There is something surreally disquieting in the digital illustrations of Italian artist Daria Petrilli. Sometimes her images portray imaginary women whose clothes seem carved out of sublime natural landscapes; at others her pallid or pondering muses sprout birds from their hair and wings from their bodies.
In some illustrations Petrilli's women pose in dreamlike vignettes with exotic animals depicted in vivid colours that contrast with the dull shades of their dresses or with the bleak environments surrounding them.
Catalan designer Josep Font combined Petrilli's dark and mysterious yet tender visions with Fritz Lang's streamline moderne moods and silhouettes from Metropolis in his A/W 2016 collection for Delpozo.
Though these two inspirations may sound terribly different one from the other, the final results actually worked pretty well.
Font has a penchant for darkly fantastical creations and well-structured dresses and coats that derive their shapes and silhouettes from architecture (this was actually his first career), so he infused balanced moods taken from Petrilli's illustrations and from Lang's films in a coherent way in his new designs.
His sad looking and ethereal models sprouting a riot of 3-D multi-coloured appliqued floral paillettes from their nude, pink or green opera gloves and walking among a bright and vivid set, looked a bit like Petrilli's uncanny and ethereal muses.
In one illustration by Petrilli, a woman who looks a bit like Louise Brooks opens her coat to let two wild horses gallop out of its folds; it is easy to wonder if the voluminous coats in this collection protect fantastic creatures or maybe hide the wings of the wearer.
Font also tried to channel the depth in Petrilli's images via three-dimensional elements and effects including appliqued details and two-tone knits.
The designer didn't borrow from Metropolis its dark and urban dystopian sets and moods, but he was inspired by the sensual yet rigid forms of robotic gynoid Maria that were reinterpreted as ample coats with large and molded sleeves formed from softly curved shoulders, as pannier-like skirts,or as dresses characterised by silvery surfaces and chrome-like miniskirts.
Other robotic elements included a stiff bustier with a structured waist, a top with bra-like cups and a metallic wool skirt that stood straight off of the hips, but that retained a sense of dynamism and movement thanks to the pleats that characterised it.
Further highlights included tailored suits and well-designed pants; marble-like pink and black speckled coats, structured vests and canary yellow or pink trousers (references to the colours of Petrilli's exotic birds?), while expect to see on the red carpet an embroidered sleeveless blouse matched with a pair of metallic trousers covered with a red chiffon skirt.
Soft geometries prevailed especially for what regaded the shoulder area and the arms: Font played with puffed, rounded, cropped or bell sleeves, integrated cutout motifs in his designs and sculpted giant shoulder bows on oversized capes; he came up with voluminous coats or played with the construction of some of the coats to create optical illusions (the oepning number could be a wrap coat with a large obi-like belt or a strapless thick wool dress donned on top of a jacket).
As a whole the collection presented a disquieting idea of beauty without the Gothic tones seen on Rodarte's runway. Font may favour brighter colours than Rodarte, but his palette hides disturbing sub-tones à la Tales of Hoffmann.
There is actually one main difference between Font and many other contemporary designers that showcased at New York Fashion Week: he surely has a knowledge of fabrics. The emphasis on dry wool crepe allowed him indeed to play with well-structured silhouettes which he enriched with couture-like embellishments.
There is one main question, though, about these designs: the offer was wide, as it included both day and evening wear, but you seriously wonder how they will manage to translate Font's passion for craftsmanship and this effortless mix of the surreal and the romantic with the futuristic into ready-to-wear pieces.
You get indeed the feeling that Font's architecturally dramatic and modern collections playing on exaggerated volumes would suit much better to the Haute Couture world and to houses like Dior or Balenciaga than those ones produced by other uber cool designers who have been hyped up and favoured by the media so far.
Teenagers love "Creepypasta", those Internet horror stories, passed around on forums and other sites that disturb and frighten readers. The word comes from the expression "copypasta", an internet slang term for a block of text that people copy and paste over and over again from website to website.
Creepypasta stories are often enriched with pictures, audio and/or video footage related to the story, and quite often the people who put them together try to spot horror and gory elements in urban legends, videogames, cartoons and animated series.
While this genre plays with our collective fascination with horror and terror, it also moves from an exercise widely employed nowadays - copying, pasting, cutting and editing - in different fields, from art to literature, from films and fashion (think about popular series such as Penny Dreadful, which is essentially a remixed collage of horror stories made even more visually gory but enriched with wonderfully amazing costumes by Gabriella Pescucci).
There are some fashion designers out there pretty good at remixing, copying and pasting, among them Jeremy Scott, who could be considered as a master genius in what we may dub the "PopPasta" genre. Well versed in appropriating images from popular culture, Scott has by now been remixing and reusing many of them for his own label's designs and for Moschino's collections.
His endless exercise in recycling images and graphics, though, means that has been recycling his own self as well: his A/W 2016 collection showcased during New York Fashion Week features indeed a mini-dress with a telephone print on a galaxy background.
Probably a derivation of an Andy Warhol polaroid, the telephone print appeared in Jeremy Scott's Autumn 2009 runway on a tomato red background; the same print was then reused for leggings that Scott designed in collaboration with Ksubi and applied to a Scott x Longchamp bag.
The telephones also appeared on the Lexus RX cars that drove obnoxious people - pardon, guests - to the New York Fashion Week shows.
Among them there were also bloggers Cailli and Sam Beckerman who arrived to the Jeremy Scott A/W 2016 show in a Scott Lexus clad in Moschino's S/S 16 roadblock collection (hopefully they didn't cause any accident, but the overall effect was quite upsetting).
Yes, you're right, when something is successful you should put it out there again, so why not re-editing the telephone print and doing it again? At the same time this infinite cut-and-paste exercise in pop culture reeks of fashion fatigue.
