In yesterday's post about the "Global Fashion Capitals" exhibition at the Museum at FIT we mentioned the fact that the event also launched a side project, a digital publication entitled Global Fashion Bloggers.
Complementing the exhibition, the publication curated by Tamsen Young, Digital Media Manager, The Museum at FIT, and organised by Taina Laaksonen, an awardee of the Mobius Fellowship Program, in collaboration with staff at The Museum at FIT and with the support of The Finnish Cultural Institute in New York, features 11 fashion bloggers. The publication was released last week in conjunction with a special symposium jointly hosted by The Museum at FIT and CUNY Graduate Center and School of Visual, Media & Performing Arts at Brooklyn College
Global Fashion Bloggers features writers, photographers and fashion fans scattered a bit all over the world, from Paris to Mumbai, passing through Istanbul, Lagos, Mexico City and Seoul. As you may guess each blogger offers his or her unique perspective about fashion and style. Among the other blogs featured there is also Irenebrination. Its founder Anna Battista provides in the interview her views on global fashion and style. You can read the edited version of the interview on the Global Fashion Bloggers publication, but if you want to read the longer version, just scroll down.
Global Fashion Bloggers
Text by Anna Battista, Founder and Editor @ Irenebrination
Irenebrination: The early days
I started Irenebrination in 2008. The name of the site is a pun and moves from the name "Irene Brin", pseudonym of Italian writer and journalist Maria Vittoria Rossi (1914-1969). A witty and stylish woman, Irene Brin was passionate about fashion and art: together with her husband Gaspero Del Corso she opened an art gallery in Rome, the "Obelisco", that soon became a local cultural hub providing also the set for many fashion photo shoots that tried to compare garments and accessories to paintings, drawings and sculptures. A voracious reader, a translator and an indefatigable writer, Irene Brin was a precise observer of the crazes and fads of the times she lived in, combining in her features an impeccable style with subtle irony. She also became the first Italian contributor of Harper's Bazaar. I'm Italian and I wanted to pay homage to a stylish Italian journalist, while giving the name of the site a global twist (the "nation" part of the site's name) and hoping the readers would be "inebriated" by its contents.
I originally devised the site not as a way to monetize the content via sponsored pieces, but as a place where I could write news, features, interviews and reviews about architecture, art, fashion, film, science and technology, but I also conceived it as a reaction against superficial fashion publications. When I started Irenebrination I felt there must have been a more engaging way to write and ponder about specific themes and appreciate or analyze a bit more in depth something as ephemeral as a catwalk show. As a writer and journalist launching my own site seemed to be the logical way also to collect my pieces all in one place or use it to publish features, investigations and interviews that nobody else in the fashion industry would have liked to publish because deemed too controversial. In a nutshell, Irenebrination started and still is a self-proclaimed labor of love.
Contents and focus.
Irenebrination mainly analyzes the intersection between architecture, art (from paintings to sculpture, photography, visual installations and so on), cinema, the performing arts, science/technology and fashion. You may find on it comparisons between a specific architect or artist and a designer or a building and a fashion trend, or explorations about new materials and experimental projects. So if you're interested in a piece that analyzes a billowing cape and inflatable architectures, guess Irenebrination is the place to go! I also tend to do quite a few posts about the history of fashion to provide readers (and especially students) with some quick notes on topics they may find inspiring, informative and educational. In my writings I'm mainly prompted by Bruno Munari's teachings. This Italian artist, designer, and inventor stated in his book Fantasia (Fantasy) that a fervid fantasy comes from being able to make connections and links between different things. To make such connections you must have a wide knowledge and an even wider culture, in this way the links you will be making will be limitless. Fashion is a great discipline that can be explored from multiple points of view and it allows you to write about various topics: you can write about it in connection with history, art, architecture, biology, chemistry, finance and economics, but also politics.
Readership and role in the mediascape.
My readership includes fashion, costume and interior designers, students, lecturers, art fans, gallerists, and textile experts (I dedicate special posts to yarns and experimental textiles and fabrics), just to mention a few. The best readers are all those people who are simply passionate about the topics I write for and who enthusiastically get in touch to ask me further information about specific posts. Writing about obscure subjects often brought me to the attention of amazing people: the great-grandchildren of Italian silent diva Lyda Borelli tracked me down after I wrote a post about her; actor Denis Gilmore got in touch after I did a post on the costumes in Roberto Faenza's film H2S, while musician Lorand Sarna, son of painter, illustrator and photographer Jerry-Plucer Sarna (1904-1994), agreed to do an interview that shed more light on his father's life after reading a post I did on his work.
