Irenebrination: Notes on Architecture, Art, Fashion, Fashion Law & Technology: January 2016

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To Have And Have Not: "1% Privilege in a Time of Global Inequality" @ Rendez-vous Image, Strasbourg, France

If you come from a fairly normal background and you somehow end up working in the fashion industry, you may get exposed at some point in your career and at some levels to quite incredible things that totally escape your living standards, from touching a coat that costs as much as a car or a pair of shoes made with the skin of an animal so exotic that it's practically extinct, to having a drink with someone sporting a high-end watch costing two years (or more) of your annual salary or being invited to interview someone in a gilded hotel with too many stars to remember and a spectacularly regal breakfast. If you're young, you'll probably be amazed by such luxuries; if you're older and wiser, you may feel embarrassed and a bit ashamed, considering there are people dying and starving in the cold all over the world and in our incredibly modern times.

Yet you don't need to be part of the fashion industry to witness wealth and social inequalities, as also proved by a visual project that will have you pondering about such issues - "1% Privilege in a Time of Global Inequality".

Curated by Myles Little, a senior staff photo editor at Time, the exhibition and the eponymous book accompanying it features selected shots inspired by one key point – the extreme gap between the rich and the poor with the richest 1% having accumulated more wealth than the rest of the world.

Funded by a Kickstarter campaign, the project consists in an exhibition launched in 2015 that will tour eight more cities this year, and a book featuring 50 images and essays by Nobel Prize-winning economist and inequality expert Joseph Stiglitz and National Book Critics Circle Award-winning writer Geoff Dyer.

As Little states on the project site, "...we may think we understand inequality, in fact we don't at all. Harvard Business School asked Americans how much they think major CEOs earn relative to ordinary workers. The median respondent thought the ratio was perhaps 30 to 1. The reality? It's over to 350 to 1."

Little was inspired in his project by Edward Steichen's 1955 exhibition "The Family of Man": the latter featured 500 documentary photos of very different people from around the world grouped under common themes, such as family, religion and work. The images, according to Steichen, portrayed "the essential oneness of mankind", but Little started finding inequality levels irreconcilable and Steichen's message impossible to adapt to our society.

Yet, rather than opting for images that simply shock, Little decided to feature pictures that examine wealth globally, in many different and subtle ways and from various perspectives and angles. Quite often the photographers selected employ the semantics of privilege to generate a new language to criticise wealth.

Clichés such as luxury watches, fur coats and cars may not be included in the pictures, but they are hinted at via the power of the unseen: maids prepare a guest room in a wealthy Kenyan household and a chef from a luxury lodge waits for his guests to arrive from a hot air balloon excursion before serving them champagne in the middle of the Maasai Mara National Reserve in Guillaume Bonn's photos; we are taken inside the ornate opera house in Monte Carlo and in the North Mara gold mine, one of the most poorest and underdeveloped villages in Tanzania, so that we confront different sides of the wealth that astonishes and seduces us.

Some images have multiple meanings: Paolo Woods and Gabriele Galimberti's photograph may be showing a man swimming in an infinity pool on the 57th-floor of the Marina Bay Sands Hotel with the skyline of the Singapore financial district behind him, but the photograph can be interpreted also as a symbol of impending catastrophe with a man who doesn't seem to be realising it; while the little girl jumping in her home cinema in Moscow uncannily looks like a puppet rather than a lively girl, a ghostly apparition controlled by the invisible strings of wealth.

Rather than feeling sympathy for the legless man shining stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in a picture take by Juliana Sohn, we disturbingly wonder if the scene depicts not what we actually see, but a metaphor for the powerless celebrating the powerful.

Just a few days ago Oxfam released a report entitled "An Economy for the 1%" that highlights how global inequality is reaching new extremes. In the document Oxfam states that "In 2015, just 62 individuals had the same wealth as 3.6 billion people – the bottom half of humanity. This figure is down from 388 individuals as recently as 2010; the wealth of the richest 62 people has risen by 44% in the five years since 2010 - that's an increase of more than half a trillion dollars ($542bn), to $1.76 trillion. The average annual income of the poorest 10% of people in the world has risen by less than $3 each year in almost a quarter of a century. Their daily income has risen by less than a single cent every year."

Would a redistribution of wealth rebalance things or would it drive our world to an even faster end considering our collective consumption habits? The answer is not an easy one and you won't find it in the images featured in this event.

Little actually attempts to provide an answer by reminding us on the project site what billionaire private equity investor Paul Tudor Jones II publicly declared last year about the wealth gap, stating that it "cannot and will not persist...it will get closed. History always does it. It typically happens in one of three ways: either through revolution, higher taxes, or wars."

We may not know in which way it will end, but Sasha Bezzubov's photo of a cloud of golden sand over a logging road in Gabon, may be prophetical with its dust evoking the impalpable, transitory and ephemeral nature of wealth.

The next stop for the "1% Privilege in a Time of Global Inequality" show is the Rendez-vous Image in Strasbourg, France (Jan. 22 to 24), before moving on to the Balkan Photo Festival, and then heading to the USA, Australia, Malaysia, Wales and Ethiopia. You can check all the dates on the project site.

Image credits for this post

A man floats in the 57th-floor swimming pool of the Marina Bay Sands Hotel, with the skyline of the Singapore financial district behind him. 2013, Paolo Woods & Gabriele Galimberti -- INSTITUTE.

A street preacher in New York appeals to Wall Street to repent. 2011 Christopher Anderson--Magnum Photos.

A legless man shines the stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. 2005, Juliana Sohn.

Untitled # IV, Mine Security, North Mara Mine, Tanzania. From the story 'Intruders'. 2011, David Chancellor--Kiosk.

A chef from a nearby luxury lodge waits for his guests to arrive from a hot air balloon excursion before serving them champagne in the middle of the Maasai Mara National Reserve, Kenya. 2012, Guillaume Bonn--INSTITUTE.

Maids prepare a room for a guest in a wealthy Kenyan household. 2011, Guillaume Bonn--INSTITUTE.

Scrapper, Packard Motor Car Company plant, Detroit, US. 2009, Andrew Moore, courtesy of the artist and Yancey Richardson Gallery.

