Ten British Designers (J.W. Anderson, Peter Pilotto, Agi & Sam, Bobby Abley, Christopher Raeburn, Nasir Mazhar, Phoebe English, Preen by Thornton Bregazzi, Thomas Tait and Claire Barrow) unveiled last week in London their Star Wars - The Force Awakens-inspired creations.
The garments are currently being auctioned with proceeds being donated to Great Ormond Street Hospital Children's Charity (the designers participating in this project also created a unisex sweatshirt and t-shirt inspired by the film which are on sale at Selfridges).
Despite the good purpose, some of the pieces for this initiative looked rather costumy; at times they also looked as if they were hastily made with very poor quality fabrics (cosplayers come up with greater ideas and solutions when it comes to materials and accessories...) or simply displayed a sort of bonkers attitude to fashion (yes, this is supposed to be a cool and fun initiative, but J.W. Anderson's men's and women's wear outfits with their transfer stickers and cotton patch appliqués on tops and trousers, handmade quilts and frame with dangling Star Wars figurines and toy weapons, verged too much towards the "mental samurai meets rag and bone man" style...).
The most surprising thing about the project, though, was that almost no designers opted for futuristic techniques or chose to collaborate with a laboratory or a platform to develop them, apart from Claire Barrow. Inspired by lightspeed and the Millennium Falcon, Barrow came up indeed with a black body-suit design covered in thousands of Swarovski crystals, and matched it with a lightsaber-style prosthetic arm designed in conjunction with Open Bionics.
It is actually a bit of a shame that young designers may not be grasping the chance to take part in these projects inspired by a sci-fi film to develop something more pioneering, such as the initiative launched by Print All Over Me (PAOM). This platform (similar in some ways to Constrvct by Continuum) offers artists and the designers the chance to print their own creations on a series of silhouettes, garments and items.
PAOM recently teamed up with the Processing Foundation to offer designs created by digital artists and give the chance to people to customise graphics developed with generative art. Thirty per cent of proceeds from each sale will be donated to the Processing Foundation to support open source development.
Founded in 2012 the Processing Foundation has one main mission - promoting software literacy and creative work with code within the visual arts and visual literacy within technology-related fields, and making sure that these tools and resources are accessible to diverse communities.
The Processing Foundation collaboration with PAOM features so far pieces developed with LIA and Sosolimited. Using p5.js the artists created algorithmic software systems that dynamically generate a design based on users' input. This means that every garment created by the consumer will be personalised and unique.
In LIA's case users can choose their fave garment, then press the number keys 1-8 to change the colours of the graphics and 0 and 9 to alter the scale.
PixelWeaver is instead a web-based application that allows users to choose between skinny, fat, vertical or horizontal weaves based on a search term (in the case of my pictures the term is the sentence "bright yellow sun, crystal blue sea" represented in vertical and horizontal weaves).
When users click on the "Generate" button, the application scours the Internet for the best bits to cover the design, then captures the essence of a search term and algorithmically blends and remixes the top image search results.
It seems rather bizarre that, while independent platforms are opening up new opportunities to artists and designers that in the long run may actually really change the way we think, produce and manufacture textiles, garments and accessories, the fashion industry seems more interested in powerful partnerships (with a futuristic sci-fi film or with multinational technology companies and producers of high-tech gadgets). But what if the future of fashion stood in empowering people of all backgrounds by giving them the chance to design, experiment and customise through things such as open software, rather than in offering a few selected wealthy ones expensive and luxurious toys?
As this post is being written, people are taking to the streets in Paris and London (and in many other cities/countries around the world) to join demos ahead of the UN Climate Change Conference COP21. During the event, taking place in the French capital from tomorrow (30th November - 11th December 2015), world leaders will be gathered in a bid to create an agreement on global warming.
Finding solutions to the climate change problem through a conference and supporting such a demo are noble aims. Yet, quite often, even when we read about these topics or join a demo defending our planet, we forget about the real impact climate change is having on our lives and will have on the lives of future generations. No matter how many images of sea levels rising, floods, deforestation, natural disasters and forced migration and population shifts we may see, we indeed find it difficult to relate to scientific and ecological data and statistics.
Professor Helen Storey from the Center for Sustainable Fashion at the London College of Fashion, may have found a new aesthetic to make us relate to the destruction of our planet and is presenting it to us via a project that does not contemplate selling us the umpteenth T-shirt with a vapid printed slogan that proves we care about the Earth.
Professor Storey has indeed deviced the Dress For Our Time, a Digital Dress Clock, a billowing gown-cum-cape made with a tent (no longer in a usable condition) gifted to the project by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), and developed in partnership with the award winning agency Holition. The tent incorporates a digital data display that clocks the effects and consequences of climate change.
The data displayed on the piece were provided by Britain's Met weather and climate office, in association with a team of global scientists. As Storey studied the data, she shockingly realised the extent of the human and ecological cost of climate change and understood that very little of our world will be left unaffected by climate change in less than 100 years.
The lecturer and fashion designer decided therefore to create a piece that hinted at nurturing, protecting and safeguarding the planet and all human beings, but that could also help people grasping complex scientific ideas bringing to life the statistics through a sort of data coding process.
"Nobody is afraid of a frock, and you have to use the power of that," Storey states in the YouTube interview with Michael Saunby, Open Innovation Manager at the Met Office (posted at the end of this piece). "If people think they're looking at fashion, if they think they're looking at art, then they are open. If you can then - through a Trojan horse or subterfuge or whetever way you want to do it - at the same time deliver something that is more difficult than looking at a frock, you've got people in the right space, which is to be open and to be curious and in some ways to be disarmed by beauty. So, if I do my job right, it's using beauty to disarm people."