I feel I mainly have an informative role in the arts and fashion mediascape, but I'm also an independent and objective critic: I don't get flown in by companies to go and see their fashion shows, and I don't accept presents (I tend to run competitions on the site if some of the people I interview for it are keen and kind enough to give a product for free to my readers). So, the unique side of it? I just speak my mind and I'm not afraid of criticizing a collection if I feel it deserves to be criticized. Remember, it's through sincere and honest criticism that we grow up and improve ourselves and not through safe and false praise.
Commercial aspects, benefits and/or drawbacks.
As I said, the blog is not as commercial as other fashion publications: if I write about a specific product it's because I feel like writing about it and not because I have received it for free. I tend to stay away from commercial projects since, a few years ago, I was involved in a commercial event that revealed itself as an eye opener: I co-ordinated three fashion bloggers and three fashion designers in a creative project. When I expressed my doubts about some of the results they had achieved, I was answered by the PR officer working on the project "Don't worry, it will go well, after all, they look amazing on camera!" Most brands or fashion houses launching such "collaborative" projects with bloggers are packaging superficial images that often do not have any kind of content, but are made to be passively received by viewers and readers.
So if it's not commercial, you may ask, what are the benefits you get from your hard work? Well, my name circulates and I get offers to write pieces from other publications or even museum institutions. After doing a few interviews with her, Dutch fashion designer Marga Weimans chose me as the co-writer of the book that accompanied her exhibition at the Groninger Museum.
The major drawback is that it takes a lot of time and energy to come up with constant ideas, especially when I write features that need in-depth research. This is the main reason why I mainly chose to have a website and a Twitter account linked to that - I don't really have the time to engage with other social platforms at the moment. There is something I would like to do better, though: I would like to improve my graphic design skills, but I'm working on it and I'll hopefully get there!
Success.
If we intend success as being invited to catwalk shows, being photographed and being part of a circus that is ready to swallow, chew and spit you, or as the possibility of being recognized in the street, well, I'm simply not interested in all that as I prefer to be heard rather than be seen. I believe indeed that in, a world based on the cult of the image and on being spotted in the street or on the social media, the power of not being recognized is much greater.
I've always been inspired by the people who struggled and fought to establish something durable and timeless in their lives and not by today's standards that promise you fast rise and an even faster fall. So for me success means reaching out to people through what I write: fashion designer Joe Casely-Hayford surprised me a while back when he mentioned me on the "How To Spend It" supplement of the Financial Times, stating Irenebrination was among his favorite blogs because, even when I may be writing about a Prada collection, I dissect it "looking at the sources in a really interesting way"; Cathy Horyn put a big smile on my face when she mentioned in the New York Times "Runway" blog an extensive research about an Italian movie that I had published on my site.
Another way to reach out is through personal side projects such as jewelry. I sometimes come up with bizarre, surreal and extravagant necklaces that incorporate found objects or recycled materials - from toy cars to 8 mm filmstrips and doll's eyeballs, minerals and miniatures - and quite often people stop and talk to me because of them. This project has become a sort of social experiment: every time someone stops me in the street, in an airport, on the train, bus or underground, and asks me about my necklace, I feel happy and "successful" because I have reached out to other people or I have managed to capture their attention, divert their gaze from their smartphones and make them curious enough to start talking to a complete stranger. I think this is also a way for me to create behavioral pieces that can help me spreading optimism through fashion and make people smile, in the tradition of Italian avant-garde fashion designer Cinzia Ruggeri.
About Fashion Weeks, established fashion capitals (Paris, London, New York, Milan) and emerging fashion cities.
I do love the idea that the fashion world has become wider in the last few years, with other capital joining the more traditional calendar revolving around New York, London, Milan and Paris. That said, we do have to sit and ponder about this movable feast of endless shows and presentations and at the ways younger fashion capitals are portrayed. In 2012 Vogue Italia Fashion Editor Franca Sozzani displayed very little knowledge of Africa when she suggested in an interview with the then President of Nigeria Goodluck Jonathan that the complex problems of the country may have been sorted out by opening up expensive shops and starting up a fashion week ("All the richest Nigerians spend their money abroad because there are no shops here, no hotels with a chic African flair, no hip restaurants or clubs. Why not build an African Rodeo Drive in Lagos or Abuja, with boutiques carrying both imported and Nigerian goods?"). Now, there is no way a fashion week can single-handedly save a country or even restore its economy. I personally love the idea that it is possible to discover new talents in unlikely places, and that we can now get inspired by other amazing cities as well, but at the same time we have reached a saturation point in the industry and it can be not just hard, but almost impossible for young talents and brands who invest their own savings in catwalk shows or in renting booths at fashion fairs, to emerge without the support of key players in the industry.
