - died today in Parma.
Born in Milan in 1929, Gaslini started playing the piano when he was seven years old. Growing up in the '40s in Milan, he became a jazz fan, a genre that wasn't appreciated at the time since it was also ostracised by the fascist regime.
Gaslini studied classical music as well as composition in Milan, playing in his life over 3,000 gigs all over the world and recording around one hundred albums.
As the decades passed, his name became known also to music fans who were not too familiar with the jazz genre thanks to his classical concerts, compositions for the opera and ballet and soundtracks.
He wrote the music for around forty films, including Michelangelo Antonioni's La notte (The night, 1961), Miklós Jancsó's La pacifista (The Pacifist, 1970), Dario Argento's Profondo rosso (Deep Red or The Hatchet Murders, 1975) in collaboration with Maria Grazia Fontana (Argento actually only retained three tracks - "Deep Shadows", "School at Night" and "Gianna" - from the ones Gaslini had originally written for him and turned to Goblin for the rest of the soundtrack), and Carlo Lizzani's Kleinhoff Hotel (1977). He also wrote the music for an Italian thriller TV series, La porta sul buio (Door Into Darkness, 1973; some of the episodes were directed by Argento).
There is actually an interesting connection between fashion and La Pacifista (with thanks to Kutmusic for providing the film from its archives for the screenshots in this post).
A minor movie in Monica Vitti's career, this otherwise dull film takes place in Milan where Barbara (Vitti), a journalist, is working on a feature about radical youth protests.
Barbara is a pacifist and therefore neutral, but things change when she falls in love with a young man who may be a terrorist and who lives in fear of being killed by his companions since he wasn't able to commit a political assassination.
Barbara's wardrobe in the film was borrowed from the Milanese boutique Gulp, founded in 1964 by fashion designer Gabriella Di Marco (who later on started also another boutique, Voom Voom).
Di Marco entered fashion history together with another fashion pioneer, Nuccia Fattori who in turn founded the stores/bazaars Cose and Altre Cose, where people could find hip brands such as Biba, Zandra Rhodes, Sonia Rykiel, Emmanuelle Khanh, Paco Rabanne, Walter Albini and, later on, also Cinzia Ruggeri.
Both Di Marco and Fattori's shops influenced fashion and style in Italy as they offered trendy brands and designs and were also open at night when they turned into nightclubs.
Di Marco's Gulp featured colourful interior designs, cardboard boxes as wardrobes, a juke box and a bar.
Among Di Marco's most popular items there were mini-skirts, sailor's pants, geometric shirts and jumpers and leather outerwear. These alternative stores became local stages where fashion and counter fashion prospered.
There is actually one bit in the film in which Barbara goes to cover a fashion event taking place in a church and she briefly speaks about models, furs and luxury contrasting with the surrounding environment, but the main link with fashion remains her '70s casual wardrobe suspended between the elegant and the hippish and somehow reflecting her crisis between neutrality and the possibility of supporting more radical causes.
Loom rubber bands bracelets may be all the rage at the moment, but at Cariaggi's stand at yarn fair Pitti Filati (early July) there were quite different kind of looms and bands.
Loom-like wooden structures were indeed used to create arty tapestries with rather thick bands in a palette revolving around black, pale grey/pink and bright fuchsia.
It was only by getting nearer that you realised the thick bands were actually strips of "Play", a wonderful 100% carded cashmere yarn that undergoes a very special processing technique.
The latter makes it possible to obtain a hollow tubular cashmere yarn that is also extremely light thanks to the air stored inside it.
The best thing about "Play" is that it comes out in versatile and fashionable shades including a bright bubblegum/neon pink, and that it can be processed also by hand, it is therefore suitable also for knitwear enthusiasts who would like to create their own designs (not just garments, but also accessories) using a truly luxurious cashmere yarn.
