The co-founders of the Wiener Werkstätte, Hoffmann and Moser developed dynamic contrasts and colourful areas that intertwined one with the other, suggesting very original solutions when it came to drawing abstractions. They re-elaborated designs for textiles and rugs creating complex geometrical and dynamic patterns that can still be considered as extremely modern, as these samples from 1899, 1902 and 1903 prove.
In yesterday's post we analysed a contemporary Haute Couture collection that incoporates in some of its designs patterns and motifs borrowed from the early decades of the 1900s, plus a palette and techniques linked to Mariano Fortuny.
Fashion design students who want to research a little bit moreinto this topic should maybe try and look in museum archives for handbooks, publications, pattern books and drawing folders dedicated to textiles and released between the last decade of the 1800s and the beginning of the following century.
Quite a few of such publications focused on nature, insects, plants and flowers: at times drawings were stylised or reinterpreted according to a then fashionable Oriental style.
Emile-Alain Séguy produced for example a series of interesting works: Les fleurs et leurs applications décoratives (1901) betrayed a Japanese inspiration; Floréals, Insectes, and Papillons (1914) borrowed from the Russian artists living and working in Paris and in particular from the art of the Ballets Russes; Samarkande (1920) focused on Persian influences, while Bouquets et Frondaisons (1926), Suggestions pour étoffes et tapis (1927) and Prismes (1931) moved from crystals and shapes found in nature.
These folders were extremely inspiring for designers working at the time and were a bit like our modern trend reports (well, they were slightly more arty and definitely less trashy than our trend reports...).
If Fortuny is still fashionable, maybe trying to learn more about drawings and patterns for textiles from his times isn't such a bad idea (there is, after all, a renewed interest in patterns - think about our collective fascination with intricate colouring books...).
"She was enveloped in one of those long, Oriental gauze scarves that the alchemist dyer Mariano Fortuny submerges in the mysterious potions of his caldrons, stirring them with a wooden stick, first like a sylph, then like a gnome, where he obtains colours from strange dreams and later prints them with his thousands of new generations of stars, plants and animals." Gabriele D'Annunzio, Forse che si, forse che no (1910)
Up until seven or eight years ago Mariano Fortuny was mainly a beloved presence in the hearts and minds of researchers, historians, curators who fought to organise exhibitions about him, and selected art and fashion fans.
Though still open to visitors, his studio and workshop located in Palazzo Pesaro degli Orfei, in Venice, weren't visited by huge crowds of tourists, yet a considerable number of connoisseurs went there to learn more about the work and experimental techniques of this painter, inventor, photographer, and couturier, best known for his dress and textile designs.
Fashion is made of cycles, though, and Mariano Fortuny's gowns - mentioned in works by Marcel Proust and Gabriele D'Annunzio, and favoured by Eleonora Duse, Isadora Duncan, the Marchesa Casati, Lyda Borelli, Madame Conde Nast and later on also Peggy Guggenheim - first reappeared on Gloria Vanderbilt in a 1969 photo shoot by Richard Avedon for Vogue.
In 1997 they inspired Sandy Powell's costumes for the film The Wings of a Dove, while in 2009 Natalia Vodianova made the gowns fashionable again by opting for vintage Fortuny dresses at the British Fashion Awards and at the Met Costume Gala.
The members of the wealthy elite who want to channel Mariano Fortuny's style shouldn't instead look further than Valentino's Haute Couture S/S 2016 collection. Creative Directors Maria Grazia Chiuri and Pierpaolo Piccioli conjured up indeed the ghost of Fortuny on the Valentino runway.
Models looked like solemn vestals in their floor-length hand-dyed velvet gowns (there were a couple of shorter and wide skirts that looked out of place and utterly unconvincing...) with metallic stencils in Fortuny's style inspired by birds or floral elements, or in their light and impalpable pleated dresses.
At times the design duo patchworked together strips of coloured fabrics and integrated them into kimono coats and dresses that recreated intricate tapestries.
The fascination with velvet - pleated, painted, and printed, washed and aged or knotted into a soft web that seemed to have been patiently built around the body of the model in just one piece - was directly inspired by Marcel Proust, who often mentioned Fortuny and the power of his gowns in his book Remembrance of Things Past.
Densely embroidered floor-sweeping coats and Oriental elements such as dragons on long kimono coats gave a touch of theatricality to the designs and echoed pieces originally donned by Fortuny's clients like the divine actress Eleonora Duse.
Despite the embroideries and the clever three-dimensional effects such as the cut out and reappliquéd brocade elements on a green velvet brocade gown, the collection wasn't about embellishments and decorative details, but about complex fabric treatments and luxurious imperfections like the velvet pieces almost crudely stitched onto a nude tulle dress.
The collection was therefore dedicated to all those wealthy customers who want to effortlessly combine elegance with simplicity to stunning effect.