The dress will be on display until today inside London's St. Pancras International Station (next to the Sir John Betjeman statue, Euston Rd, London, N1C 4QP), a very symbolical gateway to Paris, allowing people arriving and leaving to ponder a bit more about our planet and develop further dialogues on climate change or finally join the conversation in a more active way. This is also the main aim and objective of the film accompanying the project.
In the film a mysterious woman walks along the streets of London clad in the billowing gown, but, rather than being an ominous presence, the figure walks along the streets attracting the attention of the passers-by, silently urging via her attire and solemn stride to change their habits.
The climate change gown - a project supported by London College of Fashion, UAL, Unilever, Holition, Met Office, St Pancras International, UNHCR and the Helen Storey Foundation - is the first phase of Dress For Our Time. Professor Storey will be looking for feedback on social media to define the next chapters, and you can help her share and develop the project via #Dress4ourTime and #ClimateChange on Instagram and Twitter.
So, it looks like we may all end up being the ones who will suggest Professor Storey what will the next step of the project be, in the meantime it would be great if the dress could become a "reality check" for everybody - from ordinary people to world leaders attending the climate change conference - and if it could travel across the world, becoming the symbol of a movement.
Image credits for this post: all images in this post by David Betteridge
Washing machine drums and refrigerator casings were among the furnishings decorating Space Electronic, a nightclub that opened in 1969 in an abandoned engine repair workshop in Florence. Yet, as much as they may sound like bizarre props, they were perfect decorations for this place created by Gruppo 9999, four guys (Giorgio Birelli, Carlo Caldini, Fabrizio Fiumi and Paolo Galli) who were also members of Italy's Radical Architecture movement.
The space - inspired by New York's Electric Circus, the writings of Marshall McLuhan and the topics analysed at Florence's Architectural School - was indeed conceived as a venue for multimedia architectural experimentation. Music, theatre, light projections and other forms of performances were all welcomed and Gruppo 9999 even used the club as a classroom for the S-Space (Separate School for Expanded Conceptual Architecture). In 1971 in occasion of the Mondial festival, a co-production with Superstudio, the nightclub was redesigned to include a lake (the flooded ground floor...) and a vegetable garden.
This is actually just one interesting tale from the early history of Italian dance clubs, a topic that has fascinated throughout the decades many people, not just dance fans. Nightclubs can indeed be read as social and anthropological phenomena and they have strong links with the cultural development of a country, so it's perfectly understandable why they should represent a compelling topic. Yet there is something more behind the history of Italian discos and nightclubs.
The ICA in London seems to have understood it so well that is currently dedicating the issue an exhibition entitled "Radical Disco: Architecture and Nightlife in Italy, 1965-1975". The event features archival photographs, architectural drawings, film, music and articles from the international design press.
The event, co-curated by Dr Catharine Rossi (Kingston University London; author of the "Space Electronic: Then and Now" project presented last year at the Venice Architecture Biennale) and Sumitra Upham (ICA), looks at a specific period of time between the '60s and the '70s when Italian discos were conceived as places where art, experimental performances and politics met on the dancefloor.
Everything started at the Piper in Rome where a lot of young people (and quite a few architects...) used to hang around before the emergence of radical architecture. Designed by Manilo Cavalli, and Francesco and Giancarlo Capolei, the Piper featured reconfigurable furnishings, audio-visual technologies and a stage for Italian and British acts from Patty Pravo to Pink Floyd, who performed against a backdrop of works by artists including Piero Manzoni and Andy Warhol.
Interestingly enough, the Rome-based club spawned a degree course: architects Paolo Deganello (member of Archizoom) and Adolfo Natalini (co-founder in 1966 of Superstudio) persuaded Italian architect and painter Leonardo Savioli to give a degree course at Florence University on the topic of the "Piper" intended as an avant-garde disco (participants included Giorgio Ceretti, Pietro Derossi and Riccardo Rosso who designed both Piper in Turin in 1966 and L'Altro Mondo in Rimini in 1967).
Florence actually lacked a place where young people could hang around, but it soon made up for lost time when Superstudio opened Mach 2 (1967; mainly featuring transparent and reflective materials and characterised by a pitch-black interior, lined with bright yellow handrails and pink strip lighting that, reproducing a futuristic supersurface, helped people not to loose their way) and Gruppo 9999 created Space Electronic (1969).
In the meantime, in Milan Ugo La Pietra designed Bang Bang (1968), a disco entered through a boutique, while on the Tuscan coast Gruppo UFO launched Bamba Issa (1969), inspired by the Disney story "Donald Duck and The Magic Hourglass", that UFO interpreted as an allegory for capitalism.
Discos were designed by architects who quite often also ran the business, and this meant that, rather than just forms of mass distraction from everyday boredom or from a collective state of decline, clubs were considered as experiments in radical architecture.
These nightclubs weren't indeed just leisure spaces, but were deviced as places of spectacle where various dialogues developed: for example, the architects behind Bamba Issa would change the way it looked over several years to make sure they could tell a continuous story tackling various key social issues, capitalism included.
Superstudio, Archizoom, UFO, Zziggurat and 9999 believed that everything could be architecture and that the architect was committed to society and not to buildings. Discos were therefore new concepts for life and social relationships, spaces where young people gathered and expressed their creativity, conceptual territories where thought could be developed and where art, culture and fashion could all come together.
Sadly, the phenomenon didn't last long: some discos closed, others were transformed in commercial spaces. Things changed even more with rave culture and the '90s, while, in more recent years, the Internet prompted people to abandon fixed locations in favour of itinerant gathering places that can be occupied for one night only, or dramatically changed people's habits by allowing them to develop virtual spaces in digital locations where they could let their avatars do all the dance and the talking.
The debate about discos remains open, though, and it's still incredibly inspiring: Italian radical architects saw the dancefloor as a stage or a surface in constant transformation where protest, politics and multidisciplinary experiments developed, but nothing like this exists anymore.