"Play" is actually part of the new generation of Cariaggi's "Fantasia" line of yarns. The latter also includes "Nirvana" (60% cashmere, 40% silk; worsted), a voluminous, warm yet impalpable cloud-like yarn; "Bijou" (90% cashmere, 10% silk; worsted), a yarn with bouclé processing that gives garments a sense of dynamism and is perfectly suited to new colour interpretations since it features bright coloured dots on solid autumnal backgrounds.
The Fantasia yarn range is completed by a series of sumptuous textures and melanges of cotton/vicuña, cashmere/silk, wool/cashmere yarns including "Frisson" (94% cashmere, 6% silk; carded) embellished with sequins, and the "Bouclé" cashmere yarn (90% cashmere, 10% silk; worsted).
The colours for the new collection are soft, delicate and sensual at the same time. Cariaggi's colour stylist Marie-Christine Viannay came up with a palette inspired by the fragrances of the East (a tribute maybe to the expansion and success of Cariaggi in China; the Italian company opened indeed last year its first office in Shanghai), Ottoman splendour, Turkish interior design and architecture and gold hues reminiscent of Byzantium.
The result was a collection characterised by blues, infused with lilac reflections, lilac-tinted sepias that evoke a winter in Istanbul and a series of dégradé greens to brighten up the more traditional snowy greys and pallid shades of the cold season.
One final note: though Viannay borrowed some inspirations for her palette from Oriental paintings, some of the swatches made with green "Bijou" yarn seemed to evoke the shades and thick brush strokes of Italian paintings from the 1900s such as Sergio Scatizzi's "Terre Volterranee" (Lands from Volterra, 1965) or Bruno Cassinari's "Ruscello Verde" (Green Stream, 1941-42).
Let's close the future thread that started on Thursday looking at a project that was presented during the latest edition of yarn fair Pitti Filati, at the beginning of July. Entitled "Moda Futuribile" (Future Fashion), the project focused on innovative capsule collections developed by several creative minds and industries.
Milan-based Dyloan Studio co-ordinated the research behind the project, putting together four designers – Edward Buchanan, Vito Colacurcio, Kristy Krivak and Carlo Volpi – knitwear companies (Clouds, Mely's, SMT and Sterne International) and yarn producers (Filpucci, Lanecardate, Millefili, Zegna Baruffa/Lane Borgosesia).
All the collections were developed with the help of companies that employ the latest technologies available: Bond Factory specialises in thermowelding, melting for construction, ultrasound melting, taping, press bonding and laser cutting; Manifatture Mediterraneo mainly develops double face fabrics, while Santoni focused in the latest 20 years on developing circular electronic knitting machines to create seamless garments.
Sansovino 6's Creative Director Edward Buchanan moved in his creations from very simple principles: his designs, he stated, must be wearable and durable, exactly like a Bauhaus chair.
The two ensembles he created for this project (a man's sporty blazer with matching trousers and a woman's long skirt with a blouse and a sleeveless jacket) were made with cashmere, wool and cotton yarns (Baruffa, Botto Poala and Chiavazza), and were characterised by loose and relaxed silhouettes.
Fashion and interior designer Vito Colacurcio moved from technologies employed in other disciplines and fields such as architecture and high-tech in his capsule collection.
The latter included outerwear characterised by details created by using aluminium foil and electric resistance on leather, and a classic jumper with a trompe l'oeil braided motif that wasn't knitted but embossed on leather.
The collection also featured a classic man's bag incorporating a LED strip, this was actually the most banal and easy piece to reproduce considering also that these LED components are widely available on the Internet and at electronics fairs.
Kristy Krivak's collection was inspired by a visit to Manifatture Mediterraneo where she explored the possibilities that double finish could offer her when combined with ultrasonic welding, bonding, and laser cutting by Bond Factory.
The results were displayed in her capsule collection that comprised a cape, and two dresses - one in a powdery pink with a double printed leaf detail, the other in a bright violet shade decorated with a lattice-like laser-cut motif.
The most desirable piece on display was the leather coat with an embossed panel and a metallic belt.