Varvara in Her Home Cinema, Moscow, 2010, from Anna Skladmann's series "Little Adults".

Projector, 2012, from Mike Osborne's book "Floating Island" about the newly built casinos and decaying military structures in the neighboring communities of Wendover, Utah, and West Wendover, Nevada.

Dust #6723 from the series "Republic of Dust". 2012, Sasha Bezzubov.

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From Retail Heaven to Modern Art Paradise: Ai Weiwei's "Er Xi" @ Le Bon Marché, Paris

In a previous post we looked at brands including the work of artists in a window shop or sponsoring small art exhibitions in dedicated art spaces located inside large boutiques. The question at the end of that post was very simple - is this patronage or brand identity in expansion?

Somehow the same question returned when Monday night Chinese artist and activist Ai Weiwei opened in Paris what could be defined as his largest exhibition in the French capital so far, an event that also marked his return there since his first visit in 2003. The exhibition is not installed in an established museum or gallery, but in a department store: indeed Weiwei took over the windows, the atrium, the gallery space and the selfie wall of Le Bon Marché, the department store owned by LVMH.

The show - entitled "Er Xi" ("Child's Play", until 20th February) - moved from the text "Shan Hai Jing" (Classic of Mountains and Seas). Dating back as far as the 4th century BC, the traditional Chinese children's tales revolving around mythological creatures resembling birds, fish and dragons.

The fables were passed down from generation to generation, though, due to censorship laws imposed by the People's Republic of China that forbade old and imaginary stories, Weiwei's generation and the following ones weren't exposed to them.

The Shan Hai Jing characters were transformed into beautiful and ethereal kites of different sizes, hand-constructed from bamboo and lightweight white silk (some of the sculptures in the windows were left uncovered and reveal their bamboo bones) with the help of kite makers from the Shandong Province.

The creatures installed in the ten windows that line the street use Chinese myths and symbolism from art movements to tell at times an autobiographical story and reference contemporary and historical events, and the artist's own works such as "Surveilance Camera" (2006) and "Brain Inflation" (2009). There are also hints at the work of Ai Weiwei's father, Chinese poet and activist Ai Qing, interned in labour camps for the first 20 years of his son's life.

In one of the windows the artist tackles freedom and comments about his passport, confiscated a few years ago by the Chinese authorities and returned to him last July: in "With Passport" he represents himself as a "Door God", a traditional Chinese figure protecting the temple, though the artist feels more like a freedom of speech guardian. Further mythological creatures are scattered above the cosmetics department, while a 20-metre-long dragon can be admired on the ground floor.

The artist is well-known for exhibiting outside traditional spaces and this show could therefore be considered as perfectly being in line with his choices. Yet, though attracting different audiences from museum goers, and ensuring the magic of Ai Weiwei's mythological creatures spreads around the urban spaces (some installations are visible from the street and the windows guarantee many photo opportunities) of a city that only two months ago was wounded by a barbaric act of terrorism, you still feel there is something unreconcilable in these installations, especially when you consider the space surrounding them.

Through his works Ai Weiwei often speaks about freedom and his personal condition and he has recently focused on the refugee crisis with migrants arriving on the Greek Island of Lesbos (where he has also set up a studio), but his art in this case is surrounded by an artificial luxury world populated by fashion houses seductively advertising expensive products that widen the gap between the haves and the have nots. Weiwei doesn't seem to be too worried about this clash, but he is attracted by the dichotomy between the meaning of a work of art and the consumers' meaningless and unquenchable thirst and desire for expensive products such as the cosmetics and fragrances that currently form a temporary background to his pieces.

Maybe Ai Weiwei holds the key to the future of this art and fashion connection and the solution stands in not bothering about it or in avoid reading too much between the lines, even though it is somehow hard not to do so, especially when you think that no museum in Paris invited him to do any exhibitions, but Le Bon Marché did. This is actually something that should make all people wonder if the global cuts to culture funds (justified with major investments in the defence sector) will eventually leave public museums with smaller budgets and private entities with pockets big enough to organise only the shows they want to see (another piece by Ai Weiwei, one of his tree sculptures, will be on display from the end of January at the Louis Vuitton Foundation, but rumours say one kite from Le Bon Marché will be acquired by the Foundation and displayed there at the end of the department store event).

You could argue that in a way there is a lot of irony in this Bon Marché event: Émile Zola described a department store in The Ladies' Paradise (Au Bonheur des Dames), modelled on Le Bon Marché and narrating its "White Sale" with grand words. Bizarrelly, Ai Weiwei's "Er Xi" coincides with the current white sales at department store and the works included - installed over 10 days by a team wearing white branded jumpsuits by Le Bon Marché - are mainly white.

You can bet that these art and fashion events and collaborations will definitely intensify, in the meantime, for what regards the Ai Weiwei installations, surely fashionistas passing through Paris for the menswear shows (starting today) and the Haute Couture presentations (starting on Sunday) will stop for a selfie opportunity at Le Bon Marché and maybe get in and buy some luxury products and a tote bag with the exhibition logo (a fish with ten tails and the head of the artist; 15 Euros).

In Nouveaux Tableaux de Paris (1828), the Parisian arcades were described as magical places full of objects that, through their monumental architectures and abundance of goods on sale, showed "that industry is the rival of the arts". Who knows, maybe department stores rather than rivals of the arts are the forerunners of future museums and one day we will be collectively shopping next to a restored masterpiece from the Renaissance or a dinosaur skeleton. For the time being, though, get your arty selfie opportunity at Le Bon Marché or just enjoy watching the fashion peacocks doing so. Yes, that may not be so arty, but it could be an interesting exercise from an anthropological and social point of view.

Image credits for this post

Image 1 © Quentin Labail; images 2 - 8 © Gabriel de la Chapelle

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Posted at 07:39 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Perception Puzzles: Hey, Wait a Minute! by Antoine Peters and Oscar Verpoort

The last time we heard from Dutch fashion designer Antoine Peters he was busy reinventing the yak, a traditional 19th century Dutch garment, part of the regional dress of Zeeland, a province of the Netherlands.