The pieces weren't just inspired by Fortuny, though: the Venice-based company actually worked with Valentino to recreate some of their most iconic pieces and surfaces in their classic palette comprising mossy green, deep yellow, burnt orange, rich reds and subtle golds (though one section of the show was dedicated to pure white gowns), colours that Fortuny lifted from masters such as Titian and Tintoretto and from exotic places including China, Japan, Persia, Turkey, Northern Africa and Spain.
All the looks where accessorised with jewellery designs by Alessandro Gaggio and Harumi Klossowska (Balthus' daughter), who also made the gold snake headpieces coiling around the models' heads.
The keyword to unlock the collection was very simple though – freedom. Though a pseudo-Delphos gown matched with a mink-lined kimono should be filed under the "Marchesa Casati style" label, the designers were actually paying homage in their gowns to dancing muses liberated by Fortuny's light and liquid garments that emphasised body shape and movement, such as Isadora Duncan (see also the bare, bejewelled feet of the models decorated with a gold chain, walking on a runway on which leaves and petals were scattered).
The way the garments moved on the body pointed towards Loïe Fuller's choreographies in which she inflated and deflated the fabric manipulating air currents as if she were a butterfly, and towards Martha Graham's "Lamentation", with its choreography based on contractions and relaxations performed through a tube of fabric.
Dance was actually more literally referenced in the tutu-like tulle dresses at the very end of the catwalk show, some of them slightly reminiscent also of Margaret Morris' ethereal gowns.
So, what is it that still fascinates us about Fortuny's artistic legacy? To put it very simply, he was a modern man with an incredibly vivid mind.
Born in Granada, Spain, he grew up in Paris developing an interest for the world of theatres, and in particular for the theatrical applications of electricity, and for stage sets and decoration.
In the late 1880s, his family moved to Venice, where he continued his painting studies while developing further interests in photography and stage sets.
At the end of the 1890s he started exhibiting his paintings publicly, while designing scenes and costumes for operas, and working on stage lighting experiments with the help of the "Fortuny Dome", a concave device he had created that could be used to enhance the depth effect of the stage set.
In 1907 Fortuny produced his first item of clothing, the Knossos scarf that featured prints applied to it by means of wooden plates. Researches into fabrics continued and soon he developed a technique for printing on silk and velvet.
A few years later, in 1909, Fortuny registered a pleated silk fabric made with a machine he had invented; in the same year he patented a process for polychromatic printing on fabric and paper and, in November, he launched the Delphos Gown, a garment inspired by ancient Greek sculpture.
Fortuny's legacy (that continues to this day in the Giudecca factory and in his house in Venice) is vitally important for all these reasons, besides his gowns have proved the test of time: the aged effects in Valentino's S/S 16 designs were a way to add a patina of timelessness and memory (in honour of Proust...) to the collection.
There is one point to consider about these Haute Couture designs: while they do not add anything new to Valentino's current vocabulary, they reconfirm an interest from Chiuri and Piccioli's part in vestal (see the A/W 2015 Haute Couture collection) and priestesses' looks (remember the Medea inspired collection?), that may be a genuine interest or may be partially dictated by a commercial need to shift towards longer garments to appeal to Valentino's current owners (the Qatari royal family...).
Will the designers move on? Time will tell, but, for now, if you like the style but don't have enough money to afford it, you can still copy the looks and replicate them using Fortuny fabrics you will find in Venice (remember though that one metre may cost several hundreds euros, so you can maybe just opt for a notebook covered in sumptuous Fortuny fabrics that you can buy from the factory showroom on the Giudecca island).
One last question remains: Fortuny was born in 1871 and died in 1949, but the designs he's produced in the early decades of the 1900s are still fashionable in 2016, how can we even hope that what we are currently producing is so groundbreaking that will still be fashionable in 60 years' time?
As Foster explains on the Research Centre Facebook page about his paper relief portrait workshops, "Paper sculpture has been used in advertising, shop displays and theatre for years". His words and teachings about paper sculpture came to mind yesterday while looking at the models on Viktor & Rolf's runway (or maybe the design duo has been reading our musings on paper sculptures or maybe they attended a course by Stephen Foster?).
The Dutch designers have consistently been experimenting with the art world and in particular with paintings for the last few seasons: their S/S 2015 collection featured garments that echoed Vincent van Gogh's paintings of wheat fields such as "Wheat Stacks with Reaper" , "Sheaves of Wheat" or "Wheat Field with Crows".
In their A/W 2015 collection they literally wrapped up their models in framed paintings that included "The Threatened Swan" by Jan Asselijn, "Venus and Adonis" by Ferdinand Bol and "Girl in a Large Hat" by Caesar Boëtius van Everdingen; the designs were later bought by private collectors and major art museums.
For the Spring/Summer 2016 season the design duo returned to a blank canvas or rather to a clean sheet of paper. Models were transformed once again into works of art, though at times the transformation was a real metamorphosis that erased their faces and bodies and incorporated them into totemic structures.
The designs were indeed a combination between a white shirt, a healthy dose of Surrealism and several Cubist portraits and ended up looking like paper relief portraits. Viktor Horsting and Rolf Snoeren dubbed their pieces "performances of sculpture".