Colour-wise Carlo Volpi's designs were the strongest pieces of the presentation. Volpi moved from traditions and religion: knit-wise he opted to shatter traditional motifs from Aran and Fair Isle jumpers with tape to create a sort of stained glass effect.
He then recreated images of Jesus and the Virgin Mary on two brightly coloured jumpers that also incorporated neoprene and polyurethane (the jumper with the face of Jesus actually looked as if it had been made by passing knitted wool strips in and out of garden mesh or plastic netting...).
In his pieces in which he crafted religious images with "profane" materials for purely aesthetic purposes, Volpi claimed he was hinting at Eve's curiosity to experiment and explore the laws governing the universe, a metaphor used by the late Italian astrophysicist and scientist Margherita Hack to juxtapose the curiosity of science and the acceptance of faith.
It remains to be seen if in future we will go around clad in baggy jumpers knitted with religious figures in acid colours. It must be said though that, at times, the supposedly tech elements employed in some of the current collections or the LED details integrated in garments and accessories seem to be more apt from for raves than for futurescapes.
Time will tell then if this is truly the future of fashion, but, in the meantime, keeping on experimenting and researching may be the way towards developing not only innovative techniques, but also genuinely futuristic (and at times less tacky...) designs.
In the previous post we focused on technological yarns, so let's move today onto technological fabrics. As you may remember, a few months ago Milan-based designer Federico Sangalli created the "Light My Night" gown in collaboration with Il Filo dei Sogni. Made with a optical fibre-based organza dubbed Luminex, the dress gradually lit up becoming more brilliant in the dark.
Sangalli has since then developed a capsule collection (some pieces are already available in Italy, Russia and the United Arab Emirates) comprising dresses and accessories. The collection will be launched tonight during a Haute Couture catwalk show in Lugano, Switzerland.
The event will celebrate his admission to the National Chamber of Swiss Fashion and will feature designs for every taste and occasion, from day and eveningwear to cocktail dresses, silk garments, pieces decorated with embroideries and bobbin lace, and more technological and futuristic designs.
Tomorrow there is going to be a further event in Lugano at the Hotel de la Paix: Sangalli will step back into the past and tell his personal story (his aunt Maria Sangalli opened in 1952 in Milan the high fashion workshop he now runs). He will then rework some designs for his clients, adapting them with the help of his dressmakers to try and take the Italian tailoring traditions into the future.
All images in this post courtesy Federico Sangalli.
Yesterday we focused on the future of fashion; let's continue the thread by exploring one company that has been developing an innovative product - Tollegno 1900.
The spinning mill showcased at the latest Pitti Filati the new frontier of luxurious yarns: among the new yarns for the Autumn/Winter 2015-16 seasons there are classic 100% Extrafine Merino Wool, 100% Merino Wool, worsted cashmere and silk yarns, and two innovative products, New Cashmere 2/27 and Nanocashmere™ 2/27 (distributed by Tollegno in collaboration with Lora & Festa).
The former is made with fibers that come from the Alashan Region in Inner Mongolia. The harsh climate of this region attracts a special breed of goats that develop a warm and soft undercoat of fibers (between 15 and 16 microns), that is then processed in Mongolia with Italian know-how and machines. New Cashmere yarn offers lightness, high thermal insulation capacity and brilliance.
The latter is instead a completely new material: researched with the University of Hong Kong, the patented technology of Nanocashmere™ works on the nano scale. The result is a high quality water and stain resistant cashmere yarn (even ketchup slides off it, which means fewer sessions at the dry cleaner) implemented with a cutting-edge nanoparticle coating and engineered to perform specific functions (other attributes include improved pilling resistance).
"There is no luxurious material on the market with these characteristics," Lincoln Germanetti, CEO of the Group, states. "These features are currently attracting various companies and brands, especially from the sport and nautical sectors and they may lead to new applications in these fields."