Will it be possible to recreate such neutral spaces that seemed to offer people a cross-disciplinary approach and allow play, performance, disorder and social exchange to take place? Who knows, maybe Prada will open one day a conceptual nightclub with the help of Rem Koolhaas' OMA/AMO, in the meantime there's plenty to learn at the ICA, just remember to bring with you a sketchpad in case you get some clever architectural idea to recreate a shared cultural platform and a space for social involvement.
"Radical Disco: Architecture and Nightlife in Italy, 1965-1975", ICA, London, from 8th December 2015 to 10th January 2016. The "Designer Discos" talk, on 16th December 2015 (6:30 pm, £7.00 to £8.00), chaired by Justin McGuirk, with Ben Kelly, Amanda Moss and Catharine Rossi, will tackle the countercultural and social value of nightclubs.
In 1960 Swiss painter and sculptor Jean Tinguely showcased his "Homage to New York" self-destroying machine in the sculpture garden of New York's Museum of Modern Art.
The twenty-three feet long and twenty-seven feet high machine integrated a piano, an old Addressograph machine, eighty bicycle wheels, steel tubing, a meteorological balloon, a huge klaxon on wheels, a wide assortment of mechanical devices and various chemicals including smoke and flash powders.
As the main motor was switched on, the piano keys were struck, wheels turned, the klaxons sounded, the radio played and the machine emitted smoke, while several small objects were hurled in the air. The piano eventually caught fire, and the museum authorities called the firemen who finished off the machine.
Though the artist had worked on the piece to make sure it would follow a precise destructive sequence, he also hoped it would spontaneously self-destruct, as it did (even though partially, while his machine "Study for an End of the World No. 2", exploded successfully in 1962 in the desert outside Las Vegas...).
The machine embodied eternal dichotomies - being both beautiful and terrible (a juxtaposition that referenced the concept of the sublime), and being designed to follow a precise destructive path, while acting of its own accord, following its own path of destruction in a chaotic way. This meta-machine represented therefore the opposite of fixed and established works of art, but also the opposite of the fossilised architectural models, both ancient and modern, from the Pyramids to skyscrapers.
There aren't any self-destructive machines threatening to explode at the current exhibition focused on Jean Tinguely at New York's Gladstone Gallery, but there's plenty to see, since the event features works going from 1954 through 1991, some of them displaying the influence of Alexander Calder and Bruno Munari.
Tinguely's "Meta-Malevich" relief is the earliest work in the show: the piece references constructivist compositions in its title and includes a hidden pulley and rubber band system behind the pictorial plane moving white geometric shapes in front of the black background in non-repeating arrangements.
The Gladstone Gallery event also features his motorised sculptures: "Scooter" (1960), a scooter with only one wheel rotated by a motor concealed within a sodier's tin helmet; "Raichle Nr.1" (1974), a pair of the Swiss-branded ski boots topped with shears snipping at the air; and "Trüffelsau" (1984), the skull of a boar brought to life with its jaw chomping while its driftwood tail rotates slowly. There are also several of Tinguely's lamps, including "L'Odalisque" (1989), a 6-part sculpture with light fixtures and moving components.
Most pieces include welded and assembled found objects from junkyards: bits and pieces, mechanical elements and old motors (often decommissioned from 78rpm phonographs) represent byproducts of consumption.
In these jumbles of chaos and disorder, wheels prevail: usually such elements symbolise a circular movement, continuity and eternal repetition, but also point at the possibility of renewal. There is instead a healthy dose of mechanical disorder in Tinguely's wheels that create inconsistent movements caused by chance and accident that prompt viewers to think about transformation.
The event should therefore be considered first as a celebration of freedom and of continuously imperfect movement, something Tinguely wrote about in his 1959 manifesto "For Statics" when he stated, "Everything moves continuously. Immobility does not exist. Don't be subject to the influence of out-of-date concepts. Forget hours, seconds and minutes. Accept instability. Live in Time. Be static - with movement. For a static of the present movement. Resist the anxious wish to fix the instantaneous, to kill that which is living. Stop insisting on 'values' which can only break down. Be free, live. Stop painting time. Stop evoking movements and gestures. You are movement and gesture. Stop building cathedrals and pyramids which are doomed to fall into ruin. Live in the present, live once more in Time and by Time - for a wonderful and absolute reality."
The second key to read the event is to consider Tinguely's insanely hilarious constructions of motorised junk as a reaction to the established society and a way to satirise the mindless overproduction of material goods in advanced industrial society. Who knows what kind of materials Tinguely may have used if he had been alive now, but you can bet he would have included quite a few discarded clothes and accessories...
"Jean Tinguely", Gladstone Gallery, 130 East 64th Street, New York, NY 10065, USA, until 19th December 2015. In October 2016, an exhibition of sculptures including Tinguely's "meta-magic" drawing machines will be on view along with his graphic works and artist's books at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam.
As much as we may want to live well-organised and quiet existences, too often we feel surrounded by disruption, on a personal and global level. We may be responsible for the chaos directly surrounding us, but numerous unpredictable factors such as dangerous meteorological phenomena, sudden accidents and other assorted events, end up having different impacts on our society. That's why the main theme of the sixth cycle of the Prix Pictet competition - "Disorder", a topic that somehow follows the lines of the previous edition dedicated to "Consumption" - terribly fits with the times we're living in.
Founded by the Pictet Group in 2008, the competition has quickly established itself as the leading award in photography and sustainability, helping to discover new photographers producing powerful images on social and environmental topics. The final prize, with a value of 100,000 Swiss Francs (USD100,000) is set to allow a photographer to spend at least a year focusing on personal projects.
The Disorder Finalists' exhibition is currently on at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (until 13th December 2015). Honorary President of Prix Pictet Kofi Annan announced on the opening of the event this year's winner, Valérie Belin.