White shirts, polos and dresses gradually acquired eyes, lips, noses, hair and hands. Banal hemlines of plain white dresses were turned into chins; necklines were curved to resemble foreheads, rebellious curls jutted out from shoulders, together with stiff bows and ruffles.
As things got gradually more complicated and rather bizarre, models became assemblages of faces, assorted mask-like formations in which it was possible to spot art references to Juan Gris, Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso's papiers collés, but also to Picasso's portraits of young girls and of Dora Maar such as "Le Chandail Jaune" (The Yellow Jersey), and fashion hints at Capucci's gowns with spirals of pleated ruffles around them (View this photo) that also incorporated jersey covered fiberglass masks (View this photo; this wouldn't be the first time V&R moved from a Capucci inspiration...).
If you ever tried creating a paper relief sculpture or portrait, you know that it's the pattern that counts and it's the way you anchor the various pieces to your support base and background that finally forms a perfectly three-dimensional silhouette capable of highlighting several details.
In a similar way, patterns were a key element of this collection: you can indeed just imagine how intricate and complicated must have been to create specific angles, ruffles and facial elements that then formed a sculpted mask on a dress.
The choice of a completely white palette allowed the designers to create the illusion of marble, an inspiration they already employed for their A/W 2009 ready-to-wear collection that, as you may remember, featured references to classical statues.
Yet, aside from the final pieces that gave the show a Carnivalesque touch (well, Carnival is almost here after all...), and some costumy moments that may have got you wondering if V&R were thinking of working on a Cubist re-edition of an animated painting à la Jean Dubuffet's Coucou Bazar, there were actually some wearable pieces. Though Horsting and Snoeren left behind ready-to-wear to focus on fragrances and couture, from Saturday on a limited edition capsule collection of 100 tops and tunics (in a palette comprising white and black as well) derived from this collection will be available for order (deliver in March) at Moda Operandi.
These performing sculptures may therefore end up walking into the wardrobe of those ones who may be able to afford them (polos will be around 800 euros; dresses up to 2,800 euros). Yet, while ready-to-wear-able art is finally a reality for those who can buy into that, if you belong to the rest of the world, you can still learn a skill and maybe focus on how to make paper sculptures, sets and portraits (check out further events scheduled at The World Through Wooden Eyes Research Centre): you may not be able to buy an arty piece, but you may discover how to make it in paper and then transfer your knowledge onto fabric. After all, that's how Viktor & Rolf did it.
"Eco-friendly" has been the key word in the architectural field for quite a few years now. Recent developments by modern firms included sustainable projects such as the buckle-shaped eco-school complex "Groupe Scolaire Paulette Deblock" in Sin le Noble, in north-eastern France designed by Lille-based Zigzag Architecture.
All the sustainable regulations required for the structure - connecting two schools and offering educational facilities to two different districts - were turned in this case into design features.
While at the moment the building appears isolated and geometrically rigid, thanks to sunlight and rain water control, over time the planted roof will be covered in layers of flora and fauna that, spreading from the green roof down to ground level will camouflage the structure and connect it to the adjacent urban park currently under construction.
Sustainability has also been a popular word in the fashion industry and Karl Lagerfeld attempted to incorporate a sort of eco-friendly architectural inspiration in his Haute Couture S/S 2016 collection for Chanel (was he inspired by the climate change conference held in Paris late last year?).
You could argue that the huge Japanese-style wooden structure built inside the Grand Palais still looked like a modernist villa or maybe a luxurious spa complete with lush green lawn, a lily pond and blue skies, but at least it spread peace and was infused with a sense of serenity, contemplation and the possibility of hope.
Models emerged from the central wooden structure and walked along inlaid wood paths through the grass. The designs featured in the collection went well with the set: they came in a natural palette comprising cream and beige tones evoking straw, hessian and sand, interspersed with soft greens, dove greys and navy blues.
The silhouette was a key point: long and lean mid-calf pencil skirts were matched with cropped tween jackets with rounded or oval sleeves alternated with dropped waist dresses or long gowns that replicated in fabric motifs borrowed from architecture.
Embellishments and decorations were also inspired by nature: raffia was one of the materials of choice, together with wooden beads and mother of pearl; fragments of shaved wood were woven into the fabric while wood scallops formed the hem of an underskirt and wooden tiles turned into mosaic tesserae on a long vest matched with a silver satin blouse and tweed skirt.
Crystal sprinkled jackets evoked the shade of sweet honey (honey and bees also appeared on Schiaparelli's runway), a theme replicated in the pleated or geometrical motifs that called to mind the structure of honeycombs and in the dresses decorated with brooches of bees.
The neutral trend was broken by two dresses in colourful blooms and by the feathery buttlerflies and embroidered bees scattered on a black dress and one the puffed up sleeves of a blouse.
Transparent and silvery capes covered in twinkling stones also made an appearance: matched with pantsuits densely covered in wooden beads they called to mind interior design pieces such as the Campana Brother's Fungo chandelier that plays with the juxtaposition between wood and glass. Even the tufted and hooded wedding dress with a train that closed the show featured wood shavings and beads.