Yet Peters can't stand still and loves moving between the past, the present and the future with interdisciplinary projects suspended between art and fashion. His latest adventure has recently been unveiled and it's a collaboration with filmmaker Oscar Verpoort. The latter is well known for producing various commercials, music and fashion videos, he is also the director of the critically acclaimed feature-length documentary about Dutch superstar DJ Armin van Buuren, and developed the television format MINDF*CK with illusionist Victor Mids that combines the art of magic with popular-science.

Peters and Verpoort have collaborated on a number of projects before and are always on the lookout for ways to let fashion and film interact together.

The result of their latest collaboration is a short film entitled "Hey, wait a minute!" that moves from Peters' Lenticular Dress 2.0. In the film a model is shown in a 360° perspective, though she stands still, the design she is wearing radically changes and so do the lights, make-up, sound and space surrounding her. From jet black, the geometrically pleated dress becomes a riot of colours, playing with the perceptions of the viewers and prompting them to wonder if that's a clever optical illusion recreated via digital means or if that's real.

The solution to this clever enigma? The dress is real and it's made with the lenticular technique Peters developed a while back, so as the observer and the wearer move, the colours change and mutate stimulating all the senses.

The dress was developed with a Japanese folding technique but there is actually a secret behind its colours – they were recreated by hand in an effort to develop further lenticular textiles. As Peters explains: "Originally I wanted the textile to be printed first and then folded, but that appeared to be impossible because textile stretches, printing on textile is never accurate to the ,millimeter and pleating is handicraft. Therefore, the fabric had to be colored in manually. It took several weeks and cramps in the fingers and back."

The dress transformation and colour changes are captured at their best with an experimental technique, an extreme slow-motion of more than 200 frames per second repeated endlessly.

Yet the project is not just about colours and optical illusions: the director and the fashion designer were indeed determined to shift the discourse towards human feelings. Verpoort states that "The Lenticular Dress shows several emotions in one dress", and Peters hopes that the garment will makes us ponder more about first opinions and taking away prejudices, a key issue especially in our modern society in perpetual transformation. "Our film tells the story of resilience, optimism and hope," he explains. "By means of delay, we want to appeal to the imagination of the viewer, comment the snap judgments of people and show that a deferred opinion will be different or at least more nuanced."

The film was launched as part of the 'Experiences' program during Amsterdam Fashion Week and was made accessible to the audience of the catwalk program.

Peters designed a limited edition sweater to accompany the project: the design features a precisely developed asymmetrical artwork derivative of the lenticular dress and reproduces its own optical illusion.

The sweater, available on Antoine Peters' site, encourages people to be fashionably-arty via a wearable product and it could be considered as another piece of Peters' personal colourful puzzle, a game he is playing against a fashion industry too focused on manufacturing irrelevant products that do not contribute to make the wearers happy, but only end up polluting the planet and clogging our wardrobes.

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Fashion Allegories From The Keeper of The Keys: Prada Men's A/W 2016-17 (and Pre-Fall 2016)

People visiting in the next few weeks (until 1st February) the Fondazione Prada in Milan will be able to see a film festival entitled "Flesh, Mind and Spirit" featuring a selection of 15 movies.

The films were chosen by director Alejandro González Iñárritu (just nominated for an Academy Award as best director for The Revenant) and film critic Elvis Mitchell according to these three keywords and include Marco Bellocchio's Fists in the Pocket and Werner Herzog's Aguirre, the Wrath of God (Flesh), Alain Resnais' Last Year at Marienbad and Roy Andersson's You, The Living (Mind), Aleksandr Sokurov's Mother and Son and Carlos Reygadas' Silent Light (Spirit).

The curators of the festival chose films that were full of emotion; in more or less the same way, Miuccia Prada tries to send on her runways designs that may reveal hidden emotions, complex narratives or well-conceived meanings to the discerning critic. For her A/W 2016 menswear and Pre-Fall 2016 collections, Prada constructed a large story.

She opted for a set recreating via simple multi-levelled chipboard panels a town square (suspended between De Chirico's mysterious squares and M.C. Escher's illusions) where people of different social status and backgrounds meet (well, that's her vision since, usually, most of us don't really mingle with people sitting in the front row...).

Both men and women sashayed down the runway in sailor hats, tailored navy jackets, naval capes and peacoats with detached collars, lapels and hoods.

Maybe Miuccia thought these detachable pieces could be a greater solution to cumbersome coats, especially with global warming (though expect the collars and lapels to be as expensive as entire coats if they will ever be sold separately...).

At times there was a state of disarray with frayed knit elbow patches, worn fabrics and mis-buttoned shirts, not to mention the multi-coloured knitted patchwork cardigans of the sort you will surprisingly discover at the bottom of your grandmother/aunt's wardrobe and shrunken checked jackets with a vintage look upon them.

The naval look prevailed, even though this was no rime of the modern mariner à la Alexander McQueen S/S 16 - this was indeed a sort of melancholic odyssey.

The atmosphere was made somber by the soundtrack comprising Nick Cave's cavernously singing 'The Mercy Seat' and his duet with Kylie Minogue, 'Where The Wild Roses Grow' and by the fact that the nautical references in the collection rather than pointing towards romantic sailors looks as seen in Follow the Fleet, seemed to be pointing towards Joe on a misty canal trip on a bleak barge in Alexander Trocchi's Young Adam.

Somebody spotted in Miuccia's explanations to journalists and critics references to the vast expanses of water crossed by migrants to find a new hope and a better life, but the naval mood could also be an allegory referencing the fact that we all sail through troubled seas and that we are often physically or emotionally shipwrecked.

The white shirts with prints of puzzling artworks by French artist, illustrator, writer, director and porn actor Christophe Chemin added another layer to this multi-textured collection: one showed a table with mice enjoying a feast of fruit and lusciously juicy broken pomegranates; another included wild animals, mythical beasts, weird creatures and dinosaurs trapped in a concrete jungle; a third one showed Cleopatra kissing a Marine.

One blue prints showed instead a series of historical figures - Che Guevara, Pier Paolo Pasolini (a long time ago Chemin contributed to a volume on Pasolini's Theorem published by Skira), Nina Simone and Sigmund Freud - engaged in a riotous battle with classical figures was maybe an allegory for all of us, with the designer suggesting we should maybe try and know the past and history to understand the present and foresee the future.