Tollegno first started distributing Nanocashmere™ on the American, Chinese and Japanese markets and, from this year, moved onto the European and Italian markets.
"We worked for roughly three years on this product and we are currently focusing on making it even better," Germanetti explains. "This is an animal fiber and its consistency therefore changes continuously, even though we buy all our chasmere from the Alashan Region."
Tollegno boasts a long tradition and history: the Sella family founded in the early 20th century the Filatura e Tessitura di Tollegno with other entrepreneurs from Biella. In 1946 the company took the name Lanificio di Tollegno.
In the '80s the Maramotti and Germanetti families entered the group with the Sella family and reorganised the production departments investing in new machinery and equipment and acquiring further companies in the following decades.
Filatura e Tessitura di Tollegno can produce 4,000,000 kg per year and exports its products to the United States, Japan, Europe and Greater China. The company owns the brands Tollegno 1900 (pure merino and fine yarns), Lana Gatto (knitting yarns), Ragno (men and women's underwear, outerwear and swimwear) and Julipet (men's underwear, loungewear and beachwear).
Last year Tollegno 1900 also launched a new concept, the factory store: "This is the final representation of the industrial cycle, it completes the process from yarn manufacturing to product," Germanetti says. "People can visit the store and find there at convenient prices the designs yarn professionals see at the company stand at the Pitti Filati, so the store is a vehicle for the collection, but also an embodiment of the manufacturing processes."
The Filatura e Tessitura di Tollegno Group created a Research Center for yarns and fabrics on the premises of the Tollegno factory. Will they ever manage to engineer yarns capable of generating electricity to maybe power small electronic devices? "We are currently developing a few surprises, among them also a self-cleaning yarn", anticipates Germanetti.
We may have to wait for power yarns that convert physical motion into energy, but the current progresses in nanotechnologies may bring new aesthetic solutions in several fashion fields, and guarantee at the same time freedom from boring tasks such as the laundry.
Forecasting the future of fashion in general, but also the next big trend may be quite difficult, considering the extremely fast pace the fashion industry moves at.
Yet this is not the main point of a major exhibition that will be launched this Autumn at the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam.
"The Future of Fashion Is Now" will indeed look at the innovations brought into fashion in the last few years and at creations that can't be pigeonholed in one discipline or category, but that somehow merge art, architecture, sculpture, engineering, science, biology, technology and fashion all together.
Including over fifty fashion designers, the event will feature iconic garments by established names such as Comme des Garçons, Hussein Chalayan, Viktor & Rolf and Martin Margiela, and emerging talents like Mason Jung, Rejina Pyo, Little Shilpa, Ana Rajcevic and Lara Torres.
This new generation of young designers is actually looking at ways to redefine and recreate fashion and is also approaching in a critical way the demands of our consumer society.
Some of the young designers inolved in this event tackle through their more conceptual pieces identity (Pyuupiru's hand-knitted monster-like creations), sustainability and environmentally friendly materials (Wang Lei's traditional Chinese costumes from woven toilet paper and Carole Collet's experiments with lace grown from the roots of strawberry plants), and the impact of technological research on fashion (Pauline van Dongen's Wearable Solar Project jacket can recharge a mobile phone; Ying Gao's clothes inspired by the idea of uncertainty are activated by sounds).
The event will focus not just on clothing and accessories, but will also offer a rich program of activities and lectures.
Besides, there will be the opportunity to watch videos and contemplate installations like the Zen garden setting for Viktor & Rolf's Autumn/Winter 2013 collection, or look at striking images such as the ones taken by Hassan Hajjaj.
A jury including Viktor & Rolf, editor-in-chief of Dutch Vogue Karin Swerink and curator and fashion expert José Teunissen, awarded the Han Nefkens Fashion on the Edge Award to six designers.
Each of them will represent a country - Craig Green (UK), Digest Design (China), Ricarda Bigolin & Nella Themelios's D&K (Australia), Iris van Herpen (The Netherlands), Lucia Cuba (Peru) and Olek (Poland) - and develop new pieces commissioned for this exhibition.