All the looks were matched with two tone cork wedges chacterised by an architectural curved heel and a smartphone pouch bag hanging from a belt (well, you could use it also as a seed bag maybe to be more eco-friendly?), while brooches of dragonflies, bees, and other bugs, evoked the insect world.
Design-wise the collection was very classic, but it was the way the materials were used by the Chanel Métiers d'Art artisans that proved intriguing (apart from wood there was also recycled paper in some of these pieces) and that catapulted the collection into a realm suspended between interior design and architecture. Just like Zigzag Architecture turned the sustainable regulations required for their building into design features, Lagerfeld reintegrated natural materials into intricate couture details.
For the finale all the windows of the wooden building were opened to reveal the models and the designer and to maybe allow the audience to ponder a bit about this collection as a whole.
It is difficult indeed to deny that this was a non-environmental collection since all the garments included are made by hand, they are produced in a very limited edition and will potentially last a lifetime.
Unfortunately, though, the finale also made you think about a very important dicohotmy - nature and the artificial world of fashion. The garments included, donned by models in perfectly sculpted hair-dos, may be eco-friendly, the set will be recycled, but surely the spectacle was put together without saving any energy, not to mention the fact that these garments are made to be sold to very unique clients, among them extremely wealthy people who often manage businesses that do not respect the planet and who probably get a private jet just to go to the fitting for the Haute Couture dress they have ordered (and well, Lagerfeld himself mainly moves with a private plane...).
So rather than being a convincing stand for couture eco-consciousness, this was a bucolically hypocritical celebration of nature, but maybe those ones who can afford these designs, apart from finally being able to proclaim they have gone down the eco-friendly path, will feel less guilty about the damages we have collectively done to our planet.
There is something verging towards the disturbing in Les Dîners de Gala, a cookbook conceived and illustrated by Salvador Dalí in 1973. The result of a collaboration between Dalí, his wife Gala, and a secret chef (that is a team of chefs from the top French restaurants of the day...), the volume featured ideas for a magnificent meal accompanied by Surrealist pictures that evoked gastronomic nightmares à la Marco Ferreri's 1973 film La Grande Bouffe.
Many images featured in the volume looked indeed opulently and sumptuously rich, but were suspended between a delight of the senses and a deep sense of repulsion.
The volume included indeed 12 chapters, each one discussing a specific class of foods that went from shellfish to vegetables and aphrodisiacs, accompanied by lithographs in which Dalí experimented with mixed media to create complex and visually striking images.
Les Dîners de Gala was one of the main inspiration behind Bertrand Guyon's second collection for the House of Schiaparelli. You could argue that, in some ways, the metaphor worked pretty well as the book featured ingredients not for the faint-hearted and Haute Couture is not for the masses (even though it inspires trends that are then replicated in a cheaper and affordable key by high street retailers...).
The first design - a long dress with red leather strips forming the grid of a tablecloth laid out for dinner with intricately decorated leather dishes covering it - was an eye-catching number, followed by two white suits reminiscent for their clean lines of Courrèges' Space Age designs, even though Guyon's creations featured in one case a white cape with a crack that revealed luscious egg yolk seeping through it and referencing Schiap's "Phoebus" cape (Guyon seems to have an obsession with it since he also hinted at this design in his previous collection for the fashion house).
Humble (and at times ugly root) vegetables – onions, artichokes, pumpkins, aubergines and tomatoes – then took centre stage and turned into something extraordinary. They indeed appeared as 19th-century style illustrations embroidered or rendered in micro-beads on white tops and skirt suits.
The runway then progressed to tea time with teapots embroidered or appliqued on tweed jackets that called to mind a childish tea party game during which little girls may hone their social skills, while an arty element was introduced via cropped jackets with inserts made from vintage tea towels, napkins or table clothes reworked into geometrically decorative patchworks inspired by the fabric collages (View this photo) of Louise Bourgeois (something that should be definitely tried at home, if you haven't done so already while experimenting with dish towels...).
The food theme then returned in the prints featured in long and fluid gowns that went from vegetables, shrimp and lemon slices, quail eggs, snails on open caviar sandwich and sushi pieces to pasta shapes and cutlery on silk jacquard (a reference to the "Spoon with Crutches" engraving by Dalí in the Gala book?).
Pasta was also evoked by the broken egg decorations hanging from the shoulders of the pasta shapes dress, while bread was referenced through a jacket made from a raw wheat fibre and featuring an elaborate embroidery made with wheat ears, and a cape covered in pastries and croissaints, not to mention the dress with a cropped jacket reproducing a beehive structure and ruffles around the hips with metal bees scattered upon them.
China plates (also used to decorate the runway backdrop) provided Guyon with futher inspiration for long dresses with three-dimensional motifs on white brocade matched with a cropped and fitted beaded jacket and for a lobster embroidered on a dish, part of the bib-like sequinned front panel of a gown painted with seafood motifs (a reference to Dalí and Schiaparelli's 1937 lobster dress for Wallis Simpson).