Knowing history has always been an advantage for Prada and it worked well in the collection as Miuccia remixed capes and recreated them in denim, proving that an officer's coat can still work pretty well in our times once it is de-contextualised and a sailor's top in leather can provide a new perspective on a classic uniform; dresses from the '40s were also reinvented as backless draped satin and velvet ensembles, and sexed up by adding high heels and diamond-patterned woollen tights.

Almost to emphasise her invitation to know the past, Prada included among the next season's accessories a modern version of the chatelaine (was she fascinated by Mrs Hughes' chatelaine in Downton Abbey? View this photo): models on her runway wore indeed bunches of keys and leather bounded notebooks jangling against their crotches.

Before the 1850s pockets were not too common in women's garments and a chatelaine (directly derived from the sets of keys held by the mistress of a castle) was a useful accessory: chatelaines such as the ones included in this post (from the V&A Museum collection) were usually attached to a belt via a single clip or clasp, and would make small items such as scissors, thimbles, buttonhooks, watches, household seals, keys, money and a small almanack easily accessible for housewives and housekeepers.

So, in conclusion, what could we say about this collection? Well, beware of the fashion allegory: a sailor's hat is also a flotation device; a chatelaine often indicated the status of a woman in a household, with the most powerful one who usually directed also the servants, holding the key to many desks, locked cabinets and rooms. Maybe Miuccia is telling us that even in unstable financial markets Prada will keep on floating and she will keep on holding the power.

So, rather than being pessimistic about the world, she was just being tremendously optimistic about herself, reminding us that she's still the keeper of keys to gold chests, otherwise why were people deliriously screaming at the very end of the show when she came out to take her bow?

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Book Alert: Mattel - 75 Years of Innovation and Play (Assouline)

"Logic will get you from A to B," Albert Einstein once remarked. "Imagination will take you everywhere." That's the best quote to describe the life of Ruth and Elliot Handler, Mattel founders.

A recently published volume by Assouline celebrates the 75th anniversary of the toy company, doing so via archival and modern images and starting from the early beginnings.

Children of Eastern European Jewish immigrants, Ruth and Elliot Handler married in 1938 and first started producing and selling interior design pieces, doll furniture and costume jewellery (under the banner of Elzac, a company formed with LA-based jeweller Zachary Zemby) designed by Elliot and made employing Lucite, a material that fascinated him. By 1945 the couple, together with friend Harold "Matt" Matson, had settled on the name Mattel (a combination of the names Matt and Elliot) and had launched into a completely new adventure in the toy world that started in a converted garage.

The first bestseller toy was a molded plastic ukulele that debuted in 1947, but the company acquired prestige and fame after releasing a Mickey Mouse Club Guitar in the mid-'50s and sponsoring a segment of The Mickey Mouse Club TV show.

Though the company received a natural boost in sales, its big break in the industry arrived only a few years later, in 1959, when Mattel released the Barbie doll in her iconic black and white Op Art swimsuit. Directly inspired by Ruth and Elliot's daughter Barbara, the doll didn't actually follow fashion, "We just tried to anticipate what the fashions were going to be by the time the product came on the market," explained Ruth, who enlisted at the time Chouinard Art Institute alum Charlotte Johnson to design Barbie's outfits and Japanese manufacturer Kokusai Boeki to oversee production.

By 1960 Mattel was a publicly traded company and five years later it was listed on the New York Stock Exchange. More successes arrived with the Chatty Cathy doll, See 'n Say The farmer Says (a favourite not just with kids, but also with musicians who often sampled its animal noises - see for example artist and songwriter Daniel Johnston), Hot Wheels and the Masters of the Universe series not to mention the bestseller Tickle Me Elmo and more recent successes such as the Monster High dolls.

Mattel: 75 Years of Innovation and Play is an ideal volume for Barbie fans: it features quite a few pictures of the doll, plus quotes by designers including Cynthia Rowley, Patricia Field and Jeremy Scott (obviously Barbie and Moschino get a mention...) about being influenced in their career choices by dressing and undressing Barbies and creating exclusive outfits for the dolls.

Fashionistas will also cherish some of the pictures included in the volume, like the one portraying Twiggy and her doll, produced by Mattel in 1967 when the model was just 17, or images of celebrity Barbies commemorating famous TV shows such as the I Love Lucy series. Costume design fans will instead favour Bob Mackie's special Barbies or the Barbie Fashion Model Collection, celebrating Haute Couture and featuring dolls dressed in rich fabrics and costumes. There is something for everybody who ever owned a Mattel toy in this volume - from images of colourful Hot Wheels cars to the original box of the annoyingly noisy, but highly addictive Auto Race, a portable electronic game released in 1976 that drove many grown-ups to desperation with its beeping sounds.

Shame there are no photographs of the Mattel knitting and sewing machines: some readers may have indeed wanted to remember of a time when they enjoyed making things and stitched garments for their dolls with "an amazing new liquid bonding process" (the miracle stitch was actually just a glue gun, but it introduced children to patterns, fabric and decorations).

The volume briefly goes through acquisitions, mergers and philanthropic work, and closes with one of the latest products, Hello Barbie, that leverages WiFi and speech recognition technology.

Dedicated to all those grown-ups who owned a favourite Mattel toy as children, but also to graphic designers who love looking at vintage toy images and adverts, to marketing students who would like to learn more about early advertising techniques and slogans (such as "You can tell it's Mattel - it's swell!") and to all those people who, like Ruth and Elliot, believe there's no limit to imagination.

Mattel: 75 Years of Innovation and Play (Assouline) is out now.

Image credits for this post

All images courtesy Assouline

1. Mattel: 75 Years of Innovation and Play (Assouline), book cover.

2. Elliot and Ruth Handler and Elliot's brothers, Al and Sid, gather to commemorate breaking ground on the Mattel headquarters in Hawthorne.

3. A child in the Beanie-Copter.

4. Described by Vogue as "the extravaganza that makes the look of the sixties," Twiggy was 17 when her doll was introduced by Mattel in 1967.