The other point is that less established fashion weeks often depend on funding from private sponsors and this means that if the sponsor decides to stop investing in that event, that specific "fashion week" is canceled and when something becomes "intermittent" it often gets quickly forgotten. A few years ago when the first fashion bloggers arrived on the scene, quite a few of them were invited to new fashion week events in younger style capitals such as Stockholm: everybody jumped on the bandwagon, but as soon as the sponsors decided not to invite the bloggers anymore, the same bloggers didn't turn up again at the next event and the attention towards specific fashion designers started fading. That's a shame because it's always great to follow a young designer from the start and see he or she slowly - and I would like to emphasize the word slowly - developing their talents.
Resort shows are also becoming increasingly important at the moment and they seem to have become a key appointment of the fashion calendar outside of the ordinary fashion week dates. Powerful fashion houses and labels have recently launched this habit of taking the Resort shows to exotic places: Chanel's 'Métiers d'Art' shows have schizophrenically taken place in Linlithgow, Dallas, Dubai, Salzburg, and Seoul just to mention a few places; Louis Vuitton's Cruise 2016 show took place at Bob Hope's Palm Springs Estate and Dior's at Pierre Cardin's Palais Bulles in Théoule-sur-Mer. So it may be fair to say that, recently, fashion weeks and resort shows haven't focused on who is the most talented designers or which is the most beautiful collections, but they have revealed themselves as a chic war in which the most powerful and richest groups compete with each other at colonizing parts of the world. The proliferation of fashion weeks and other shows and events also means that things happen pretty fast and that it is therefore becoming pretty difficult to write consistent reports and reviews about the events seen.
On the relationship between a city's fashion industry and the street.
In the opening monologue of Wim Wenders' Notebook on Cities and Clothes (1989), the director talks about cities, identity and images, wondering if we can trust the electronic (and digital) image, stating about the latter, "The very notion of the original is obsolete. Everything is a copy. All distinctions have become arbitrary. No wonder the idea of identity finds itself in such a feeble state. Identity is out, out of fashion (...) Then what is in vogue, if not fashion itself? By definition, fashion is always in. Identity and fashion, are the two contradictory?"
Our identities went through a globalization process and we more or less look all the same and tend to model ourselves on a collective perception of what is stylish that is packaged for us by specific media outlets – be they blogs or glossy magazines.
What we are not grasping, though, is the importance of the fashion industry intended as infrastructures such as the factories where the production takes place. When I think about the "industry" I immediately conjure up in my mind a series of manufacturing processes and not the most superficial aspects of fashion. For example, if you leaf through Italian fashion magazines from the '70s, you will see fashion house adverts including the names of the fabric and yarn producers who worked on a specific collection. This was not an exception, but the rule: in some cases the adverts were conceived as "thank you" notes to the textile or yarn manufacturer. I miss this connection between the industry and the world of fashion: we have wrongly managed to make young people believe that fashion is all about what you wear and how you wear it in a selfie, but there is more to fashion than just that, and the links with the manufacturing processes shouldn't be forgotten.
Contribution of blogs and fashion media to the social dialogue about local/global fashion.
When fashion blogs first started there seemed to be a bit more of an objective view provided by bloggers on fashion weeks, and surely some of the early street style pictures were less pretentious. In the last five years we saw a lot of revolutions in the blogging world, with bloggers sitting in the front row, getting invited to events, sitting in fashion competition panels or creating capsule collections with fashion brands. Most of them were co-opted by the system and their objectivity went down the drain. In a nutshell their original "bird's eye view" - an aerial and general view of what was happening in the world of fashion - was replaced by a "crow's eye view". Crows have divided vision, they can see and process two separate unrelated pictures, so they can see an entire picture with just one eye and I guess that's what we started to see as well.