Dalí was rumored to have bathed in sardine oil and to have taken afternoon naps with live lobsters in his bed, but Schiap was less eccentric in her real life and knew the importance of eating well: she had indeed installed a trattoria in the basement of her Paris house with a kitchen run by an Italian chef.
"Eating is not merely a material pleasure," the designer wrote in her autobiography, Shocking Life, "Eating well gives a spectacular joy to life and contributes immensely to goodwill and happy companionship. It is of great importance to the morale."
Through this collection Guyon's re-emphasised this aspect of Schiaparelli, intrinsic in the gesture of sharing small pleasures in life such as having a meal with friends, especially in our modern and complex world. Fashion-wise, though, not everything worked since as at times the food metaphor was too literal or too surrealist, and the craft was lost in a sea of sequins and embellishments.
A simple dress with twin cherries (the proverbial cherry on the cake...) perilously perched on the nipple of the model wearing it introduced the final section of the collection.
It included draped chiffon gowns in soft porcelain shades, an attempt maybe at cleansing the palate (or at whetting further the appetite?) or a reference to a more liquid and less substantial palette maybe borrowed from Dalí's 1977 volume Les Vins de Gala, a book detailing wines and famous vineyards (even though the black gown with a spider on a web on the back was more "witch" than chef or wine taster, or maybe that's the sort of spider you discover building invisible webs while you harvest grapes...).
Food references were scattered on these gowns through the large decorative brooches representing a shrimp with a lemon slice, a porcelain potato and copper lettuce leaves.
Brooches were actually the only visible accessories on the runway: there were some peas breaking out of a pod, butterfly wings held together with a padlock, and Surrealist brooches like the arrow pierced heart and lips and the Cocteau-evoking eye already seen on the runway during the previous season. Shame there were no clutches or further pieces of jewellery to admire with the dresses, but maybe Guyon didn't have time for accessories.
So far reviving Schiap has proved extremely tricky for all the designers involved: Guyon's new collection was a feast for the eye, a gastronomic Alice (in a way Alice was there in a pale blue gown with sequinned tea cups and teapots...) in Foodland adventure that at times made you think about the bulimic fashion industry keeping on eating and vomiting the same things.
The preface to Les Dîners de Gala warned readers that the book was "uniquely devoted to the pleasures of Taste", highlighting "Don't look for dietetic formulas here. We intend to ignore those charts and tables in which chemistry takes the place of gastronomy. If you are a disciple of one of those calorie-counters who turn the joys of eating into a form of punishment, close this book at once; it is too lively, too aggressive, and far too impertinent for you."
Guyon's second collection for Schiaparelli can be considered as devoted to the pleasure of the eye, and, while it is undoubtedly lively and manages to employ some great artisanal techniques, it risks of ending up like Les Dîners de Gala: just like this volume, these attractive designs can be used as a great dinner (or red carpet...) conversation, but aside from that will we ever manage to see them elsewhere, or will they be enough to relaunch once and for all the House that Schiap built?
The fashion industry has the terrible habit of launching a designer, claiming they are a genius and then discarding them to move onto the next big thing. Yet it is always more interesting to give a designer the time to start their business, develop it in a gradual way and regularly check about how they are getting on with their work. The last time we heard from Cologne-based Eugen Laitenberger he had just released the first collection of shirts and ties for his menswear label GUNEE Homme.
The young Creative Director, graphic designer, illustrator and photographer has now moved onto his second collection and seems more focused than he was when he launched GUNEE two years ago.
"02. Mountain Trip" is based on Laitenberger's bold graphics and his passion for high-end tailoring: the new prints for the shirts are inspired by nature and their palette, going from grey-black-white to aquamarine-blue and ochre-mustard, is suspended between earth and water, realms that prompted Laitenberger to give his new designs names such as "Spruce", "Mountain Peak", "Gravel", "Fog", "Aquatic Plant", and "Plankton".
The collection is accompanied by a campaign inspired by an intriguing theme - the transformation a human being goes through while climbing a mountain and being exposed to the sublime power of the elements.
The last time we heard from you, you were busy working on multiple projects since you are a fashion and graphic designer but also an illustrator - what are you up to at the moment? Eugen Laitenberger: I'm currently working on putting the final touches to the new collection. Art-wise, I'm still working on my "Cat Sequence" illustration and sculpture project - I hope to finish the illustration part at the end of the first quarter, so that I can start something new, though my focus is mainly on GUNEE Homme, at the moment.
Which aspects of GUNEE have you been developing in the last few months? Eugen Laitenberger: We worked primarily on technical aspects like distribution and production. We also focused on the visual presentation of the current collection and on some new products to expand our line. It is an unexpectedly long process, in part due to my perfectionism. Yet, being the head of my own label, I can set my own deadlines. I believe it is important to think about all the things and processes I'm working on, rather than throwing some new products on the market as fast as I can. I'm a really impatient person, but I perfectly understand that it is very important to have enough time to review my own decisions.