If you like photography and would like to know more about this year's competition, but can't visit the event in Paris, check out the Disorder - Prix Pictect 06 volume recently published by teNeues.
The book features all the finalists' (12 artists from 7 countries shortlisted by an independent jury) portfolios, together with outstanding individual images by photographers from the wider nomination.
Photography fans will find in the volume Belin's "Still life" (2014) series - chaotic jumbles of kitsch and cheap objects and everyday items, mannequin heads, plastic tubes, fake flowers, and random elements, forming disorderly yet elegantly striking compositions in bright colours.
In an official press release Belin stated about her series, "These still lifes offer a jarring commentary on the effects of our obsession with cheap objects, for not only is their material, plastic, emblematic of the wasteful use of raw materials, but it also represents a grotesque kind of immortality because of its non-biodegradable nature - an immortality that, one could say, is slowly killing the planet."
The portfolios touch upon a wide variety of themes, such as the devastation caused by climate changes; popular uprisings in Ukraine; human trafficking and refugee crises; conservation rangers working with locals to evacuate the bodies of four Mountain gorillas killed in Congo's Virunga National Park; the disappearance of honey bees and artificial cities and the consequences of flooding in different parts of the globe.
Disturbing and eye-opening, colourful and breathtaking, all the pictures tell a story, suggesting readers to contemplate disorder through a journalistic approach or from a creative point of view.
"Our times are defined by Disorder", states Kofi Annan in the Foreword, "at the very moment in human history when we almost dared imagine that no problem was beyond our capacity to solve. Remarkable advances in medicine have helped to eradicate scores of formerly fatal diseases. We are capable of breathtaking feats of engineering – raising mighty dams, flood defences and soaring earthquake-proof buildings. Our mastery over manifold aspects of life has deluded us into thinking that we have bent the planet to our will. Yet the fragility of that assumption is exposed with each new pandemic, earthquake, tsunami or drought. With each passing day our illusion of order is shattered."
While the Disorder volume is just out, after Paris, the exhibition of the shortlisted images will tour the world, beginning at MAXXI in Rome and then travelling to major international museums and galleries including the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Museum, Geneva; Westbau, Zurich; CAB (Contemporary Art Brussels), the Palau Robert, Barcelona and the Museum of Photographic Art, San Diego. Check out the Prix Pictect site for further dates and information.
In 1894 French aesthete, dandy and poet Robert de Montesquiou introduced Marcel Proust to his cousin, Élisabeth, Countess Greffulhe, née Élisabeth de Caraman-Chimay. At the time, Proust was twenty-three and the countess was thirty-four. A year before that presentation, Proust wrote to Montesquiou to tell him he had seen her at the house of Madame de Wagram. He described the Countess with these words: "Her hair was dressed with Polynesian grace, and mauve orchids hung down the nape of her neck, like the floral hats that Monsieur Renan describes (...) The entire mystery of her beauty is in the glow, above all in the enigma of her eyes. I have never seen a woman more beautiful." Proust admired her and eventually borrowed her manners, style and wardrobe to create the Duchess of Guermantes in the novel In Search of Lost Time.
Proust's readers may have just imagined how the Countess looked and dressed, but now they can finally see her wardrobe in all its glory at an exhibition currently on at Paris' Palais Galliera.
Curated by Olivier Saillard, director of the Galliera, "La Robe Retrouvée: Les Robes-Trésors de la Comtesse Greffulhe" (Fashion Regained: The Treasured Dresses of Élisabeth, Countess Greffulhe") features some of the most beautiful gowns and accessories donned by the Countess.
Born in 1860, Élisabeth lived through the Belle Époque and the Roaring Twenties. Leader of Paris Society (le Tout-Paris), she became particularly influential after her marriage to the Belgian banking tycoon Count Henri Greffulhe.
The countess dispensed favours and was a leading patron of the arts, holding a salon in her house in Rue d'Astorg, receiving guests at the Château de Bois-Boudran and at her villa in Dieppe.
Founding president of the Société des Grandes Auditions Musicales, she raised funds and produced and promoted operas and shows, which included Wagner's Tristan and Isolde and Twilight of the Gods, performances by Diaghilev's Ballets Russes and Isadora Duncan.
A supporter of Captain Dreyfus, Leon Blum, and the Popular Front, she also sponsored science helping Marie Curie to finance the Institute of Radium, and Edouard Branly to pursue his research into radio-transmission and tele-mechanical systems.
An extremely elegant woman, she was known for her theatrical appearances and her outfits that emphasised her silhouette. On display at the Palais Galliera there are some fifty models - coats, indoor clothes, day dresses, lavishly embroidered evening dresses, and also accessories - bearing the labels of grand couturiers such as Charles Frederick Worth, Fortuny, Callot, Jeanne Lanvin and Nina Ricci. Most of the items featured were donated to the Galliera by the heirs and descendants of Élisabeth, but there are also pieces from further donations.
The event opens in the museum's Salon d'Honneur: visitors can admire here a variety of stunning creations, from a Maison Soinard's day dress (circa 1887) in antique pink silk satin with brown silk velvet appliqués, to a green silk taffeta housecoat (circa 1895) by Maison A. Félix (a couturier the Countess had patronised since her wedding in 1878) and a stunning dark blue cut voided velvet on bright emerald satin silk tea-gown (circa 1897) by Jean-Philippe Worth.
But there's plenty more including an evening coat and a day dress attributed to Vitaldi Babani (specialists in the sale of art objects, silks and kimonos imported from the Far East; later on they also started selling their own designs, quite often inspired by Mariano Fortuny) and a bronze green silk jacket with gold prints by Fortuny, a figure occupying a key place in Proust's work.