To make the event more dynamic and interactive, the organisers have launched a discussion board: everybody can choose a theme among the ones available on the "Topics" page and join the conversation.
Issues go from public consumption, identity, body mutations and fast fashion to analysing materials and technologies or pondering on design processes and on the final messages that individual designers or brands are spreading through their works and collections.
We may only be able to discover tomorrow what the future of fashion will really be like, but it's good to know that we can all start collectively debating about it today.
1. The Future of Fashion Is Now, Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen. Concept / Art Direction: Glamcult Studio. Photo: Jouke Bos.
2. Viktor & Rolf Haute Couture, Autumn/Winter 2013. Photo Peter Stigter.
3. Ana Rajcevic, Animal - The Other Side of Evolution, 2012. Photo: Woland.
4. Hussein Chalayan, Laser Dress from the Readings collection, Spring/Summer 2008. Collection Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen. Loan: Han Nefkens H+F Fashion on the Edge 2010. Video: Nick Night/SHOWstudio. Photo: Nick Knight. Courtesy of Hussein Chalayan.
As you may have heard, the Pet Shop Boys will be presenting their brand new work "A Man From The Future" tonight at London's Royal Albert Hall as part of the BBC Proms.
The duo started working on this project inspired by Alan Turing - the computer pioneer and Enigma codebreaker persecuted for his homosexuality - in 2012 influenced by a television documentary and by Andrew Hodges's biography, Alan Turing: The Enigma. The new work focuses on key episodes from Turing's life and work with Neil Tennant alternatively singing and narrating them.
Born in 1912 in London, Turing studied mathematics at King's College, Cambridge, from 1931 to 1934.
In 1936 he published a paper entitled "On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem" (Download Turing_Paper_1936) that laid the foundations for computer science, presenting the notion of a universal machine capable of computing anything that is computable.
After studying mathematics and cryptology at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, Turing returned to Cambridge.
During World War II Turing worked at Bletchley Park, the GCCS wartime station, where he cracked Germany's secret military communication codes, including the Enigma encrypted signals (with the bombe, an electromechanical device), contributing in this way to the Allied victory.
In the mid-1940s he began collaborating with the National Physical Laboratory, leading the design work for the Automatic Computing Engine, creating a blueprint for store-program computers and addressing the issue of artificial intelligence in a paper written in 1950.
Two years later Turing was arrested, tried and convicted for homosexuality, then a criminal offence. Given a choice between prison and chemical castration he opted for the latter and received hormonal treatment for libido reduction. He committed suicide on 7 June 1954, biting into an apple dipped in cyanide (a reference maybe to his favourite story, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs). Turing was awarded a posthumous royal pardon at the end of 2013.
Turing was very much a man of the future, not only for his pioneering researches and for bridging the gap between mathematical logic and machine building, but also for his attitude about his own homosexuality. A new film about him - The Imitation Game, directed by Morten Tyldum - will be released later on this year, but Turing's life and work come to mind also while exploring other disciplines and fields, fashion included.
Though he proved to be "a man of the future", Turing lived very much in a tailored past made of V-neck sweaters, ties and formal jackets and somehow his story could be evoked by designs such as those seen on the runway for Thom Browne's Spring/Summer 2015 menswear collection.
Browne stated that the collection was inspired by Tron, but there are things - scientific and robotic imagination, machines, and a certain degree of naivety (incarnated by pastel colours and floral motifs) that characterised Turing - that call to mind the polymath and computer pioneer.
Models/guards in an armour-like wool suit (slightly reminiscent of the Cubist costumes by Jeffrey Bryant for the Pet Shop Boys) and carrying laser sabers opened the show.
The robotic guards patrolled 20 masked robot-like models who sat still behind them in classically cut grey suits.