Your new collection features graphic prints that seem to be inspired by nature, can you tell us more about them? Eugen Laitenberger: The new collection arose from the inspiration of two pictures: "Wanderer above the Sea of Fog" (1818) by Caspar David Friedrich, and my illustration for the "Cube Cat" (View this photo). The latter features two cartoonish cats on the bottom and two mountains in the background, behind them. I imagined climbing my mountains and wondered what it would look like once you got to the top and you were exposed to the sublime surroundings and the landcapes. That's how I came up with the name of the collection - "02. Mountain Trip". With this collection I therefore created the structure and the layer of that landscape. I also transformed the mountain from my illustration "Cube Cat" into a pattern for my "Mountain Peak" shirt.
The campaign that accompanies the new collection features several photographic images digitally altered in an arty way - some of the images in the campaign evoke Arcimboldo's paintings and the themes of transformation and natural camouflage, what kind of themes influenced your campaign images? Eugen Laitenberger: I entrusted the visual language of the campaign to my photographer. I worked for a long time with Studio Peripetie and I trust her work 100%. I gave her the input, the inspiration and the idea behind the collection and she transformed it to her own view. The main idea of the campaign was the question: "What happens to a person that goes onto a mountain trip?". Climbing a mountain has something to do with an identification process. A trip can be easy at the beginning and very heavy in the middle and/or the end. Sometimes you reach the peak and sometimes you don't. The longer the trip, the more you become the mountain - that's how the idea for the digitally distorted layers was born. The model in the campaign is the matrix of the mountain and wears the pattern of the landscape onto his body.
Can we buy the pieces directly from you and how does it work your made-to-measure service? Eugen Laitenberger: At the moment you can directly buy the pieces of the first collection (01. Prelude) from us. We are working on an online store to simplify the process. In future you will be able to buy GUNEE Homme and my illustrations from the site GUNEE Gallery. Furthermore, we are in contact with a few boutiques and will release a list of stockists as soon as we are ready. The made-to-measure service is for the moment focused on our region in Germany, because it's easier to work on your body than on your virtual one (via photos etc); it is also cheaper because we do not have to charge the client the shipping costs for the prototype. But, if you are interested in having a made-to-measure service, you can contact us even if you are somewhere else in the world. You will have to provide us with your measurements and we will produce the first prototype with your measured data. After the feedback, we will produce your personalised GUNEE Homme shirt.
Film and music play a great part as inspiration in your work, what kind of films/music have you been watching/listening recently? Eugen Laitenberger: To be honest I did not find the time to watch many new movies or listen to a lot of new music. The last good film I saw was Submarine by Richard Ayoade. The soundtrack is great as well. I have been listening a lot to "Stonemilker" by Björk, "Like Blood Does" by Why There Are Mountains, "Song Seven" by Interpol and "Ocean Death" by Baths. I developed a new hobby last year – collecting limited vinyl LPs! Last year during record store day, I found a limited red vinyl LP of Placebo's eponymous debut album. I felt like I was 16 again when I went home with it. I'm too young to remember a time when people bought LPs, but I'm old enough to remember buying CDs and having no Internet. It was great being the first one in the store who bought the new album of your favourite band, and then opening the booklet and absorbing every second of each song. I think that's a feeling that has gone lost. I see the advantage of cloud and streaming platforms, but they are so impersonal: you spend money and buy music and other products that you end up not owning because they are trapped somewhere in a cloud. You also lose the experience that surrounds the music - the package, the booklet and so on. My new hobby partially gave me back that lost experience from my childhood. The only problem is that I now have to find the time to buy a record player for my new hobby!
The menswear shows for the A/W 2016-17 season have just finished – have you been following any shows and are there any brands you particularly like? Eugen Laitenberger: I followed some shows, but don't have any brand I would highlight. I liked some pieces from the military touched collection by Dries Van Noten and one or two pieces by Yohji Yamamoto, Ann Demeulemeester and Kolor.
Many fashion designers are subjected nowadays to pressures as sales seem to be more important than creativity – what do you think about this perennial battle between profit and creativity? Eugen Laitenberger: I think that, if you are a designer and put sales before creativity, then you should think about changing your job. One of the main reasons for this discrepancy between creativity and profit has been the structure of many companies, especially those ones that are not in the direct hands of the designers, but are managed by huge groups with shareholders. The main aim becomes therefore increasing growth and sales. I never understood this system and will never do. I don't know why it is so important to maximize your sales volume every year and why it is an apocalypse when you have a stagnation in your balance sheet. Profit is profit but creativity can not grow if your shareholders tell you that you have to do six collections a year and give you only three to five weeks of time to make them. How can this work?! I guess that, if you can live with the fact that sales are more important for you than creativity, then you can do this. Otherwise you have to sit down and wonder if you are prepared to adapt yourself to the system. I personally think freedom remains the most important thing for me, and that you also have to give priority to the things you love to do rather than to how rich and famous you can be. Sometimes it's more important to reach one special person with your art than 10,000. I know that sounds idealistic and this one person will not allow you to pay the rent for your flat, but there are other options as well, like being a designer and maybe having a part-time job, such as working as a taxi driver. For me the key stands in balancing all these aspects and managing your life in a sustainable way.