But if you truly like the print and you want it now, you can beat them all by going on Aliexpress and see if they still have the telephone leggings. As an alternative, take a video game or a cartoon character (suggestions: Steven Universe or Adventure Time) or a Pop Art image and come up with you PopPasta garment, then tweak colours and backgrounds and design your own PopPasta collection. Who knows, you may even end up becoming the next big fashion sensation.
Take Rodarte's catwalk show: their supporters and followers, especially the American press, keep on using magniloquent words when they describe the Mulleavy sisters' collections. According to them they are a sort of cult to be followed, witches casting a charming spell on the runway, they are storytellers with a spellbinding talent for telling stories and evoking secret and unspeakable dreams.
Skeptical critics take instead distance from their clothes, wondering how dubious garments that look as if they were casually put together without any notions of proportions and fabrics can be considered as produced by genuinely talented fashion designers.
Their A/W 16 collection, celebrating the design duo's 10th anniversary in the fashion business, is supposed to be inspired by a trip to San Francisco (the sisters attended the University of California, Berkeley). Inspiration hit them while sitting at Caffe Trieste, a historical den where bohemian poets, artists and musicians sipped their espressos and where Francis Ford Coppola penned most of the screenplay for The Godfather.
The resulting collection was a combination of two different moods, one derived from the two weddings in The Godfather, another from San Francisco's freedom and Art Nouveau inspirations.
Showcased is a set of rubble, gravel, living and dead poppies and neon tubing that suspended the mood between the natural and the artificial, the collection mainly featured a series of collage-like designs (that kind of amateurish look that Rodarte's supporters call "homespun touch") in which hand-beaded fabrics were combined with fragile guipure and mesh lace, and embellished with floral sequins, other options included single sleeve dresses in pink or burgundy.
Virginal white or black widow knee-length lace dresses and gowns with pouf sleeves, sequins and plastic petals worn with veils pointed towards the weddings out of The Godfather - think Connie Corleone and Apollonia Vitelli in their lacy confections and veils - but also emphasised the dichotomic edge of the collection.
You can argue that Art Nouveau's asymmetries, arches and curves and elaborate embellishments borrowed from nature were all channelled in these looks that also hinted at a sort of bohemian witch fantasy. Yet the fabrics quite often didn't spell quality and some designs were replicated (more or less identically) in two colours, white and black.
The romantic edge of the collection was shaken by a selection of leather pieces such as rigid jackets, boots and gloves that sprouted sinuously spiralling ruffles; multi-coloured cumbersome long-haired goat jackets and patchworked leather trench coats.
Flower power was added via floral earrings and headdresses made with real flowers. Actually the floral earrings made with calla lilies and orchids (by LA-based florist Joseph Free) received more Instagram likes than the looks on the runway, proving that maybe beauty wasn't in the most elaborate and intricate looks in the collection, but in this simple details that Mother Nature can provide.
Duplicity also closed the collection as models in long white, burgundy and black gowns stood next to models wearing shorter dresses in the same colours. This juxtaposition maybe hinted at a physical representation of virginal brides vs corpse brides and projected a sense of an eerie femininity on the runway.
Somehow the collaged (have the sisters been reading too many Creepypasta stories?) "bad girl gone corpse bride"-aesthetic of these designs was unsatisfying: the collection - based on black, white and red with some mud brown and dusky pink tones thrown in - revolved indeed around wispy dresses, knits scattered with ladders and holes (a trademark of this brand), and a selection jackets and coats that do not look particularly original. There were also occasional trousers and copious amounts of see-through lace pants and a limited number of accessories (note: you can easily find leather opera gloves covered in sinuous ruffles in specialised glove stores in Europe and, though expensive, they are definitely cheaper than designer ones...). The shoes also looked like reinvented versions of Prada's A/W 2008 Art Deco ruffled footwear (View this photo).
So you seriously wonder if the Mulleavys want to keep on being kids playing at dress up, or build a stronger brand. Fashion is an entrepreneurial business after all and quite often with Rodarte you get the sense that their collections are about their high-profile friends rather than their clothes and the women who (being able to afford them) may want to wear them.
The problem is that even a supporter and friend such as actress Kirsten Dunst doesn't look particularly good in their designs, so it is only natural to doubt about the fit and cut of their designs and silhouettes. Maybe the time has come for the sisters to move on. In the end, with their interest in films and narratives mixing horror, Gothic nuances and romance, and a film ("Woodshock") in the making (obviously starring Kirsten Dunst...), the loss of the fashion world could maybe become the gain of the film industry.
Creatively speaking, limitations can empower you. It is indeed often the case that the best things (from articles to artworks, from films and fashion designs to videogames...) end up being produced in times of adversity, while going through budget constraints, or even when somebody tries to boycott you or to bar you from reaching your goals. Think about it: you want to do an investigation into the world of fashion? As an outsider you may come up with amazing discoveries and quotes, but you will never unveil any truths or, if you do so, you'll be reluctant to reveal them if you're close with some key figures in the industry.
This truism perfectly applies to Ben Stiller's Zoolander 2: while the first film was a light and silly comedy that took the piss out of a fashion industry too busy looking at itself in a mirror to realise there was an entire world outside it, this new installment has so many cameos by real-life fashion people (Anna Wintour, Naomi Campbell, Kate Moss, Karlie Kloss, Valentino, Alexander Wang, Tommy Hilfiger, just to mention a few ones...) that you may be wondering if you're watching a film or sitting at a fashion week.