There are two absolute gems in this section, the first being the "Russian Cape" (circa 1896). This embroidered maroon silk velvet cape with a rosette pattern was actually a "khalat", from Bukhara (present day Uzbekistan), that is a ceremonial cloak, donated by Tsar Nicolas II to Countess Greffulhe. The Countess had the luxurious gift altered into an evening cape by her couturier, Jean-Philippe Worth.
The second magnificent piece is Worth's "Byzantine dress", a lamé taffeta and silk tulle gown with silk and gold yarn elements that the Countess donned at her daughter Elaine's wedding on 14th November 1904. The dress left many columnists so stunned that most of them forgot to report about the bride, but preferred to linger in their articles on the Countess' dress.
The next room focuses on the Countess' colour of choice from the 19th century to 1914 - black. This section includes a Jeanne Lanvin evening gown with sleeves embroidered in a latticework of taffeta and the "Jupiter" coat with its Surrealist brick-like arrangement of rectangles, plus a two-toned, black-and-ivory evening outfit by Nina Ricci.
Other highights include Beauchez's midnight blue and brown silk velvet transformable evening gown with two bodices, and a grand and fluid ivory silk evening gown by Jenny, not to mention the hint at exoticism in the evening coats inspired by the Orient or in an evening gown with geometrical patterns directly inspired by the discovery of Tutankhamun's tomb in 1922.
The Petite Galerie Est reminds visitors that the Countess was very keen on accessories as well and that she considered indispensable while travelling several pieces including a large hat and several summer veils (to be rolled - she wrote - and not folded!). Yet the Countess also loved fans, hats and gloves, and fancy shoes like the ones in a shocking pink shade and a black velvet ribbon.
Photography fans will particularly enjoy the West Gallery that features pictures by Paul Nadar (who also taught the Countess photography), and Otto Wegener, a Swedish photographer who lived in Paris and was a favourite for society portraits. Photography helped the Countess turning into a charismatic woman, while highlighting her elegance and power of seduction as proved by Wegener's portrait in which she is pictured wearing an evening gown and coat lined with Mongolian lamb (circa 1886-1887).
The exhibit ends with a famous black velvet evening gown designed by Worth and decorated with appliques in the form of lilies and a Bertha collar that could be folded into bat wings (the former was reference to a poem by Montesquiou; the latter hinted at his tutelary creature, the bat). Greffulhe sported the same dress in a picture by Nadar (a photograph coveted by Proust...) in which she is portrayed gazing at herself in a mirror.
Films, photographs and music tracks plus papers describing her trousseau, identification card and even her will (in which Greffulhe explained she wanted to be buried in a black velvet gown with Venice lace collar) complement the event.
Quite a few visitors will leave the exhibition pondering about a few interesting aspects linked with the event, but not directly tackled by it. First of all, the Countess' empowering garments prompted writers to almost turn into fashion reporters, something that doesn't happen in our times (paparazzi take pictures of celebrities, but writers do not produce essays that poetically examine the look of famous people...). Indeed, invited to a party in May 1894 where he saw the Countess, Proust wrote "Madame la Comtesse Greffulhe was deliciously attired in a pink lilac silk dress printed all over with orchids and covered in silk chiffon of the same colour; her hat a mass of orchids surrounded by lilac coloured gauze."
Besides, there is another hidden message in the halls of the Galliera: the displays and fashion pieces featured may be hinting at very different times from the ones we are currently living in, but, rather than following fashion, the Countess cleverly "made fashion".
As Montesquiou wrote: "She would go to the top couturiers and have them show her all their latest fashions. Then, when she was sure they had shown off everything they could come up with, she would stand up and take her leave. The creators, who were confident of having enlightened her and managed the proceedings with skill, were addressed with this disconcerting instruction: 'Make me whatever you think fit – as long as it is not that!'"
The Countess seemed to have the power to transform the creations she chose: talking about a gown she once donned, novelist and journalist Albert Flament referred to "(...) a dress which cannot be described, since the way she wears it makes it impossible to know what the dress itself is like." In a nutshell, Greffulhe created her wardrobe to shape her identity in the public eye, while nowadays we shape our identity through wardrobes that in some cases (think about celebrities who are given certain pieces for free...) we do not even chose for ourselves.
So there's a lesson to learn at Palais Galliera that goes well beyond the yards of tulle and chiffon and the cascades of feathers that the Countess loved so much: garments and accessories can offer great opportunities to all of us, especially when we refuse to behave like slavish followers of fashion, but try to shape our own identities through what we want to wear and feel like wearing.
"La Robe Retrouvée: Les Robes-Trésors de la Comtesse Greffulhe" (Fashion Regained: The Treasured Dresses of Élisabeth, Countess Greffulhe), Palais Galliera, Paris, until 20th March 2016. The exhibition is be presented at the Museum at FIT in New York in the Fall of 2016 under the title "Proust’s Muse".
Caught in the wintertime blues? If you like fashion design there is one way to get rid of them - admiring rare garments covered in delicate floral motifs that have the power to instantly conjure up visions of warm springs.
Fashion fans have the chance to do so at "Fleurs: Botanicals in Dress from the Helen Larson Historic Fashion Collection" at the FIDM Museum, in Los Angeles. The event includes 13 rare, historical lavish designs and selected accessories from the 18th century to the 1910s.
"Fleurs" focuses on sartorial techniques that create eternal springtime and flowers that never fade: trompe l'oeil woven petals, shade-embroidered leaves, and three-dimensional silk bouquets. The exhibition also includes a flowered lace roundel made uniting the coats of arms of Queen Victoria and her husband Prince Albert. The piece features intricate Tudor roses symbolising England, thistles hinting at Scotland and shamrocks standing for Ireland, plus oak leaves, acorns, and palm and olive branches.