All images in this post courtesy Eugen Laitenberger / GUNEE Homme; images 1 to 4 in this post by Studio Peripetie.
Though Maison Kitsuné wasn't trying to make a literal comment about wars and violence, its collection and lookbook accompanying it moved from a poetical animated film - historical drama The Wind Rises, written and directed by Hayao Miyazaki and animated by Studio Ghibli - that features enough metaphors about dreams, beauty and the cruelty of this world to make us want to sit and ponder for a while, leaving behind the relentlessly fast world of fashion.
The film homages Jiro Horikoshi, designer of the Mitsubishi A5M fighter aircraft and of the Mitsubishi A6M Zero, used by the Empire of Japan during World War II, and his friend Kiro Honjo (who designed the Mitsubishi G3M).
In the movie Jiro is portrayed as a dreamer and often sees in his most extraordinary visions a very personal hero, Italian aircraft designer Giovanni Battista Caproni, who inspires him to become an aeronautical engineering.
Jiro eventually manages to create state-of-the-art planes, but, his perfect designs are destined to destruction, after all, as Caproni warns him in a vision, planes are beautiful dreams that can easily become tools of death in the hands of cruel mankind.
The film was evoked in a few elements featured in Maison Kitsuné's new collection: designers Gildas Loaëc and Masaya Kuroki called it "Love Rises" and tried to borrow its main mood from the romantic parts of this drama and from Jiro's visions. Details from aviation and military uniforms were therefore combined with some of the brightest shades of the film, though the collection also featured tops with World War II fighter planes, outerwear with images of Mount Fuji and snow-capped mountains, and the red rising sun on a jumper and shoes as well.
A sky-blue sweater and socks with plane motifs also evoked the stylised plane/cross motif on Jiro's childhood kimono, while the images of the lookbook with a model climbing fake rocks were directly taken from the mountain holiday that allows Jiro to meet again with Naoko (though her place at the canvas is taken by a male model painting on a fake green hill....).
The clothes were wearable, though at times you wished the designers had been a little bit more thought-provoking and maybe emphasised Horikoshi's quote that convinced Miyazaki to do a film about this story - "All I wanted to do was to make something beautiful".
Interestingly enough, the design due ended up being the victims of their own inspiration: the lookbook images with the Japanese military flag, which features red rays emanating from the rising sun and is considered by many as a sign of aggression and imperialism, were actually removed after the fashion house received negative feedback online. Somehow, you can almost hear the designers claiming they were just trying to make something beautiful in Horikoshi's style, but their message was misunderstood and corrupted.
Rather than being just a biopic The Wind Rises reflects indeed on the way human beings easily corrupt beauty. Fashion does the same and quite often simply destroys creativity and the will to experiment and research in the name of capitalism.
There are instead different lessons to be learnt from this film that could be easly applied to fashion: Caproni reminds Jiro in one vision that "Engineers turn dreams into reality," and that "the important thing for an engineer is the inspiration".
Jiro is worried and remarks about the fact that Japan seems backwards when it comes to aviation, but Caproni reassures him that "Inspiration unlocks the future. Technology will catch up." Put the word "fashion designer" in the place of "engineer" and you could come up with a great message for the entire industry - inspiration is definitely the key to the future.
Yet it's the deeper meaning of the film that remains the most important one: the absence of genuine beauty in today's world is driving us towards a barbaric dark age. The ghosts and shadows of beautiful things etched in our collective memories should help us getting on with our lives, in a nutshell, as Paul Valéry's quote from Le Cimetière Marin (The Graveyard By The Sea) states at the beginning of the film, "Le vent se lève!... Il faut tenter de vivre" - "The wind rises!... We must try to live!"
Words are elements, little tools, that, combined and recombined, can help us putting together sentences and coming up with a message. Images can be employed in the same way, even though, in our digital world, visual messages seem to have a bigger, deeper and more immediate impact. Fashion has the great advantage (when it is willing to do so...) of being able to tell complex narratives and intriguing stories with strong visual images.
In yesterday's post we saw for example a fashion designer claiming he was angry at the state the world is in and doing so via bright colours that got gradually tinged with dark tones. Rei Kawakubo presented instead a similar message, but in a softer and maybe more poetic way with her Comme des Garçons Homme Plus A/W 2016 collection.
The floral hairdresses donned by the models spread a message of love and grace, but the tailoring incorporated elements borrowed from armors and reworked and reintegrated in the suits.
There were no helmets, chainmail and gauntlets, but couters (plates that guarded the elbow), spaulders (plates that covered the shoulder and part of the upper arm), pauldrons (dome-shaped pieces that covered the shoulder and the armpit) were recreated in fabrics to radically transform the sleeves of jackets and coats with soft articulated pieces.
In some cases each part of the armor was created in a different fabrics (at times three or four textiles - including jacquards and floral brocades - in the same jacket) to give a more joyful and less threatening aspect to the designs.