Sadly, the cameos aren't instrumental to the narrative flow, but they are used in the same way a drunk may use a lamp-post - for support. The weak plot revolving around Derek Zoolander (Ben Stiller) and Hansel (Owen Wilson) looking for Derek Jr and investigating the murders of the most beautiful young people in the world, all killed leaving behind a "Blue Steel"-inspired selfie face, seems indeed like an excuse to make all the obnoxious famous fashion characters (who pretend they love self-parody) fit in. So, rather than taking the piss out of people who take themselves too seriously or think they're too cool to mix with ordinary people (rather than criticise ridiculous garments seen at fashion shows or the use of incredible technologies to produce bland designs), Derek and Hansel join them as they did at the end of Valentino's A/W 2015 runway, almost to say "if you can't beat the snobs you used to scorn, well, team up with them".
Somewhere else, on the pages of the March issue of Harper's Bazaar, artist Cindy Sherman has attempted to play around with fashion. Sherman twisted her conceptual portraits such as her "Untitled Film Stills" created between 1977 and 1980 and portraying her representing many different female stereotypes using various disguises, and came up with an entirely new alter ego – a sort of street-style icon clad in the latest fashion designs happily and cheerily floating on a pink cloud outside catwalk show venues and smiling to street photographers.
The result was a series of satirical portraits, collectively nicknamed "Project Twirl", because, as Sherman states on the fashion magazine, she loved the description of these people "These characters who go to the fashion shows - and twirl, as you talk about."
Sherman is not new to the fashion world: she did a series of postcards for Comme des Garçons in 1994; starred in campaigns for Marc Jacobs and M.A.C., and collaborated with brands such as Balenciaga and Louis Vuitton, while she has been often mentioned as an inspiration by designers like Raf Simons.
The artist employs clothes, accessories and make up to transform herself in her portraits, but this photoshoot was mainly meant to show the clothes from the current collections.
Sherman poses in some extremely expensive designs by Prada (she actually looks a bit like Miuccia in her Prada portrait...), J.W.Anderson, Marc Jacobs, Dolce & Gabbana, Miu Miu, Gucci and Chanel (designs include a Marc Jacobs coat that may set you back $10,000; a Prada dress costing $6,790, and a Gucci jacket, around $3,990), but she, at times, looks like she may be on the set of Absolutely Fabulous, or genuinely taking the piss out of the bizarre characters you bump into during fashion weeks, endlessly posing as they carry expensive bags and clutches, stare at their smartphone screens or wear sandals in freezing temperatures and massive and cumbersome fur coats in Summer.
Sherman is among New York's richest artists and would easily be able to afford what she's wearing in the pictures (in 2011 one of her works, 1981's Untitled #96, sold for $3.89 million at Christie's; in 2013 the same auction house sold for $6,773,000 a collection of 21 black and white images from her Untitled Film Stills...).
Yet the artist manages to satirise the street style icons in a credible way, maybe because she researched her models and checked some of the Instagram accounts belonging to the most famous "twirlers".
"I was physically repulsed after looking at some of these accounts," she commented on Harper's Bazaar, "thinking how this person travels with hair and makeup and a photographer and is just going to visit her sister in L.A.? (…) They're not even selfies; they're setups. Then some of them get paid to wear the clothes? I guess it makes sense - it's business, but there's just something dead about the whole thing. It's so self-involved."
So Sherman provided via this shoot and her quotes some much-needed ironic anti-fashion (or rather anti-twirlers...) comments, shame the photo shoot is all in favour of selling fashion. Sherman's original artworks for Harper's Bazaar appear indeed also on the covers of five limited-print March issue subscriber editions that can be bought at random for $5.99, or as a collector's set of all five for $29.95.
So are irony and humour really missing in action in the fashion industry and where will we turn for some genuine fashion satire? Try going maybe for Disney Animation Studio's Zootopia directed by Byron Howard. What has this tale of anthropomorphic animals living in city-like environments, but reverting to their wild status got to do with fashion?
Well, the animals are pictured in the film posters in a sort of Times Square-esque crossing, surrounded by adverts that lampoon real brands, so you have Bearberry (Burberry), Lululemmings (Lululemon), Just Zoo It (for Nike's slogan Just Do it) and the hilarious DNKY (for DKNY) with a sexy donkey in a pink mini-dress or Preyda (Prada), an accessory brand promoted by cool pop star Gazelle.
Mind you, if it's left in the paws of some cute animals to satirise our marketing strategies and fashion obsessions so well in an animation film, maybe we've truly hit rock bottom when it comes to fashion satire...
Inspired by the possibility of wearing, rather than breaking, the Internet, Nayana Malhotra's Neuro Couture showcased garments that displayed popular GIFs like the "Sad Frog" and Donald Trump's face.
The designer integrated in the garments consumer-grade electroencephalogram (EEG) devices detecting electrical activity in the wearer's brain via electrodes, and monitoring factors ranging from the wearer's emotions through to their body temperature.
The factors alter the appearance of the projections, rendering them into GIF graphics and distributing them on the garment surface via LEDs. The result is a collection that can be considered neurally "behavioural" since it responds to the wearer's feelings, providing the clothes with an element of unpredictability (in a nutshell, you wear what you feel).
Design-wise, though, there wasn't anything new in the collection since the pieces showcased consisted mainly in outerwear and oversized white ponchos with moving GIFs repeated ad infinitum. So, culturally speaking the garments - undoubtedly the results of a long research process - ended up revealing a lot about our society in which advanced technology is employed not to improve the condition of the wearer, but to make a strikingly visual statement.
threeASFOUR, also opted to keep on developing their experiments in technology in their A/W 2016 designs. Their new collection entitled "Biomimicry" unveiled yesterday at Milk Studios, New York, saw the designers playing at being Mother Nature: Gabi Asfour, Angela Donhauser, and Adi Gil borrowed indeed the shapes and silhouettes for their pieces from geometrical figures find in nature, including honeycombs, plants and animals.