We often see flowers appearing on runways, usually as prints and appliqued motifs, but it's not rare to see monumental gowns that wrap up the models' bodies in petals of luxurious fabrics during Haute Couture shows, while Italian designer Roberto Capucci is well-known for his fantastically colourful gowns that looked like floral sculptures endowed with the power of transforming the wearer into delicate blossoms.
Yet botanical motifs of embroidered foliage, profusions of flowers and realistically rendered roses, peonies, jasmines, daffodils, tulips and carnations have always been popular in fashion, they have indeed been "growing" around the human body for centuries. At times these motifs were replicated in silk, silver, gold or chenille threads, at others clusters of vibrantly coloured flowers were appliqued on dresses.
Patterns of large flowers were for example embroidered in lavish designs worn at court, with threads worked using various types of stitches (filé, frisé, strip and purl to mention a few of them).
Among the botanically-inspired gowns in the "Fleurs" event there is a delicate ivory day dress with romantic embroideries of flowers; a deep yellow American ball gown (circa 1852) with appliqued motifs of flowers framed in green lace; and a Parisian Opera gown from 1887 by Maison A. Félix.
The event also includes an example of "andrienne", a gown in the French style incorporating a loose panel of box-pleated fabric falling from the shoulders to the hem at the back (also known as a Watteau gown, because it can be admired in many paintings by French artist Jean-Antoine Watteau). Flat in front, voluminous at the back, and inflated at the hips, the gown has unnatural proportions that show off as much expensive floral silk fabric (embroidered with metallic threads and trimmed with metallic lace and linen lace) as possible.
The FIDM Museum is in the final weeks of a major fundraising campaign to save 400 years of fashion history by purchasing the Helen Larson Historic Fashion Collection, a private collection of around 1,200 historic garments and accessories from four centuries.
Helen Larson spent 50 years assembling it and the collection is in danger of being dispersed forever or absorbed into another private collection, becoming in this way inaccessible to students, researchers, and the general public.
The FIDM Museum is currently raising funds to purchase it: people can make a contribution of any amount online or by mail, or join the #4for400 social media campaign to donate $4 (or more) by texting "Museum" to 243725.
The FIDM Museum has until the end of 2015 to finish raising the necessary funds, and, since Black Friday is coming, rather than spending money on useless gifts, it would be a good idea to splash it on preserving historically significant garments for a museum that will make sure they will become accessible to a vast public. "Fleurs" is also a free-to-the-public exhibition, so giving back something to the museum wouldn't be a bad idea.
"Fleurs: Botanicals in Dress" is at the FIDM Museum, Fashion Institute of Design & Merchandising, 919 S. Grand Avenue, Los Angeles, California 90015, until 19th December 2015.
Image credits for this post
1. Opera Gown Designer: Félix, c. 1887 Silk faille, silk machine lace, silk satin, silk chenille, silk flowers & pearls Helen Larson Historic Fashion Collection FIDM Museum Proposed Acquisition
2. Day Dress British, 1820s Embroidered silk areophane Helen Larson Historic Fashion Collection FIDM Museum Proposed Acquisition
3. Ball Gown American, c. 1852 Silk taffeta, silk satin, silk floss, silk & metallic lace Helen Larson Historic Fashion Collection FIDM Museum Proposed Acquisition
4. Court Gown (Robe à la française) Europe, 1760s Metallic silk brocade, metallic & linen lace Helen Larson Historic Fashion Collection FIDM Museum Proposed Acquisition
If you're a costume fan and you happen to be visiting Italy, check out the double exhibition Louis Vuitton is hosting in its shops in Venice and Rome.
Entitled "A Tale of Costumes", the event will run through 31st March at the Espace Louis Vuitton in Venice and at Louis Vuitton's Spazio Etoile in Rome.
The Venice side of the exhibition features an 18th century "andrienne" (known as the andrié in Venice, this style was characterised by a pleated tail that descended from the shoulders, widening out to a broad train) from the collection of Palazzo Mocenigo restored with the support of the brand; a reinterpretation of the dress created by the students of the Centro sperimentale di cinematografia (Experimental Film Centre) in Rome and made under the supervision of Italian costume designer and Academy Award nominee Maurizio Millenotti; and a paper garment by Chinese artist Movana Chen, made knitting paper threads from destroyed books.
The Roman part of "A Tale of Costumes" has instead a cinematic twist about it, since it features contributions from the Rome-based tailoring house Sartoria Tirelli.
The exhibition revolves around a film program featuring a docu-film about the history of the tailoring house, "L'abito e il Volto (The dress and the face)" and "Piero Tosi, 1690 - The Beginning of a Century" both by Francesco Costabile, and "Handmade cinema" by Lauda Delli Colli and Guido Torlonia.
The event also features a selection of costumes made by Tirelli. The best piece remains the monumental purple silk dress with an anthracite cameo brooch in a silver frame designed by legendary Piero Tosi and donned by Romy Schneider in Luchino Visconti's Ludwig (1972).
But there's plenty more to see, including the white tunic and pale blue and ochre overgarment created by Maurizio Millenotti for Valeria Golino in Bernard Rose's Immortal Beloved (1994) and the silver sequinned evening gown matched with a white feather boa designed by Alessandro Lai for actress Margherita Buy in Ferzan Özpetek's Magnificent Presence (2012).
Fans of TV series and new films will discover Gabriella Pescucci's ivory silk and gold trimmed dress made in 2010 for the TV series The Borgias by Neil Jordan; Salma Hayek's (you get the feeling the brand picked this costume to piss off her husband François-Henri Pinault, CEO of Louis Vuitton's rival Kering...) red satin and black lace costume designed by Massimo Cantini Parrini for her role in Matteo Garrone's Il racconto dei racconti (Tale of Tales, 2015; a film characterised by amazing costumes and locations, but the stories are narrated in an extremely detached and cold way...); and Paloma Faith's PVC jacket, bra and trousers designed by Carlo Poggioli for La giovinezza (Youth, 2015) by Paolo Sorrentino.