Two tribes of further masked models (the plastic masks created a disturbing marionette-like effect, a sort of crossover between Pinocchio and the Thunderbirds, with occasional and undesirable moments verging more towards the Robert The Robot out of cBeebies's Justin's House...) then followed: one tribe was clad in garments inspired by human anatomy in which heavy padded bulging muscles and six packs ("The Electronic Athlete", the title of a chapter in David Leavitt's biography of Turing, The Man Who Knew Too Much, comes to mind...) were incorporated in tailored suits (View this photo); the other donned jackets and trousers characterised by spikes, points and geometrical shapes, with some multi-coloured garments and suits calling to mind the avant-garde fashions suggested by the Italian Futurists in the early decades of the 1900s.
Various fabrics - embroidered seersuckers, cottons, linens, rubberised tweeds, and Browne's own custom tartan - were employed to create the complicated suits, some of them made with patterns broken in sixty to eighty pieces.
In some cases jackets and socks were decorated with three-dimensional butterflies and flowers, while the pastel shades or flowery prints on Bermuda shorts, pants, vests, short-sleeved or sleeveless tuxedo jackets gave a gender twist to the most theatrical pieces.
Browne stated that this show was a sort of metaphor for an epic war in which everybody lost, including - we may add - the traditional sartorial canon sacrificed in the name of a futuristic and robotic approach.
And while you can bet we will soon see a menswear collection deliberately inspired by Alan Turing, in Browne's theatrical costume drama there was maybe a bit of Turing's spirit, from the man and machine dichotomy to the act of breaking with tradition in favour of gender bending gestures, from the mathematical concept of variables applied to traditional tailoring to the correspondence between complicated patterns and the precise logic of pure mathematics. And what will you create inspired by Turing's theories and ideas?
Being alive we are not too sure about the benefits that being dead may bring us. One thing is for certain, though, once we are gone, none of the worries that plagued our existence on this sad earth will keep on bothering us. But how would we feel if somebody we had never met in our lives would carry our name forward into the future, attaching it for example to their own creations? After all, this happens all the time when fashion designers die and a new Creative Director is called in their place, a process that is usually followed by the media behaving in a condescending way to avoid not being invited to catwalk shows, parties and other assorted fancy events.
It's only natural to wonder for example what would Elsa Schiaparelli think about what's going on at the moment at her revamped fashion house. Up until a few years ago, Schiaparelli was pilfered by all sorts of designers who often didn't even mention her as an inspiration. The history of fashion saw her newspaper print being relaunched and her bust bottle becoming the signature of someone else's fashion house, while her monkey fur designs, leg of mutton sleeves and gloves with red nails reappeared here and there throughout the seasons. Following her rediscovery and relaunch, Schiap became a new fertile ground for a wide range of reinterpretations, remixes or mere copies of her designs.
Vivetta's womenswear designs are for example haunted by the ghost of Schiap, but so is her S/S 15 childrenswear collection.
Showcased in June during Pitti Bimbo, it featured classic Schiap archetypes such as facial profiles forming decorative motifs, elegant fingers creating delicate collars around the neck and three-dimensional lips on little jumpers (this wasn't a totally successful idea as they looked like disturbing labia...).
Then there is the puzzling case of Schiaparelli's Haute Couture collections. The first collection designed by Marco Zanini was launched in January. For his second collection, showcased in July during Paris Haute Couture Week, Zanini opted to throw into a big cauldron Schiap's designs and remix them a bit.
The main silhouettes with exaggerated shoulders were borrowed from the '40s, but the surrealist bunny hats and reinvented turbans courtesy of Stephen Jones came from the '30s. Further Schiap echoes included fur fringes, squarish leather, beaver and glycerine-treated ostrich feather boleros, ample fox or sable sleeves, wide legged trousers matched with a caramel silk blouse, and a voluminous pink coat marked with the "ES" initials in blue.