5. Barbie as Wonder Woman.

6. The popular Disney-Pixar film Toy Story led to a partnership that resulted in a broad line of toys capturing the beloved characters.

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And What If Pre-Fall Collections Destroyed the Fashion Calendar?

In a fashion industry oppressed by the concept of producing more and more collections, Valentino Pre-Fall 2016 designs posed a few questions to all those people willing to sit down and ponder about a few issues.

Maria Grazia Chiuri and Pierpaolo Piccioli included indeed in their Pre-Fall collection for the historical fashion house around 84 looks, a scary number of designs, especially when you consider that they showcased the garments in New York just one week earlier than their menswear and two weeks before their Haute Couture shows.

Presented in a temporary showroom in Andy Warhol's Factory, the collection was inspired by the late Italian designer Elio Fiorucci. Famous in Italy and beloved in fashion capitals all over the world, Fiorucci established in a way the "glocal" concept: he thought globally and acted as an antenna, capturing inspirations and styles from all over the world, then remixed them all together and brought them all in one "local" place, his store.

Cross-cultural was therefore the password to unlock the collection, a riot of influences and ideas that went from an East at times reminiscent of Kansai Yamamoto's brightly coloured pieces to a West in which images of the Chrysler Building recreated in metallic micro sequins on an evening gown lived next to tie-dye garments and cowboy shirts.

Japan lived in the embroideries of cherry blossoms, clouds, and birds at times recreated in quilted motifs, but also in the floral and bamboo prints on long-sleeved dresses, pajama sets, and pleated skirts.

A hairstyle at times reminiscent of Björk circa "Venus as a Boy" accompanied both the vividly coloured and the softly poetic looks. Fiorucci mixed and sold a bit of everything in his stores and so did Chiuri and Piccioli including silhouettes and materials, quite often with surprising results.

There was also a bit of something for all shapes and ages (well, as long as you can afford it...) and for all times of the day and night, from a tie-dye karate gi jacket and densely embroidered pieces (matched with shiny thigh-high red or turquoise patent boots) decorated with a Mt. Fuji erupting red, white, and blue fireworks to stars on a military camouflage jacket, hearts scattered on a romantic organza dress, dragons spitting fires on motorcycle jackets, embroidered black lace kimono gowns, and a classic pea coat decorated with a delicate floral appliqué, while herons flew on a skirt or on a leather coat and intarsia motifs of birds appeared on ombré blue and pink mink coats (there was a great emphasis on luxury outerwear).

As we highlighted in his obituary, Elio Fiorucci brought joy and happiness in fashion, something that is truly missing in the industry nowadays. This collection had the same playfulness Fiorucci tried to spread and in many ways Chiuri and Piccioli managed to recreate in their clothes the kind of surprise original Fiorucci shoppers would get while visiting the stores and spotting new products they deeply desired.

That said, there are some differences between Fiorucci and this collection: the former produced indeed pieces in a lower price range compared to Valentino. Though impeccable, this collection brings instead the fun and joyfulness of Fiorucci to the aristoi rather than the hoi polloi, while reshifting the attention to a key question – how many collections do you need to produce a year when you may manufacture just a selection of garments with all the embellishments and details you may want/need?

The Pre-Fall season is becoming an endless affair with presentations starting in December and continuing throughout January when the menswear shows start, yet in some cases brands seem to be able to summarise in such collections and in just a few pieces (well, that's not the case of this particular collection...) what consumers may desire.

As the climate has also dramatically changed, so that in Europe you get artict temperatures, floods and storms in the North and extremely warm winters with Spring temperatures in the South, you seriously wonder what's the point of having so many collections when you may just have one that could coherently comprise a variety of garments for all seasons.

In Valentino's case, Chiuri and Piccioli have also started merging for a while Haute Couture and ready-to-wear including in the latter garments made with techniques borrowed from the former. Now they seem to have taken the Pre-Fall season to another level having produced a collection that looks narratively engaging and more desirable than a ready-to-wear collection.

Will it be possible for Chiuri and Piccioli to keep up this creative rhythm? We will discover in just a few weeks' time if they genuinely have more cards up their sleeves.

In the meantime this collection should come with a warning: if you're a young designer who has just launched a Pre-Fall collection, avoid even trying to come up with so many refined looks, it is indeed almost practically impossible to produce couture-worthy embroideries in a Pre-Fall collection (well, unless you're Valentino and have the logistical and financial means to do so...).

Will other designers opt to produce more Pre-Fall than proper A/W looks or will we soon see consumers re-shifting their attention towards just one collection? Time, as it usually happens in these cases, will tell. But this Pre-Fall season has probably insinuated in the minds of many designers the possibility of destroying the fashion calendar with its useless divisions between men and womenswear as well and, if only some of them had the courage to do that, we may finally end up having fewer and more desirable pieces and a healthier fashion industry.

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Acid Alice Under a Liquid Sky: Marco De Vincenzo's "In-Lusionem" @ Teatro Niccolini, Florence

While riding a rainbow-farting unicorn, Alice on acid, rather that falling down the rabbit hole, landed onto the set of Slava Tsukerman's 1982 cult film Liquid Sky.

This kaleidoscopically perverse vision might have appeared in the minds of at least some of the fashion connoisserus that yesterday night stepped into the Teatro Niccolini in Florence to see the installation by Marco De Vincenzo, womenswear guest designer at the Pitti tradeshow.

There were no Lower East Sides junkies, punks or mysterious aliens feeding off the substance junkies secrete at the point of orgasm, but the space was invaded by an installation deviced by De Vincenzo and artist Patrizio Travagli that was a riot of bright colours, illusionary mirrors and masks that called to mind the visual power of Tsukerman's film with its mix of Marina Levikova's costumes, Marcel Fiévé's fluorescent make up, Pop Art, and Kabuki theatre (the Noh mask in the film, courtesy of industrial designer Gennadi Osmerkin).

Entitled "In-Lusionem", the installation played with spatial and chromatic perceptions and comprised a single line of theatre seats upholstered in metallic leather sitting in the middle of the auditorium surrounded by semi-opaque mirrors and therefore multiplying themselves ad infinitum and looking as if they were filling the room.