There is actually a strong link between Louis Vuitton and the Rome-based Centro sperimentale di cinematografia where Piero Tosi also teaches as the company offers support to students and the chance to take part in costume and fashion workshops.
Cinema has always inspired fashion: Luchino Visconti's La caduta degli dei (The Damned, 1969) prompted the fashion industry to rediscover and relaunch the '30s; in more recent years designers just lifted famous images from specific films and reused them in their own collections.
As you may remember from a previous post, a few looks by Marc Jacobs for Louis Vuitton A/W 2011-12 collection were borrowed from a disturbing scene in Liliana Cavani's Il portiere di notte (The Night Porter, 1974) in which Lucia, wearing only a pair of trousers, suspenders, long leather gloves and a beret with a turquoise mask on top of it, sings for a group of SS officers.
Silvana Mangano's vanilla and soft pink dresses with hats wrapped up in yards of tulle maline in Morte a Venezia (Death in Venice, 1971) inspired instead some of the looks in Chanel Cruise Collection 2009/10, while more recently images of Maria Callas as Medea in Pasolini's eponymous film with costumes by Piero Tosi, reappeared on the moodboard of Valentino's Spring/Summer 2014 collection.
"Piero Tosi and the late Umberto Tirelli made outstanding contributions to the history of cinema because they created visual images that are so well coded and crafted that they can be easily identified," Dino Trappetti, current Head of the tailoring house and Chairman of the Tirelli-Trappetti Foundation, once told me in an interview.
"It's only natural for fashion designers to use their visual language to call back in their audiences' minds certain references and I'm definitely happy to see that in this way Tosi and Tirelli's work is still out there. What makes me sad is the fact that there is no copyright to protect their unique vision, which means designers can use them and become rich without creating anything original."
So, who knows, maybe the event at the Louis Vuitton spaces will re-open at least in the minds of visitors the dialogue about copyright issues and creativity as well.
In a biography he wrote in the early '80s, Umberto Tirelli, who considered himself not only a tailor but a passionate collector and "fashion archaeologist", stated he had stopped collecting garments in 1968, since, after then, fashion ceased influencing culture and designers started copying each other.
Hopefully "A Tale of Costumes" will inspire students to discover more about Umberto Tirelli's teachings, his legacy at the tailoring house, the power of costume design and the most obscure tricks of costume making. "We have a 5,000 square metre warehouse outside Rome with 170,000 costumes available for research, study and exhibition," Trappetti explained me a while back.
"It is extremely important for students to see how these garments were made, study the cut and explore the seams. We quite often discovered amazing things ourselves by disassembling garments from our collection. Once we found out strategically placed pieces of cardboard inside a men's coat from the 1700s that were put there to give it structure. If you're a fashion or costume design student coming to visit us, you will feel a bit like doing half a university course in one day."
A wunderkammer - this is definitely the best way to describe Fiona Hall's "Wrong Way Time", the installation representing Australia at the 56th Venice International Exhibition (until today).
There are indeed hundreds if not thousands of objects and elements inside the Australian Pavilion, some of them displayed under glass cabinets, others lined around the walls or occupying a section of the floor.
There are sardine tins cut and turned into sculptures of plants, figures and endangered marine creatures from the Kermadec Trench in the South Pacific; skulls painted on empty perfume bottles; bread sculptures on atlases; lead sculptures of potatoes that turn into Platonic solids; Chinese cork-landscape dioramas; zoomorphic pieces of driftwood; nests made with banknotes; endangered animals woven from military uniforms and desert grasses; knitted heads and figures made from military camouflage garments, bones and teeth, and clocks painted with a variety of messages and slogans.
The installations in the pavilion - inspired by Hall's combined passion for African, Oceanic and Aboriginal art - tackle three main themes - global politics, world finances and the environment.
Hall is interested in exploring greed, terror and the cruelty of our world, factors that are killing our planet and ruining our lives on a daily basis.
Yet the artist is interested in analysing such factors by using her deep love for life and for our planet, and a childish wonder that turns even the most common material she finds on her path into a fantastic and at times disturbing object.
While dark moods and nuances prevail and, on the surface, the outlook of the pavilion looks pessimistic (reminding people that Hall is inspired by Dante, William Blake and Hieronymus Bosch...), Hall actually provides visitors with a life-affirming inter-cultural message as her works (that could be interpreted as votive offerings or surrealistic excesses) possess an invisible glowing interior light that has the power of shattering our global fears and anxieties.
The items on display are indeed a way to ward off evil and spread around the artist's vitality.
Hall affirms her strength and energy by knitting, weaving or carving out of the most disparate materials she can find numerous shapes and forms.
Through them the artist prompts all visitors to ponder about stories of terrorism, climate change, extinction, environmental pillage, migration and collapsing markets.
News stories become in some cases Hall's main inspiration for very unusual representations of the world.
Her human beings made of bread scattered around the Mediterranean area on an atlas showing Europe, hint at the many migrants who lost their lives at sea as they tried to flee their home countries.
A cruise ship carved out of bread and left on a map of Italy calls to mind the Costa Concordia that capsized and sank off the Isola del Giglio in Tuscany in 2012.
Hall's nests made of shredded US dollar bills ("Tender", 2003-06) remind us that habitats have been destroyed by thirst and money.
The empty nests replacing natural habitats are not nurturing creatures, but greed and they are not resting among cocooning tree branches, representing therefore pure artifice and the sadness of transnational monopoly capitalism.
In other cases Hall overimposed leaves on banknotes to juxtapose the images on banknotes and therefore the human kingdom made of heroes, heads of state and patriotic symbols, with the image repertoire of the plant kingdom.