They also experimented with a new 3D printing technique with a little help from New York-based architect and industrial designer Travis Finch and in collaboration with Stratasys Ltd., the 3D printing and additive manufacturing solutions company.
The new technology was applied to two fully 3D printed dresses made with a light-based photo-polymer process (it takes around 200 hours to print one dress, so forget about even dreaming of printing your dress at home for the time being...).
The "Harmonograph" and the "Pangolin" dresses were indeed produced using Stratasys' Objet500 Connex3 3D Printer, a very precise machine that features the world's only multi-colour, multi-material 3D printing technology and is therefore capable of varying material properties such as rigidity and colour gradation.
A combination of geometry, biology and logarithms, the "Harmonograph" dress circles around the body in three spirals, following the geometry of the Fibonacci sequence and optically portraying the effect of a harmonograph. The "Pangolin" dress, comprises instead 14 pattern pieces, and an overall skin created by mixing a variety of interlocking weaves, biomimicking natural animal textures.
"Having the capability to vary colour and rigidity in a single piece using Stratasys' Connex3 3D printing technology inspired us to explore flexibility, depth and transformation as inherent design objectives," Adi Gil from threeASFOUR stated in an official press release. "As artists and designers, it is our prerogative - and our nature - to explore the bounds of new technological opportunities, and to push the limits of the way in which forms are created. As the most advanced 3D printed dresses that we have created to date, we are extremely excited to showcase these pieces and demonstrate the unique possibilities unfolding at the intersection of fashion, design and technology."
The 3D printed dresses - at times reminiscent in their shapes and formations of other fashon experiments in 3D printing such as Iris Van Herpen's - are also the first demonstration of a special Nano Enhanced Elastomeric Technology material (that will become commercially available later in 2016) from Stratasys which has extreme flexibility and durability and that may find more applications in future in the automotive industry, in consumer goods, consumer electronics, medical devices and the fashion industry.
threeASFOUR have developed 3D printed designs for their Spring/Summer 2014 and 2016 collections (the latter featured a collaboration with architect Bradley Rothenburg, who helped in the 3D modelling process, while the final designs were printed using Belgian company Materialise's services), but this new technology has allowed them to experiment further with porosity, flexibility and the creation of new nuances.
Fans of new technologies interested in seeing more 3D printed pieces by threeASFOUR and by more designers, will have to take note of the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Costume Institute's upcoming exhibition "Manus x Machina" (5th May - 14th August 2016), that will explore the concepts of hand-made and machine-made in the creation of haute couture and avant-garde ready-to-wear.
The event was previewed yesterday during New York Fashion Week, but once the exhibition will open, let's hope it will inspire new researches into wearable technologies and high-tech in fashion. Most designers seem indeed to keep on focusing on using new technologies to satisfy our visual instincts and are struggling to bridge the gap between the useful and the glamorous.
Actually there is someone who has been trying to do so, even though she's not strictly a designer - Iris Apfel. The 94-year-old icon of style launched in January at Las Vegas' CES (the International Consumer Electronics Show) her jewellery collection in collaboration with WiseWear. The pieces monitor the wearer's health, and keep track of their physical activities.
The three bracelets included in the collection - The Kingston, Duchess and Calder - feature activity tracking (the devices record number of steps taken, calories burned, and level of hydration), haptic feedback and built-in geolocated distress messaging, so, by tapping the bracelets three times, they will send messages to pre-approved contacts, identifying also the location of the user. Apfel has more plans to expand the line and include also statement pieces, such as necklaces and brooches, and men's accessories.
You may like or not the looks and materials employed in Apfel x Wise Wear pieces, but at least in these cases technology is employed for useful purposes. Having satisfied our visual needs via incredibly intricate 3D printed designs or visually striking solutions that can merge the digital and the real world, we will now have to find further ways to develop intelligent designs that can improve the wearers' life on a daily basis. After all fashion should be not just a frivolous - but also a useful - escape into technology.
Visionary set designers devised the futuristic cities that appeared in some of the most memorable sci-fi films. Dramatically different from real brick and stone buildings, these structures turned into reality not only the dreams of film lovers, but also the visions of many architects aiming to reach new heights, shapes and spaces.
The history of architecture is full of futuristic buildings among them projects created for architectural competitions such as Mario Ridolfi's "Torre dei ristoranti" (1928), real buildings like Le Corbusier's cities or futuristic pavilions, the geodesic dome designed by Richard Buckminster Fuller for the Expo 67 in Canada or the Main Portals and Exposition Tower at the 1939 Golden Gate International Exposition on San Francisco Bay, and more contemporary designs such as Philip Beesley's alien-like structures or renderings for projects like "A Tale of Two Cities" by Billard Leece Partnership.
Yet futuristic architectures inspired not only architects but also fashion designers. Quite often in fashion collections designers referenced early sci-fi visions seen in Fritz Lang's Metropolis (1927) or William Cameron Menzies's Things to Come (1936), and the dystopic futures inspired by Ridley Scott's Blade Runner(1982) and Katsuhiro Ohtomo'sAkira (1988).
Los Angeles-based artist Syd Mead is among the visual futurists responsible for some of the most iconic cityscapes in Star Trek: The Motion Picture, Blade Runner (he designed city backgrounds and vehicles for this film), Tron (see the lightcycles, tanks, solar sailers, and carriers), Short Circuit, Aliens and Timecop, among the others, not to mention his designs for two Japanese anime icons, Yamato 2520 and Turn A Gundam.
He also provided architectural renderings and industrial designs for the Ford Motor Company, Philips Electronics and United States Steel, Sony, Minolta, and Honda among the others .