Schiap's irony was reinterpreted into prints of pigeons with sequinned eyes or rats and squirrels on a bias-cut gown; the eccentric colourful motifs of the Harlequin coat originally embroidered by Lesage and inspired by the Commedia dell'Arte (Spring 1939 collection) were turned into a fur bag, while the 1938 circus collection was evoked by a shocking pink conical hat covered in Lesage embroidery and a fabulously whimsical tinsel bolero that could be used as a replacement for Christmas decorations; Schiap's signature colour reappeared instead in coats and draped silk dresses.
The final effect was that of seeing a series of designs heavily inspired by Schiaparelli, that found some derivation from Adrian's costumes for George Cukor's The Women.
The hats seen on the runway were indeed reinvented versions of the insolent headdresses Sylvia the chronic gossiper wears in the film; the hat crucified by harrows and allegedly inspired by the martyrdom of Saint Sebastian (and the accompanying top with a bleeding heart embroidered by Lesage) was actually an updated re-edition of a Surrealist hat from 1937 and an architectural velvet turban reproduced the shape of headdresses that you may see in fashion archives from 1938-40 (like the one from Rome's Gauturo, image 13 in this post).
There are a few puzzling points to make here. Haute Couture is usually an advertising vehicle to sell more affordable items including make-up and fragrances, but the house of Schiaparelli doesn't offer at the moment these products. Therefore the Haute Couture designs are simply made to keep people interested and promote themselves at occasional events, though it should be noted that designs from the first Zanini collection for Schiaparelli rarely appeared on the red carpet. As you may remember, Tilda Swinton donned one at the premiere of The Grand Budapest Hotel at the Berlinale Film Festival and another at the Snowpiercer premiere in L.A.
Which takes us to the second point: up until 2008, fashion publications often wondered if Haute Couture was still necessary, but now most features have moved on to discuss the new hip and younger couture clientele that includes nouveau riches, heiresses, 2.0 princesses, and socialites.
It is for these new clients that designers are including sneakers (albeit lavishly embellished ones) and functionally modern pieces in their collections. Zanini is offering to these supposedly new and young clients a series of '40s looks (quite often matched with dynamic '60s boots with an occasional Courregesian twist about them) that are a bit too costumy and attention-grabbing and that some of them may not be able to pull off at their best.
It is pretty difficult to capture the spirit of a dead designer and inject it in modern garments and accessories; it is proving extremely hard to capture Schiap's spirit and infuse it in wearable clothes. Zanini has so far either borrowed too little or too much from the archives and he is striving to create a properly contemporary look for Schiaparelli.
A few questions remain: what's the financial impact of such a brand at the moment, in a nutshell what does the house of Schiaparelli sell at the moment or what does it advertise? Besides, how long will we have to wait to see something more desirable and less costumy designed in Schiap's spirit rather than a glamorous spectacle perfectly choreographed also thanks to Lesage's embroidery, Maison Gripoix's jewellery and Lemarié's feathers?
There were hints (accessories such as sunglasses, gloves and luxurious mink or sable handbags with locks based on Lesage's designs) at the products Zanini may come up with in future when the fashion house finally decides to step out in the real fashion scene, but nobody knows when and if it will ever happen.
Schiap thought that all clothing is but a masquerade, but she used the masquerade also as a way to comment on specific events. The "Commedia dell'arte" collection (1939) was indeed a way to react to the political situation in Europe. Here we have visually strking and aesthetically charming clothes that could be considered as a masquerade, a catwalk show out of Cukor's The Women, but with no hints at our crazy and insufferable world and, above all, no power to shock.
And so Schiaparelli is destined to remain (for the time being) a girlfriend in a coma, a patchwork monster made of various collections that a Dr Frankenstein-like designer is trying to revive or a corpse going through an unexpected - and undeserved - martyrdom. What's for sure is that, rather than new versions of old clothes, we, ordinary mortals, would have been happier to see an affordable wonderful fragrance in a fun bottle or a lipstick in an outrageously shocking pink shade being released. After all, as Schiaparelli said in one of her 12 commandments, a woman "should buy little and only of the best or the cheapest".