Further mirrors multiplied five handcrafted black chamois leather looks (three long dresses, a cape and a pantsuit) crisscrossed by brightly coloured rainbow-hued strips creating a Harlequin pattern and donned by glitter-masked mannequins (locked in glass displays to produce a magic box effect), while six further designs covered in fringes of laser-cut organza that formed a fur-like effect were scattered around the theatre box seats.

Though fashion was clearly an instrumental part of the installation, it was actually just one element of it since architecture and art played equally relevant roles. De Vincenzo opted for this format since he felt there was no need to produce a proper collection, after all, he has just released his Pre-Fall designs and will be again on the runways in a month's time for the womenswear shows, while in February he will also launch bags and shoes.

He therefore decided to employ the funds he was allocated for something more useful such as taking the fashion audience into the recently reopened Niccolini Theatre, the oldest in the city, founded in 1648 (and originally called "Teatro del Cocomero" - Watermelon Theatre - being located in via del Cocomero, now via Ricasoli) and closed for the last 20 years, located just around the corner from Florence's Duomo.

The designer manufactured for this occasion unique pieces that will end up in his archive and came up with an experimental project impossible to put into practice for an emerging designer who may not have a substantial budget (De Vincenzo designs accessories for Fendi and the LVMH group took a sizeable investment in his brand in 2014, but this doesn't guarantee him extra funds to splash on arty projects...).

Definitely more uplifting than Juun.J apocalyptically somber presentation held the previous day at the Stazione Leopolda, De Vincenzo's performance art project followed Thomas Tait's presentation last June deviced as a small exhibition to ponder about the value of slow fashion that included seven designs by Tait reinterpreted in luxurious materials by seven Italian manufacturers.

The Pitti tradeshow has often been a platform for unique presentations and one-offs (though at times there were some major mistakes as well, including an entertaining musical by Band of Outsiders that fashion-wise was a flop...), and maybe keeping on producing special events (that make people think or introduce them to themes and ideas that transcend fashion) rather than entire and often useless collections, could be an antidote to all the depression and the fatigue we are currently seeing in the fashion industry.

There was just a minor detail in De Vincenzo's installation - it would have looked like a great disco, even for one night only. Next time make it more Fiorucci meets an Italian radical disco club à la Space Electronic and just open it to the public.

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Posted at 07:56 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Après L'Apocalypse: Juun.J A/W 2016-17

Costume designers creating the garments for the latest sagas of dystopian films such as The Hunger Games and Divergent followed the sci-fi tradition that tended to divide the post-apocalyptic world in factions or classes defined by clothes in precise colours and shades.

The main impression left by Juun.J's A/W 2016-17 collection was that the Seoul-based designer respected this tradition. His designs were indeed at times identical, but precisely defined by a neutral palette comprising beige, white, anthracite and black, with sparkles of deep navy blues.

One of the main themes was protection, something emphasised by the opening futuristic embossed leather jackets with protective plate panels and exaggerated shoulders that called to mind the gear of rugby players and by the closing section of shearling coats and jackets characterised by outlandishly voluminous and ample silhouettes.

The genderless theme was introduced in graphic statements proclaiming not just "genderless", but also "confineless", "boundaryless" and "paradigm-less" on coats, knitwear and extra-long scarves.

In between, there were a few reinvented pieces of menswear, including rounded shouldered coats and tailored pants and a jacket camouflaged into a cape (or was that a cape camouflaged as a jacket?).

The collection also had a very fashionable mecha anime feel thanks to the skeletons of robotic dinosaurs and pinup gynoids courtesy of Hajime Sorayama hand-painted on the backs of the shearling coats and jackets (as opposed to Paolo Pedroni's illustrations on the outwerwear from the A/W 2015-16 collection). These pieces were maybe to be interpreted as cumbersome exoskeletons that swallowed the thin models wearing them rather than just as mere protective coats.

As a whole, though, this collection was a bit of a missed opportunity: Juun.J was the guest designer of the Pitti Uomo event, and, while the leather bound notebook employed for the invitation announced great things you could maybe write about in a memorable way, the collection didn't seem to add much to the designer's vocabulary, even though he could have maybe twisted his tailoring skills a bit more to create more experimental pieces.

Extra large silhouettes have indeed been one of his trademark for a while, together with his ultra-wide-leg trousers, bomber jackets with rounded sleeves and utilitarian pockets scattered on jackets and shirts. Juun.J also referenced in previous collections vintage military uniforms that were hinted at in some of the details included in this collection as well.

The designer often states in interviews that he takes inspiration from what he sees on the street, so he must have seen a lot of pre and post-apocalyptic styles recently donned by ordinary people, fashionistas and soldiers, but he seemed to have failed bringing in fresher and more innovative and unordinary elements inspired by his very ordinary models. In a way, it was a bit of a shame, especially in the aftermath of the grand "Korea Now!" exhibition at Paris' Les Arts Décoratifs.

Besides, the show didn't seem to introduce any new themes on the runway: the genderless issue is indeed becoming a parody of itself as too many of us have by now forgotten that such experiments occurred in fashion in the '70s and were defined "unisex".

Maybe Juun.J should have taken his "boundaryless" and "confineless" concepts further: he could have indeed made a more radical and political statement about the current migrations of people from conflict zones, reshifting the discourse around the debate about closing boundaries between nations and leaving them open; or he could have made a comment about the fashion industry welcoming the general public to fashion shows to create a "confineless" experience between the designer and the final consumer (mind you, it would be rather difficult with Pitti as their organisers tend to deny entrance to a show if you've pissed them off in previous seasons or if you're simply too irrelevant in their minds to mingle with the people they deem to be "relevant"...).

Juun.J claimed this collection was a vision of the wardobe of survivors in a post-chaos and post-apocalypse city: who knows, maybe his K-pop fans G-Dragon and Big Bang's Taeyang will wear the garments in a video for one of their tracks to be used by South Korea in answer to the next nuclear test announcements by North Korea (on 8th January, South Korea responded by blasting K-Pop tracks on giant loudspeakers as an answer to a suspected nuclear test conducted by its northern neighbor two days earlier). Now that would be really interesting: a sartorial weapon of dictatorship destruction.