There was still a field he hadn't conquered - fashion - at least until Opening Ceremony's Humberto Leon and Carol Lim invited him to do so. Both the men and women's designs from the A/W 2016 ready-to-wear collections include indeed T-shirts, sweatshirts, sweaters, and dresses digitally printed with images from the visual futurist's archives.
Women's tops and jackets with sharp shoulder lines matched with pencil skirts pointed at a retro futuristic world à la Blade Runner or Things to Come, but urban futurscapes were also evoked by the knits embedded with multicoloured crystals, the holographic prints and metallic textures of peacoats and parkas; the lacquered crocodile-stamped velvet designs, the shining devoré velvets in bright colours, and designs covered in spirals, the latter accessorised with oversized spiralling bangles.
The lamé-like silver liquid fabrics employed in some of the designs also seemed to be a reference to the shiny chrome surfaces of Syd Mead's vehicles and car concepts.
The designers transformed a few illustrations by Mead into prints and jacquards, including a 1980 rendering of hydroponic space agriculture, an imagined portrait of Los Angeles in 2013 from a 1988 cover of the Los Angeles Times Magazine (its streamlined architectures were also reflected in some of the most rigid designs characterised by geometrical silhouettes), and a rendering or the "Running of the 200th KD", a 1975 drawing that imagined the Kentucky Derby of the future.
In a way some of these pieces may end up being rather desirable with the fans of Mead's futuristic architectures, yet as a whole the collection - showcased at Pier 90 among inflatable versions of Mead's cars and vehicles and on a runway with a carpet that evoked the orangey palette of some of Mead's sketches for Blade Runner - didn't seem to add anything new to the Opening Ceremony glossary.
You may argue that the design duo mainly focused on presenting a future in which certain things - that is garments and accessories - will still be existing and won't really mutate as much as the architecture surrounding the wearer. So, rather than opting for something too dystopian or utopian that may have pigeonholed the collection into a box labelled "Space Age", they just went for ready-to-wear designs that at times looked rather banal or simply unnecessary (how many utilitarian pieces and army parkas will we need in our architectural future?) and didn't seem to have the time or the will to experiment with more intriguing shapes and silhouettes.
In his illustrations Mead crafted an invisible yet probable and almost tangible world, a reality in which we can still believe; Opening Ceremony may have moved from a reality conjured up by an artist fascinated with modern architectures, but, this captivating inspiration certainly wasn't visionary enough to guarantee this collection the cult status that some of the films Mead worked on have gained throughout the decades.
There is currently an exhibition on at the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV), Melbourne, entitled "Blue: Alchemy of a Colour" (until 20th March) that analyses the meaning and history of the blue shade through highly detailed textiles, ceramics, and exquisite works on paper from the 7th century to the present (all of them selected from the NGV's Asian Art Collection). The event looks at the meaning and symbolism behind all the guises and interpretations of this colour, from indigo and cobalt to Prussian and ultramarine blue. Textiles are among the most intriguing pieces included in the event, from Japanese indigo dyed garments to an indigo Burmese jacket, and an 18th century English cotton bodice.
The event also explains visitors how indigo blue is sourced from plant species found across the world and is used as a textile dye and paint pigment. Intricately patterned and expertly crafted indigo textiles from Egypt, Japan, China, Central Asia, India, Indonesia and Italy are on display.
One of the most interesting pieces is a cotton rag kimono (Noragi ranru) from the Meiji period (1868-1912). The feudal government encouraged frugality and attempted through sumptuary laws to ban the wearing of silk clothes by merchants and commoners, so cotton became widespread in Japan by the middle of the Edo period (1615-1868). Indigo dye also became widely used at this time and indigo blue cotton garments came to signify the working-class status of the wearer.
The rag kimono included in this exhibition comes in a style commonly worn by impoverished rural workers and integrates many different types of resist-dyed (kasuri) fabrics from old garments held together with sashiko stitching, a quilting technique consisting in a running stitch used to impart warmth and strength to garments.
There were a few garments in Visvim's A/W 2016 collection - presented during New York Fashion Week - that seemed directly linked to this piece. Visvim's designer Hiroki Nakamura has a passion for learning and reinterpreting handcrafted methods, and quite often turns to vintage suppliers or unknown and obscure craft laboratories to research and rescue artisanal techniques.
Both men's and women's jackets from the next Autumnal season directly borrowed from sakiori (rag weaving) as they were made with bits and pieces of cotton taken from other garments. Nakamura's wife Kelsi also came up with kimonos that integrated in patchwork formations velvet, denim, and other recycled materials. Fabrics (hand dyed with vegetable products) went from indigo to peach.
Wool arrived in Japan later on with the Europeans, and, to pay homage to this material, Nakamura created a kimono made with Harris tweed from Scotland after seeing a woollen men's kimono in a museum. Sashiko stitching was also used in this collection as the finishing for a padded men's dotera jacket with a light silk layer replacing the down filling.
There is actually another beautiful piece in the "Blue" event at the NGV, a Summer kimono (Yukata) from the Meiji period covered in floral motifs (the kimono features more than ten different types of flowers, such as hydrangeas, clematises, chrysanthemums, wisteria, irises, peonies, plum blossoms, lilies, bush clovers and bell flowers). This piece was made using natural indigo painted with a traditional Japanese tsutsugaki yuzen resist-dyeing technique, where a glutinous mix of rice flour and water is applied to the cotton fabric using a tool similar to a cake icing bag with narrow nozzle. Seeing the final results, this seems to be another technique worthy of being rediscovered and reinterpreted in a modern collection.
New York Fashion Week was usually a commercial affair with a bulimic calendar and with quite a few celebrities and fashion icons sitting in the front rows. Yet the digital revolution that threw fashion into an insta-frenziness introduced to this event an unnecessary phenomenon - the celebrity as fashion designer.