The cuisse, that is the plate that curved over the thighs and protected them was reinvented as pockets; poleyns, the plates that originally covered the knees in armours, were reintegrated in trousers. In a way this collection could be interpreted as a tale of two armors since it incorporated the metal plates of Renaissance armors and the techniques behind the protective gear donned by samurais.
These modern armors were made in fabrics and therefore they lost their protective aim to turn into weapons of seduction (consider the bright colours and vivid textiles...), the main idea was, after all, that of creating an "armor of peace", as Kawakubo called the collection, and profess a Flower Power pacifism through armoured and tailored suits (for many of us a suit is a sort of armor; but for Kawakubo it is also a blank canvas that can be endlessly reinvented, while the definition "suit of armor" can be interpreted in an entirely new way).
The level of technicality behind the collection was particularly intriguing because it played with armoured articulations (employed also on some of the shoes) and, to a certain extent, with anatomy as well. The most interesting point, though, was the fact that most pieces remained wearable and desirable for women as well (that's what genuinely "genderless" designs look like...).
There was also an arty note in the presentation: the floral hairdresses at times matched with black garments under the chiaroscuro light gave the runway a sense of Caravaggio-esque beauty, here and there reminiscent of the palette of "Bacchus" or "Boy with a Basket of Fruit".
The presentation also had a circular rhythm since it went from black to colourful and back to black with leather armoured pieces, though the models carrying colourful bouquet of flowers at the very end of the show seemed a delicately silent homage not just to Paris but to all those places (and people) suffering and being in desperate need of a peaceful and graceful protective blanket.
There are different ways to comment and react about key issues bothering our world: analysing specific problems through exhibitionsis not a solution but may provide new perspectives on global predicaments, in the same way as a poignant photograph, cartoon, article or essay may re-shift our collective attention on contemporary troubles plaguing the lives of many.
At times fashion designers comment upon the world on their runways, but this practice is becoming untrendy for too many reasons, including the fact that fashion is supposed to provide us with an escapist view of life and when you design a collection you want the consumers' consensus, you don't want to scare or trouble them with heavy comments on society.
Yet, as hinted in Milan by Miuccia Prada in her A/W 2016 menswear collection, it is possible to subtly hint at specific problems; or, as seen in Paris on the Walter Van Beirendonck's runway, you can launch yourself into an angry but joyful tirade.
Though a pacifist interested in spreading a kind of energetic and dynamic joy through vivid colours and bright patterns, Walter Van Beirendonck claimed via his new collection that he is angry about the state the world is in.
The consequences of terrorism, wars and migrations were on his mind and he hoped politicians will find a solution to a situation escaping our hands. He launched his appeal using a word from his language - the Flemish "Woest", meaning "furious" - also the title of the collection.
The term appeared embroidered on transparent PVC patches integrated in jumpers or on denim jackets and workers' overalls covered in colourful yet deadly scenes showing combat aircrafts.
The word - almost a follow-up to the slogans "Stop Terrorising Our World", "Warning Explicit Beauty", "Demand Beauty" and "An Eye for an Eye Only Ends Up Making the Whole World Blind", included in the A/W 2015 collection - wasn't applied to all the designs.
Quite often Van Beirendock played indeed with juxtapositions to show his anger: animals were painted onto the faces of models, but rather than being happy and cartoonish creatures, they carried guns in their paws; silhouettes of Pinocchio-like puppets hung from tailored jackets in vivid colours, but they didn't hint at the innocence of childhood. They could have indeed been interpreted as politicians acting like puppets or using other people like puppets.
Savage fury was represented by leopard and animal prints and by a process of construction and deconstruction.
Van Beirendock's peace fighters also donned intarsia leather jacket and coats forming tribal masks evoking Conrad's Heart of Darkness, totems and monstrous faces with dangly legs (the designs, at times incorporating figures slightly reminiscent of illustrations and paintings by the Italian Futurists, were probably the most eccentric yet still wearable pieces in a collection that, as a whole, wasn't always too cohesive) and blanket coats in multiple colours with tribal motifs.
A few models accessorised their looks with the Friesland oorijzer ("ear iron"), the iron bands with ornate spirals or flat squarish ornaments on their ends that originally served to display family wealth, but in this case turned the models into uncanny antennae showing sensitivity or receptiveness to contemporary events. This was maybe a way for the designer to create a transnational look that incorporated exotic moods and elements from his own country.
We live in dark times, Van Beirendonock seemed to say, and that's why he closed the show with an unusual shade - black - for a coat with another of his disturbing fabric puppets thrown across it.
Pessimism on the runways? In a way it's already there with many menswear buyers from Japan avoiding Paris due to a Japanese government-issued travel warning that followed last November's terrorist attacks, while people going to the shows get their body and bags scanned by metal detectors and their passports checked upon entrance.
Van Beirendock is aware that it is highly unlikely that fashion will change the world, but raising issues - especially if you have a platform to do so such as a runway - is not such a bad idea, isn't it?