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Posted at 07:57 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Grindring, Tindering & Pornhubbing: Recipes for Digital Success...or for a Fashion Disaster?

There has been a very interesting trend at the opening of the menswear shows: rather than preview features about the collections and maybe interviews with designers to highlight their inspirations for what regarded the main themes, shapes and silhouettes or colour palette for the A/W 2016-17 designs, there has been an emphasis on digital channels and new ways of promoting the collections. The news about J.W. Anderson mainly revolved for example around the fact that the show was going to be streamed on gay dating app Grindr, better known until last week not for its fashion connections, but for being a great tool for one-off hookup chances.

Fashion-wise the show revealed that the designer hasn't moved on from his gender-fluid trademark style, but opted to safely remain in the realm that he established in the previous season (well, if it's so successful why should he move on?) when he started sending down on his runways men in ill-fitting blouses and bustiers and fashion critics thought that was incredibly revolutionary and brave.

Anderson's tale for the A/W 2016-17 season included satin pyjamas in pastel colours; nylon tracksuits and vests with pockets shaped like clouds; a floral bed jacket matched with cream coloured knitted trousers and juxtaposed to a camel coat with a studded collar worn by a model with bare legs; and leather or knitted tracksuit trousers matched with boxing boot-style sneakers.

While Perspex chokers gave the collection an underground club vibe, knee-length rabbit fur gilets (black with red spots; white with blue spots) reproduced a cartoonish version of more regal ermine coats, and there was a certain childish glee in the toy raygun print on one ensemble, in the luridly shiny vests with distorted prints (for that touch of twisted innocence?) of Bonzo, the white, chubby British cartoon dog created by comic strip artist George Studdy in the 1920s, and in the snail motifs embroidered, printed or appliqued (in their glow-in-the-dark rubber version) on garments as if they were stickers.

He may have shown the collection on Grindr, but the large sticker-like snails on the clothes, though apparently inspired by labels applied onto luggage and to be interpreted as meaningless symbols, looked as if they were borrowed from Line, the Japanese messaging app with super large emojis, or digital "stickers" of cute cartoon characters such as Brown the bear and Cony the bunny (well, large fake stickers applications are already a trend accessory-wise, but they have been intruding also in the A/W 2016 menswear collections – see for example James Long's A/W 16 designs).

Fashion doesn't need to make sense, but the collection proved J.W. Anderson quite often struggles to tell a coherent fashion story (yet this is a problem many young designers seem to have as they tend to mix, mash and burn too many ideas and references all in one collection...) and, while many editors praise him exactly for this reason, his garments suffer from this lack of direction superficially disguised as eclecticism.

While they may be manufactured in luxurious materials (see the camel coat or the perforated black leather coat in the A/W 16 collection), the garments often end up looking as part of a wider experiment with gender fluidity or as mere weapons of rejection of social norms (yet, there aren't many social norms he is rejecting, since, at the end of the day, the main point for Anderson like for any other designer is first and foremost that of selling).

Anderson's show played on loop for 24 hours on Grindr and in interviews the designer seemed more keen to reach a huge number of people - seven million of them to be more precise (the number of Grindr users) - than in inviting them behind the scenes of the collection to highlight the value of specific fabrics and textiles. It is as if the designer weren't interested in the quality aspect of his own collection, but in the numbers; at the same time, he never complains about the speed of fashion, but simply accepts it as a necessity, that's why the conceptual equation "speed dating on Grindr" plus "models rushing down the runway" seemed to work pretty well.

There was actually another designer in London inspired by Grindr (and Robert Mapplethorpe's 1979 photograph portraying Brian Ridley and Lyle Heeter) - Sebastiaan Pieter. The Dutch designer printed the site's "HH" (High & Horny) status on t-shirts, and included in the collection a sweater with "Cruise" across it to maybe reconnect with a past in which smartphones didn't exist.

You may argue that these collections are to be filed under the A/W 2016 label, so the fashionable allure of of specific apps and sites à la Grindr will become more relevant in the next few months, but the fashion industry is ready to accelerate things: Diesel's artistic director Nicola Formichetti has indeed announced that, after the #DieselReboot, the casting campaigns on Instagram, and Glitch-ing an invitation to a fashion show, the brand's Spring/Summer 16 campaign will appear on Grindr, Tinder and Pornhub.

The new Diesel adverts tick all the right digital boxes: they play well with online language and feature custom Diesel emojis; the slogans will undoubtedly resonate with teenagers as they poke fun at shopping addicts, the selfie culture and social celebrities. Diesel also seems to be willing to take the piss out of itself, with ads such as the one portraying Joe Jonas and Kiko Mizuhara with the caption reading, "We have more followers than @diesel" .

Launching the underwear line campaign on Pornhub was inspired by the fact that, according to Formichetti, porn unites us (am I allowed to add, unless you're a woman forced to perform extreme gagging oral sex?).

There may be a few things to consider, though, for brands that decide to choose the same marketing stretegy (apart from the fact that teens will stumble on porn images that may have a serious impact upon them while Googling words such as "Diesel campaign+Pornhub" and this is something tremendously important when you consider how mainstream porn is geared towards male sexual desires...): let's think about how the music industry has changed in the last few years. Most artists nowadays sell digital singles or albums, and while there is a resurgence of vinyl, very few people buy the actual products, while most people tend to illegally download things for free or swap files.

Fashion is going towards the same direction, but it's not realising it: sooner or later people will simply satisfy their fashion needs by watching, sharing and even downloading the latest cool digital campaign and maybe even dress themselves in digital clothes and take a selfie in expensive garments they may not be able to afford as if they were in a paper doll game.

Besides, most of these apps are designed for fast and quick hook ups and casual sex, so while their nature may go well with the fast rhythms of fashion, they may not automatically generate a loyal consumer (besides, how many people will get angry when, while looking for a keen user on Tinder, they find a Diesel model pretending to be a user and eventually discover they've just wasted their time engaging with an ad?).

It may be that the digital world is making us lose wider and more realistic perspectives: there is actually a very scary word that many marketing people and creative directors use when they refer to viewers – "eyeballs". That's very interesting as it refers to a part of the body detached from the brain and implicates the visual aspect is more important than any other thing. Or is it?