In the last few years there have actually been all sorts of alleged "collaborations" between brands/historical maisons/fast fashion retailers and celebrities, and then we entered a new phase in which a famous icon like a musician turned from performer at the back of a runway show into front row accessory and finally mutated into an entirely new creature, turning into "proper designer". Then this new and annoying figure was integrated into the fashion calendar and so it happened that, after Kanye West's Yeezy Seasons 3, it was the turn of Rihanna's Fenty x Puma debut.
The singer, who developed a clothing line with River Island a while back, was named creative director/brand ambassador for the Kering-owned footwear brand in late 2014; she mainly released sneakers, but for the Autumn/Winter 2016 collection she moved onto garments as well.
This New York Fashion Week presentation in a construction site, opposite the American Stock Exchange, was actually relatively subdued compared to the Yeezy extravaganza, but, while it lacked a stadium, thousands of paying fans, and hundreds of models forming a living and breathing (but largely motionless...) installation by a major contemporary artist, it had something very similar - a pile of more or less undesirable clothes.
Exactly as it happened with Yeezy Seasons 3, there wasn't much to say about the clothes as the collection inluded '90s-inspired streetwear (for both men and women), oversized hoodies and sweatshirts; reinventions of bomber jackets; body harnesses and furry pullovers that can double as dresses; mesh dresses; lace bodysuits and boxer-type shorts. The emphasis as you may guess was on footwear, with new versions of the creeper sneaker Rihanna created for Puma in 2015 (View this photo), and with several interpretations of classic sneakers reinvented as thigh-high boxing boots and sneaker-stiletto boots.
In this mix of gothic athleisure and streetwear with an erotic twist, there were also occasional messages written in Japanese and the large red disc of the Japanese flag. To be honest there was also a sense of déjà-vu: many looks out of Fenty x Puma looked indeed like the edited sporty versions of Hyein Seo's creations.
As some of you may remember, South Korean Hyein Seo won the British Council and British Fashion Council's International Fashion Showcase Emerging Talent Award 2014 for Best Designer with a collection inspired by 1990s fashion, Dario Argento, Jim Jamusch and old school hip hop.
Rihanna was often photographed wearing Seo's creations, including a bomber jacket and choker and a faux fur stole emblazoned with the word "Fear" in black block letters (View this photo). Last year she also opted for Hyein Seo's "School Kills" T-shirt. Rihanna actually liked it so much that, in May 2015, her company Roraj Trade, LLC, filed at the US Patent and Trademarks Office a new brand - $CHOOL Kills - under the category of 'leather products' and 'clothing products.'
Luckily for Seo, there are no direct rip-offs in the Puma collection, but there is a certain mood, and little references and ideas such as the Japanese references (among Seo's recent designs there are indeed jackets and trousers inspired by punk and covered in Japanese graphics).
So here lies the dilemma: brands invest in celebrities because they represent more powerful and famous brands capable of selling more or less everything to consumers. Undoubtedly, celebrities have got attitudes, but they do lack ideas and skills when it comes to designing garments. Sadly brands have been maybe confounding attitude with design skills, while they would win the respect of many consumers out there if they could only invest in talent, nurture and help it grow.
Genuinely new and innovative ideas do not lie indeed in sneakers-cum-stilettos or in the umpteenth version of the bunny boot (see the Yeezy 950 Duck Boot), but they are maybe being developed by somebody completely anonymous who is working hard in a fashion institution or in an independent design studio where there is no money and celebrity status, but quite often there is a lot of talent.
You can defend celebrities highlighting that a garment is just a garment and doesn't need to have a conceptual meaning, besides we may be staring at another tracksuit, but, well, it's loaded with attitude beause it's designed by somebody famous. Yet again the most talked celebrity collections seen at New York Fashion Week have shown absolutely no research, innovation and design skills, proving that, sadly it's not your knowledge that counts nowadays, but your attitude and how you project it on your followers on social media.
It is often the case that people with absolutely no money are often blessed with copious quantities of creativity, but at times can't make their dreams come true since they lack the necessary funds to develop their researches or finalise their projects. There are instead wealthy people and celebrities out there with a lot of money and enormous egos who can easily pretend of being amazingly creative minds.
Take Kanye West, for example. A supposed musical genius, producer and entrepreneur, he fancies himself also a fashion designer and a conceptual artist. Last night he descended from his cloud unto New York to launch his seventh solo album, "The Life of Pablo", and his new collection, Yeezy Season 3 at Madison Square Garden (an event simulcast to venues around the world).
We have grown accustomed to seeing a fashion show incorporating some live music performances or the favourite band of the fashion designer playing some tunes in the background, but this was considered a fashion runway with a listening party attached to it.
The event was open to the public, but, while last September Givenchy allowed 800 members of the public (among them fashion design students) to register on a dedicated site and see the show for free, this was a ticketed fashion show and music launch mainly dedicated to West's fans.
As it happens for big concerts, there were people reselling tickets outside the stadium or online, while fans could celebrate the event also by buying outside the stadium T-shirts and sweatshirts, some of them emblazoned with the words "I Feel Like Ye" on the front and "I Feel Like Pablo" on the back, the latter a line lifted from West's track "No More Parties in LA" (apparently a reference to Picasso; prices ranged between $40 and $90, so they were cheaper compared to the pieces in the Yeezy collections).
Apart from around 18,000 fans, guests included Caitlyn Jenner and the Kardashian clan, all clad in a mix of Yeezy and tacky Balmain by Olivier Rousteing's designs (apparently, the embroidered pieces were the result of a collaboration - yawn - between West and Rousteing). Matching looks abounded with more than one of them wearing white holey jumpers as mini-dresses for that fake patina of character and ostentatious fur coats.