For her installation "Kuka Irititja" (Animals from Another Time, 2014), Hall wove endangered or extinct animal species together with eleven women (Roma Butler, Yangi Yangi Fox, Rene Kulitja, Niningka Lewis, Yvonne Lewis, Molly Miller, Angkaliya Nelson, Mary Pan, Sandra Peterman, Tjawina Roberts, and Nyanu Watson) from the Tjanpi Desert Weavers from the Central and Western Desert region of Australia.
This collective of Aboriginal women artists is well known for their works of fibre art, but the sculptures made for the Australian Pavilion were made using two main materials - desert grasses and bits and pieces of camouflage fabrics from military uniforms.
The animals represent part of the past heritage of these women, reminding visitors that they disappeared for two main reasons - either they were killed by the nuclear bombings in the '50s or they disappeared when Aboriginal Australians switched their eating habits with white people's foods.
The installation "All the King's Men" - comprising several free-hanging three-dimensional heads with distorted features or caught in grimaces of horror - was made using the same materials.
The camouflage fabrics included in the animals and in these warring evil forces and scary masks of death symbolise a pattern stolen from nature and commandeered into warfare, hinting at the displacement of Aboriginal women under colonial regimes and the secret British nuclear bombings on their lands in Maralinga in the 1950s.
The scariest pieces included in the event are probably the large group of floor and mantle clocks forming the installation "Wrong Way Time".
Each clock is painted in a different way, but many of them are characterised by skeletons; messages and graffiti cover other pieces.
A red-U-turn painted anticlockwise over the growth rings of a tree reveals us that Hall thinks we are heading backwards, while the masked assassin from early propaganda videos from the Islamic State depicting the beheading of a journalist in 2014, reappears on several clocks, joining a graveyard of painted skulls.
Yet, once you start reading deeper into Hall's art, you realise that her clocks are not omens of death, but memorial totems and protest signs urging people to change their habits and lifestyles.
From artist, Hall becomes therefore a collector, historian, scientist, and philosopher: her manic manual activity of cutting, shredding and knitting turns into a clever weapon to defeat without using violence the evil forces of the world, while reminding us that too many artists nowadays focus on conceptual pieces with obscure final meanings or produce works of art manufactured by professional factories rather than made by hand.
Hall's process of manually making her pieces stretches the time, making the past and the future collide.
One part of her installation includes vintage Chinese cork dioramas locked in cabinets with live spiders: these pieces are living mini-museums, exotic landscapes destroyed in real life by urban developments, in which Hall has reintroduced nature (the spiders) hoping that the latter will take over.
The clusters of objects, images and worlds that form "Wrong Way Time" could be considered in the same way, a museum in which Hall's symbols – skulls, clocks, camouflage fabrics, plants and animals – are turned into the grammar of a witty discourse. In this dialogue nature plays the role of saviour from the many illnesses infesting our society and our planet, suggesting us we should shift from economy to ecology.
As the Biennale closes, it's interesting to see how some of the installations and art it featured have assumed further messages after the recent stories about terrorism: Hall's works can definitely be read along new lines, proving they can pass the test of time, forcing visitors to enter a nightmarish iconography only to find a better life and more reasons for living in our complex existences.
Some of the people who visited the 56th Venice International Exhibition (until tomorrow) during the press days or the early days of the event and saw the uprooted pine trees abandoned around the French Pavilion in the Giardini, probably shrugged thinking the organisers were still finishing setting up the gardens.
The trees looked indeed as if they had recently been delivered and were ready to be replanted somewhere. Yet, careful observers who took the time to stop and look at the trees quickly realised there was something peculiar about the pines.
Indeed, the trees surreptitiously moved between the French, British, Canada and German pavilions, following every now and then unsuspecting visitors. The trees outside the pavilion are actually part of a trio of pines (one stands inside the French pavilion) forming the installation "rêvolutions" by artist Cèleste Boursier-Mougenot.
The pavilion is left open to the elements, conjuring up in this way the follies of the romantic parks of the 18th century, evoking the sense of wonder of Italian Mannerist gardens. But there's more behind these mobile sculptures: the trees, almost protagonists of a fantasy tale, represent machine and nature hybrids, trans-human creatures liberated from their rootedness and therefore gifted with the freedom to go wherever they want, wandering from one nation to the next, migrating across frontiers, admiring the architectures surrounding them and providing shade and shelter to birds and people.
Nature becomes a way to return to the origins and to someone's roots (while hinting also at rootless and displaced human beings), but also turns into an instrument or a music box: the tree in the pavilion emits indeed real-time sound environments via the small differentials recorded in real time.
This new generation of hybrid trees is made mobile by the electricity generated by the conversion of data drawn from their metabolisms.
Technology-wise the trees were devised with the Laboratory for Analysis and Architecture of Systems (LAAS), a Toulouse-based unit within the National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS): the plants were first given a motor system to allow movement and then a control architecture to make the movement consistent, keeping in mind the influence of the climate on the plant's metabolism and the safety requirements of the Biennale.
The result of this installation is the physical representation of the main character in Primo Levi's short tale Dysphylaxis, a story in which animate and inanimate worlds converge since the human kind has interbred with other life forms such as animals and plants.
Nature is combined with technology in Cèleste Boursier-Mougenot's installation, but the artist also tackles the rooted/rootless, vegetable/electrical, human/non human dichotomies through his trees, offering visitors a place – the pavilion – where they can take refuge, relax and think about the ecosystem and a hybrid future.
Interestingly enough, while recent fashion and technology collaborations were mainly launched hoping to generate media revenue and sell gadgets and accessories, art seems to be using technology to come up with more imaginative poetical ideas and dreamlike visions that, rather than putting pressure on consumers, may help us thinking not just about ourselves (note the young girl in the video in this post who seems too busy taking a selfie outside the French Pavilion to even realise a tree is moving towards her...), but about the ecosystem surrounding us.