Consider this: all the buzz around Alessandro Michele at Gucci has generated a new hysteria around the brand, but the hysteria has still got to be transformed into tangible sales. What happens if all this digital frenzy fails to generate sales? This remains a mystery, at least for the time being.

Having infiltrated into Grindr, Tinder and Pornohub, the fashion industry maybe has just got to move onto Line (you can bet a cartoon fan such as Jeremy Scott is already thinking about it...). Line's 181 million monthly users are mainly located in Asia, so there's an entire market there to conquer. Or maybe they should start a "Fashion Line", so that instead of typing messages and sending a Brown bear or a Cony bunny sticker, we could all send large and impressive stickers of Karl Lagerfeld raising the middle finger or of Anna Wintour sitting on a toilet. Guess they would probably be more engaging than all the trite stuff the fashion industry is feeding us at the moment, delusionally thinking it is adventurously exploring unchartered territories and bravely breaking boundaries.

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Posted at 07:19 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Re-articulating Modernist Images: Narelle Jubelin's "Flamenco Primitivo" @ Marlborough Contemporary, London

Fans of the petit point technique know that it can be immensely satisfying; if they are art fans as well, they also know that this technique can be taken to the next level as Narelle Jubelin also proves.

Born in Sydney in 1960, between 1985 and 1987 Jubelin was co-founder (with Roger Crawford, Tess Horwitz and Paul Saint) of the Sydney-based Firstdraft Gallery, which remains today the longest running artist-run-initiative in Australia.

Jubelin has lived and worked in Madrid since 1996, working with different materials and techniques and exhibiting widely all over the world - from Italy (she exhibited her installation "Trade Delivers People", featuring porcelain buttons, string and lace and cotton petit point, in the Aperto section of the Venice Biennale in 1990), Spain and the UK, to the United States and the United Arab Emirates.

For over two decades, Jubelin has stitched miniature petit points, combining them with objects and textual citations in architectural, photographic and painterly installations.

Her next exhibition, opening at the beginning of February at Marlborough Contemporary in London is entitled "Flamenco Primitivo" and will feature quite a few artworks made with the petit point technique.

The title of the exhibition comes from the opening 'cante' (actually unsung) performed in Madrid by the contemporary Flamenco singer Niño de Elche. The event will feature petit point renditions of photographs from archival sources, photographic image banks or microfilm holdings in libraries of Modernist works by Anni Albers, Lina Bo Bardi, Lee Bontecou, José Guerrero, Hannah Höch, Ree Morton, Pablo Picasso, Mira Schendel and a collaboration between Josef Albers and Harry Seidler.

We live in a very visual age, and quite often our eyes are literally bombarded with several images every few seconds; Jubelin invites us to break this pattern by reducing a major work of art or an image into a smaller fragment, and asks us to slow down the process of assimilating a complex image through the intricate work of sewing in which even the smallest details (check out the view from the amoeba shaped windows carved in the brutalist walls of Bo Bardi's SESC Pompeia, the São Paulo-based cultural centre she redeveloped in the '80s, or Jubelin's rendition of a collage by Hannah Höch) are recreated, establishing in this way a new intimacy between the viewer and the work of art.

Jubelin employs coloured cotton threads stitched into silk mesh as if they were fine art paints, but her precise stitches should also be interpreted as a sort of punctuation, forming a grammatical structure that creates the context to contemplate an image or start a debate about it (therefore these works are best appreciated first from a distance and then close up, as done in this post).

There's also an interesting dichotomy to consider in Jubelin's pieces: the artist shows indeed the perfect fronts of her works, but doesn't hide the disordered backs, asking the viewers in this way to explore all the contrasting elements and juxtapositions behind a work of art.

There is a lot to explore and discover in these pieces not just for what regards the technique: while Jubelin's intricate and laborious sewing works compel the spectators to engage with the intimacy of scale, they also inspire them to analyse more in depth the concept of needlepoint as women's work, opening up in this way a conversation between grand works of art portrayed using a humble technique that miniaturises large works, while introducing other narratives intertwining feminism, education, cultural exchange, traditions, and transformation (her petit points pieces are indeed re-articulated representations of other works, so that they are transfigured and transformed recreations, quite often situated among other selected objects). In this way Jubelin's petit point fragments become parts of a larger conceptual whole.

"Flamenco Primitivo" will also feature five bronze works cast from packaging buffers designed for secure travel over huge distances - hinting at the geographies of Jubelin's practice, while also prompting visitors to consider again the theme of transformation since these quasi-Modernist totemic sculptures are essentially made with objects that serve to circulate goods in the world.

The event is completed by assembled video works documenting unrepeatable moments of the artist's own experience, colliding in this way the personal and the global experience in an exhibition that will prove interesting not just for art fans, but also for people keen on taking embroidery and textile art to the next conceptual level.

"Narelle Jubelin: Flamenco Primitivo", Marlborough Contemporary, 6 Albemarle Street, London WS1 4BY, UK, 4 February – 12 March 2016.

Image credits for this post

1 and 2. Narelle Jubelin, As Yet Untitled (Hannah Hoch, 1926), 2014, cotton on silk petit point, 36.5 x 28.5 cm, Courtesy the artist and Marlborough Contemporary, London.

3 and 4. Narelle Jubelin, As Yet Untitled (Lee Bontecou, 1959), 2014, cotton on silk petit point, 39.5 x 34.5 cm, Courtesy the artist and Marlborough Contemporary, London.

5 and 6. Narelle Jubelin, As Yet Untitled (Lina Bo Bardi, 1986-87), 2014, cotton on silk petit point, Courtesy the artist and Marlborough Contemporary, London.

7 and 8. Narelle Jubelin, As Yet Untitled (Mira Schendel, 1963), 2014, cotton on silk petit point, 27.5 x 24 cm, Courtesy the artist and Marlborough Contemporary, London.

9 and 10. Narelle Jubelin, As Yet Untitled (Pablo Picasso, 1932), 2014, cotton on silk petit point, 11.5 x 9.5 cm, Courtesy the artist and Marlborough Contemporary, London.

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