The huge sheet covering two structures in the middle of the New York Knicks basketball court was pulled back (after some technical problems...) at the end of the first track to reveal over 1,000 models clad in the previous Yeezy collections, surrounding what looked to some people as a pair of refugee tents on top of which male and female models stood dressed in Yeezy Season 3. The staging was another collaboration with performance artist Vanessa Beecroft.
All the models preserved for the entire duration of the show (90 minutes) their bored or sad expressions; not many of them moved, though every now and then a few of them briefly sat down, as instructed by Beecroft's norms and regulations that were also posted on Twitter and that featured a series of directions (such as "No whisper/No smile/No dancing/No eye contact/No sharp movements/Loosen up no stiffness/Do not be casual/Do not act cool"), a few spelling mistakes ("If you are tired, sit down or lye down" or "Be aware of others and be percautios") and a sentence that sounded as if it had been lifted from a sci-fi film ("Do not ever look at the Jumbotron"). There was also a supermodel cameo with Naomi Campbell, Veronica Webb, Alek Wek, and Liya Kebede in black holey leotards and mink coats.
If you took it all as a show filled with noise, techno and samples, this was perfectly fine, but if you were looking for clothes you probably went to search for them in the wrong place.
Though the palette was more varied compared to Seasons 1 and 2, the garments were more or less the same: athleisure such as bodysuits, hoodies and tanks; fake military clothes; tattered sweaters; cargo gear, and oversized outerwear and shearlings. Occasional new entries included super-luxe fur, stretch knits and over the knee socks. The palette revolved around fifty shades of rusty orange as favoured by the Amity faction out of Divergent(View this photo). At least, you may argue, there was diversity among the models, even though a few of them looked extremely thin.
The most annoying designs in West's collections remain his holey and tattered jumpers: some people - among them many children - actually do have to wear in their lives jumpers with real holes as they can't afford wearing anything else. Fakely distressed and torn/tattered clothes are not glamorous or elegant, they just prove that who wears them was too lazy to work or too privileged to actually have the hard life of real people (frankly, the combination of immaculately white holey and tattered jumpers/mini-skirt, furs and beaded dresses on the Kardashians looked ridiculous).
The collective images of the models and their close ups on the Jumbotron at times conjured up images of refugees escaping from their countries by boat; now if that was the final aim of the presentation, that would be extremely upsetting because a tragedy shouldn't be used for a fashion event with no real message at its core (well, there were a few models delivering here and there the black power salute, so there may have been a message that was sadly lost in all the grand spectacle...).
Music-wise West thinks he is God, but fashion-wise the rapper is locked in a Divergent syndrome (oh, wait a minute, would his family clad in white represent Candor then?) and believes the world has gone through an apocalypse, at the end of which people were divided into factions, distinguishable only by the colours of their attires.
After the album playback was finished West asked the crowd "Tell me how y'all feel about the clothes this season?" then thanked Adidas for paying for the collection, led the crowd in a chant of "fuck Nike" (he fell out with the company after a disagreement over royalties linked with his Air Yeezy footwear and West has the habit of seeing people falling off with him as dangerous enemies, be they Taylor Swift or Nike...).
During the event, West also reminded his fans why they should buy into his footwear ("...it's the number one shoe...the number one Christmas present"), and concluded his rants with a key appeal, "My dream, I told Anna [Wintour], is to at least just for a couple of years be the creative director of Hermès."
Surely the presentation - that also featured as a bonus a teaser of a video game about West's deceased mother's late arrival to heaven (entitled "Only One"; couldn't you have spared people at least this one?) - had an audio-visual impact, but, as a whole, the collection was overshadowed by the release of the album that was then overshadowed by West's rants about his collection.
If you're a fashion student severely indebted to pursue your dream and haven't lost your critical skills, you're probably wondering why you're suffering so much if the fashion industry has been infiltrated and partially saturated by such narcissistic egomaniacs. The good thing, though, is that this is certainly not the future of the fashion presentation, but a one-off. There is indeed no designer who may be able to splash so much money only for a collection presentation.
The sad thing, though, is that vapid celebrities will instead keep on existing and churn out horrid designs, collaborations and fashion collections (which will also mean you can obviously forget writing an in-depth fashion analysis, because what reasons, messages and meanings can you find in a pile of bodysuits?). There is only one doubt left: behind her impenetrable sunglasses, did Anna Wintour ever think "get me off the fashion bandwagon, NOW?". Ah, a penny for her thoughts.
New York Fashion Week kicks off today, yet there are other more intriguing events to see in the Big Apple, apart from following a bulimic calendar packed with collections that may end up being completely useless, especially in light of the recent developments regarding fashion shows. One of such events (especially for fans of costumes designed by artists...) is the New York City Ballet's performance of "The Most Incredible Thing".
This edition is completely new and features choreography by Justin Peck, the New York City Ballet's 28-year-old choreographer-in-residence and soloist. Peck has managed in the last few years to convert a younger generation to ballet, winning the heart of many people, including Opening Ceremony Creative Directors Humberto Leon and Carol Lim who, as you may remember, chose him to choreograph their S/S 16 runway show.
While this is Peck's most ambitious work to date since it features a cast of more than 50 performers, the ballet also includes a score composed by The National's Bryce Dessner and costumes and scenery designed by David Zwirner-represented artist Marcel Dzama.
The story is still taken from the eponymous fairy tale by Hans Christian Andersen. Written and published in 1870, the plot focuses on a bizarre contest launched by a king: the inventor of the most incredible thing will win half his kingdom and the hand of the princess in marriage.