I must admit I don't always find inspiring the images I see on various Instagram accounts, as they all look more or less the same to me. Let's indeed consider this: people like Iris Apfel or the late Anna Piaggi proved throughout their lives that the key to being stylish stands in effortlessly mixing clothes and accessories, market finds, vintage pieces, plastic toys and designer coats, achieving your own look and refusing to abide to specific codes. I can see no bravery, flamboyancy and extravagance in polished Instagram pictures of some of the "new icons of style" and celebrities who are supposedly contributing to the social dialogue. Among them there are high profile bloggers paid or supported by specific brands to advertise their designs (let's be really honest, how many ordinary people you see in the street can buy a Chanel backpack costing over $3,000?). I do feel that, quite often, specific street pictures are used to manufacture consent and reinstate the power of fashion brands, something that deeply fascinates me since it makes me think about Italian dictator Benito Mussolini.
In the mid-'30s Fascism dictated austerity and promoted autarchy in Italy, controlling consumption habits, promoting self-sufficiency in textile production and fashion design, and establishing the Ente Nazionale della Moda (National Fashion Board). Fascism understood pretty well that fashion could be used as a way to promote and enforce political power and tried to employ it for its own means. Some of the street style fashion images could be read as a new form of modern fascism, though their main intent is not political, but financial as they are used to generate desire and sell expensive designer pieces. I don't honestly think pictures of models caught in the street in between fashion shows or of fashionistas hanging around show venues during fashion weeks can be considered strictly as "street photography". In most of these images we can indeed see people clad in expensive designer wardrobes and it's only every now and then that you see a hairstyle, or a DIY accessory or garment that genuinely inspires you.
More thoughts about fashion weeks in general. I do follow the more established fashion weeks and the fashion weeks where I feel there are interesting an unusual designers scheduled. Visiting Moscow for example game me the chance to meet in person with duo Nina Donis (Nina Neretina and Donis Pouppis), two people I respect for their design integrity and I love as human beings. I also tend to go to fashion fairs (not just garment and accessories events, but also textile, yarn and leather fairs) and I enjoy spotting people there and doing interviews with young designers and students who may have fresher views on the future of fashion (I have started abhorring well organized press conferences in which the PR officer talks more than the supposedly famous/cool/hip fashion designer...). Yet I do feel that some fashion weeks are becoming totally surreal: there are too many shows, events, parties and presentations scheduled for example in New York and I don't think quantity automatically means that the fashion industry is in a terribly healthy status.
There is an artwork that could be considered as a perfect embodiment of a fashion week - Michelangelo Pistoletto's "Venus of the Rags". This work consists in an industrial reproduction of Venus, representing a degraded idea of the western canon of beauty, with her face buried in a pile of clothes. The garments could be interpreted as shadows of human existences turned into rags, while the latter turn into physical witnesses to consumerism and the ephemeral nature of beauty. You can change the statue and the color and style of the clothes/rags and come up with a perfect logo for any fashion week across the world: you could for example put the Statue of Liberty in the place of Venus and a pile of clothes made in the USA, and you could have an arty representation of New York Fashion Week.
Personal fashion knowledge.
It would be pretentious of me to rate my own fashion history knowledge. I do know my fashion history (I compiled roughly 900 questions for a fashion game for Vogue Italia a few years ago and I can assure you that some of the questions included were pretty obscure...) and keep myself constantly updated. Being Italian, my expertise remains Italian fashion and tailoring, and I do love obscure little stories about Italian tailors moving to other countries and combining their own knowledge and traditions with the local trends.
On museums and fashion institutions.
I always try and do posts and features about museums to attract the attention of younger people to such institutions. I do have a long list of museums in my mind (some of them not necessarily linked just with fashion), I can mention here The Costume Gallery at the Met Museum and the Museum at FIT in New York; The Philadelphia Museum of Art; the Victoria & Albert Museum in London and the Fashion Museum in Bath; Palais Galliera and the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris; and the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, the Groninger Museum and the Rijksmuseum in The Netherlands.
I'm very concerned about museums at the moment as they all seem desperate to break the attendance records of previous exhibitions, so they keep on organizing monumental fashion exhibitions financed by powerful sponsors trying to attract huge numbers of visitors. While I can understand all this, there are museums all over the world with smaller collections that not many people know about as they do not have aggressive marketing strategies and the funds needed to take journalists on sponsored trips. I do love for example Palazzo Mocenigo in Venice. Apart from currently offering the chance to admire very rare pieces such as an entire section of waistcoats from the 1700s, this Museum and Study Center of the History of Fabrics and Costumes has a great and helpful staff with a passion for costumes that I have rarely seen in other institutions and that extends from the museum director Chiara Squarcina to the ticket office and the cleaning ladies.
