The words "fashion industry" immediately conjure up in the minds of many of us stressed fashion designers, glamorous models and exclusive garments and accessories. Yet the fashion industry leviathan is much more than just that. Luckily, the Fashion Space Gallery at the London College of Fashion comes to our rescue organising talks and exhibitions that try to go beyond the most superficial layers of the industry, providing innovative approaches to this subject. To coincide with London Fashion Week, the gallery launched last week a visionary exhibition dedicated to the world of set design.
"Simon Costin's Impossible Catwalk Shows" (until 13th December 2014) features several imaginary model sets offering visitors the chance to discover the working processes of set design and prompting them to think about a collection not just in terms of clothes, but also in relation to space and architecture.
In the last few years these elements have become more and more important as they have started to strongly contribute to the creation of a narrative path for a collection, revealing the moods that generated it and providing the audience with a permanent context where transient and temporary clothes and accessories can be placed.
Simon Costin, Gareth Pugh's art director for the past 5 years, is known for his work with many key fashion houses, designers and brands - including Alexander McQueen, Lanvin, Valentino, Givenchy, Gucci, Stella McCartney, YSL, Margiela, Matthew Williamson and Bulgari.
Costin also created adverts for many companies and designed parties for Ferragamo's Cinderella Ball, Hermes and the New York Academy of Arts Tribeca Ball. His work has also appeared in solo and group exhibitions at key institutions in New York, London and Paris.
Among his most memorable creations there are Costin's photocopied collages of skeletons and muscle human figures from 16th century anatomical plates dressed in McQueen's "Elect Dissect" collection for Givenchy (Autumn/Winter 1997-98), and his decadent and dark jewellery pieces (that at times appeared on McQueen's runways) like the controversial "Incubus Necklace" (1987), that incorporated vials of human sperm.
"What I want to present here are a series of suggestions as to how fashion presentations could be; an invitation to dream and speculate," Costin stated in a press release.
The event at the Fashion Space Gallery revolves indeed around imaginary sets for fictitious shows: Costin takes visitors to a street flanked by cardboard buildings with spray painted graffiti decorating its façades; he lures them into a disused miniature sanatorium with dresses suspended on hangers and lowered and withdrawn on steel baths filled with dye, or invites them to search for the models hid among the trees of a baroque forest.
Garments become almost secondary elements in these spaces: the dome-like structure inviting to explore 16 deconstructed garments is the protagonist of its own space, in the same way as the abandoned nuclear plant covered with black crystalline elements assumes a sublime post-accident beauty, almost erasing the garments displayed within it that will be left to decay over time since they can not be retrieved because they are contaminated.
There is space also for Costin's sketches and notebooks and for a moodboard for Gareth Pugh's Spring/Summer 2015 collection and some behind-the-scenes footage from Alexander McQueen’s infamous Spring Summer 1998 show "Untitled" (formerly called "The Golden Shower") for which Costin designed the set.
The moodboard is particularly interesting since it assumes a revelatory meaning about fashion: photographs of the Burry Man in South Queensferry, the Pearly Kings and Queens, and an iconic portrait of Bronislava Nijinska by Man Ray are all combined together, offering an almost logical path in a visually illogical collage. In a way it's as if fashion and set designers told us that fashion has its roots in traditions and folklore, but passes through art and finds form and definition in a performance that at times may turn into a proper spectacle.
Commissioned and curated by Ligaya Salazar, "Simon Costin's Impossible Catwalk Shows" is accompanied by a programme that also includes hands-on workshops and masterclasses, check out the Gallery's site for further information and updates about this event.
Image credits for this post
Photographs by Katy Davies
1. Street; 2. Dome; 3. Forest; 4. - 6.Sanatorium; 7.- 8. Nuclear Plant; 9. Sketchbooks by Simon Costin (Courtesy of Simon Costin); 10. Gareth Pugh, moodboard for Spring/Summer 2015 collection (Courtesy of Gareth Pugh); 11. Street.
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