Accessing online fashion collections is also great: being able to go through a museum or fashion house archive is incredibly inspiring and educational and it can help you making interesting discoveries and parallelisms. Museum-wise I particularly love the Rijksstudio, a very special (and free) online archive comprising 125,000 works from the Rijksmuseum collection that offers the chance to register, access the museum collection and download ultra high-resolution images or sections and details of specific artworks. The Met Museum in New York now offers instead the chance to improve our culture and knowledge by downloading 448 books from its publishing program for free. The MetPublications portal includes indeed a wide selection of out of print volumes and exhibition catalogues about various topics and disciplines – from art and anthropology, to fashion, jewelry, tapestry and textiles - all in PDF format.
How do the digital and physical practices of fashion feed one another?
During the last few years we have seen live streaming of catwalk shows and drones on the runway; we can do interviews with designers via Skype and instantly create videos captured during fashion presentations, parties and events. It's all brilliant, but we have to start detaching ourselves from our computer/tablet/smartphone screens and learn a bit better from real life if we want to build a more solid fashion history knowledge and a better fashion industry in general. As I said earlier on, the real industry and the manufacturing aspects behind fashion collections have been terribly neglected in the last few years (no, organized guided tours of factories and workshops for high profile bloggers who have never been in a factory environment and who are just visiting for half an hour do not count...) and the time has come to do more coverage about these environments to get a better grasp of the industry.
Thoughts about the future of digital fashion, my blog or the industry in general. Well, the fashion industry knows that things aren't as brilliant as they make us want to believe and they are looking for other ways to attract people's attention. There are two themes at the moment: public access/savvy use of social media for marketing purposes and a talent drain from the fashion world to the world's biggest tech companies and vice versa. For what regards the former, well, in September we saw Givenchy reserving 1,200 tickets for its New York show for ordinary people (820 distributed on first-come/first-served via registration on a dedicated Web site; 100 tickets reserved for residents living near the outdoor show site and 280 tickets to students and faculty of local fashion schools). Blogs helped stirring the attention of people and have been used for marketing purposes, but now they seem to have more or less exhausted their role and, for most fashion houses manufacturing the consent of a larger number of ordinary people is much more important than giving one free bag to just one person.
For what regards the link between fashion and tech companies, well, former Burberry chief Angela Ahrendts assumed the role of senior vice president for retail and online stores at Apple (currently perceived as a luxury brand), while LVMH recently enlisted former Apple executive Ian Rogers as its new chief digital officer. You can bet that these exchanges will become more and more frequent while e-commerce will triumph. This phenomenon will also generate an increasingly vapid portrayal of fashion with a coverage of fashion weeks that may end up being even blander than it already is: dynamic digital global retailers may indeed know how to sell a pair of designer shoes, but they do not have any historical or cultural fashion backgrounds. I think we will also lose a few fashion weeks: the runway show is indeed an old formula that will eventually die. Will this generate a Brave New Fashion World? We'll see, but as things stand Banksy's next "Dismaland" will definitely be inspired by fashion. For what regards the future of my site, well, Irenebrination will keep on going until I have the energy to do so, but, in the meantime, I'm exploring new ideas and opportunities in other fields as well.
What digital technologies excite you?
I'm very interested in seeing how digital technologies will change cultural communications, but I'm also very keen on disciplines such as science and technology and in experiments that merge textiles and these two fields. We're living in exciting times but I often feel we're only using technology to take pictures of accessories, garments and of our latest exotic meal. We don't need to clutter the Internet with personal relics that prove that we exist in a Cartesian fashion ("I blog/post pictures on Instagram and therefore I am..."). I often think that one day I will wake up and realize I've been part of a boisterous, naïve and sad generation who uselessly lived at a frantic pace. I think the key is to slow down a bit, experiment more and collectively inspire each other in positive ways. After all, that's what global fashion is – an opportunity for us all to mutually learn from each other in a natural, cosmopolitan and transnational way.
Images featured in this post
Banner/Collage by Anna Battista.
Irene Brin by Richard Avedon.
Irenebrination logo.
"Marga Weimans - Fashion House", book by Anna Battista and Sue-an van der Zijpp, 2014.
Safety Mining Necklace by Anna Battista – a piece about health and safety issues on the workplace inspired by the explosion and fire occurred in May 2014 in the power distribution unit in a mine in Soma, Turkey.
Michelangelo Pistoletto, "Venus of the Rags".
Palazzo Mocenigo, Venice, the waistcoat room, by Anna Battista.
Donis Pouppis, Anna Battista, Nina Neretina and Nina Donis' manager Tom Amelin, Moscow.
Member of the Boxxet Network of Blogs, Videos and Photos
Comments