In the story a young man, The Creator, designs a clock that manages to conjure up at the stroke of the hour various figures - Moses, Adam and Eve, the Four Seasons, the Five Senses and many more. He is proclaimed the winner, but then an evil character, the Destroyer (a man with a club-shaped arm in this New York City Ballet production) smashes the clock. Everybody thinks that this act is actually the most incredible thing they have ever seen and the wedding is therefore arranged. During it, though, the figures from the clock reappear, fight against the Destroyer and defeat him, reuniting the Creator and the Princess.
The Sadler's Wells version was a blend of ballet, pop videos, cabaret moments/spoof TV shows and film installations, and, in more or less the same way, this 45-minute run, part of the NYCB winter season's Artist Series, focuses on a strong visual component rather than on the body.
Peck's choreography often combines geometric and agile movements, but, as a whole the ballet comes out as a series of sketches and divertissements stifled by the power of the elaborate costumes. Indeed, quite often the dancers look as if they were created as accessories for Dzama's sets and costumes.
Dzama's designs look like the result of a visual retro-futurist marriage between Alexandra Exter's Constructivist shapes and silhouettes for Yakov Protazanov’s Soviet sci-fiAelita: Queen of Mars and the costumes for the Triadisches Ballett (Triadic Ballet) developed by the Bauhaus' Oskar Schlemmer(see also the illustration for the programme). Dzama also looked at other inspirations, including art movements, literary works and artists such as Francis Picabia (the polkadots on the children's costumes reference a 1910 ballet by Picabia's with dancers in polka-dotted underwear).
Dzama actually has a fascination with dance, and some of his early works feature figures arranged in various dance positions (while he also mentions as a source of inspiration for this work Hans Christian Andersen's "The Red Shoes"). Ths is actually not the first time Dzama designed dance costumes: one of his designs appeared also in Jay-Z's "Picasso Baby" music video, but in this case his works - brought to life by Marc Happel, New York City Ballet's Director of Costumes - contribute to the creation of vivid vignettes.
There are indeed some intriguing characters such as the Nine Muses in matching Louise Brooks bobs and black and white optical costumes (in a formation that calls to mind Thom Browne's Bauhaus inspired S/S 13 collection show) that echo in their whorls Marcel Duchamp's rotative sculptures (Duchamp's passion for chess inspired Dzama's Art Series installation on the David H. Koch Theater Promenade at Lincoln Center).
The Seven Deadly Sins in flame-coloured, hand-painted unitards call to mind Nijinsky's faun, while the King is portrayed by two dancers in a rigid twin-like costume (a rather interesting and fantastic effect), and the scarlet Spring Bird (Gwyneth Muller) dances at times like Loïe Fuller, moving the sleeves of her costume to create flickering flames.
Yet there are also dubious appartions: despite The Creator is supposed to be a tremendous innovator, there is no futurism in his costume, but he looks like a pastiche out of a vintage Western comic book (think Tex Dawson, Western Kid, and you get an idea); clad in their identical tiered triangular hooped dresses (slightly reminiscent of Pierre Cardin's hooped designs) that turn them into unidentified flying objects the Five Senses look indistinguishable and rather clumsy.
The Eight Monks resemble instead wizards, and there are way too many birds, from the Winter Crow to the above mentioned Spring Bird and the Cuckoo Bird (Tiler Peck; this figure substitutes Moses in the original tale). The latter wears a tutu comprising cascades of gold brocade feathers, that quite often distract from the fast and unfinished steps, and her costume is not to be confused with the Princess (Sterling Hyltin)' tutu with a silver tulle bodice designed to resemble metal scales, but looking a bit like feathers.
The double-faced Destroyer is probably the character who is most alive: he looks like a guard out of Aelita (and so do the Three Kings...),but his club arm becomes a tool to create complicated choreographies with the Princess (Sterling Hyltin) who loses instead her passion in the supposedly romantic pas de deux with the Creator (Taylor Stanley).
Costumes are also accompanied by headpieces, wigs, and masks, that add a disquieting element to the tale, but an unmistakeable Dzama touch.
The visual power of the performance is actually better appreciated when the event is put in an arty context and seen together with the current exhibition at David Zwirner entitled "Marcel Dzama and Richard Pettibon: Forgetting the Hand" (on until next week).
This show is the result of a collaboration between the two artists that started last year when Pettibon handed some drawings to finish to Dzama. The drawings and collages created followed therefore the surrealist "exquisite corpse" method in which a partner is only given portions of an otherwise concealed drawing to work on.
The pieces were collected in a zine for Printed Matter's New York Art Book Fair at MoMA PS1 (September 2015) and further works were then produced jointly by the artists for this exhibition.
The drawings are the result of two different artistic styles and visions, but, if you look closely at some of the details in these densely populated images that often conjure up the fears and anxieties generated by our modern and claustrophobic existences, you will be able to spot disturbingly carnivalesque and dark theatrical elements such as Dzama's trademark flaming red capes, bandit masks, polka dots, swirls and whorls that appear also in "The Most Incredible Thing".
It was indeed this exhibition and Dzama's 2012 Dadaist-inspired video "Une Danse des Bouffons" (A Jester's Dance), featuring Kim Gordon as Maria Martins, a sculptor and lover of Marcel Duchamp, that actually prompted Peck and Dessner to call the artist to work on a ballet with them. The event also gets visitors the chance to see Dzama's new video, "A Flower of Evil", that also offers some correspondences and links with the costumes in "The Most Incredible Thing" (see Tha Gambler's black costume covered with large white polka dots).
In a way "The Most Incredible Thing", Peck's 10th new work fo the New York City Ballet, is overshadowed by the whimsical and inventive costumes produced by Dzama, and while the production may be dismissed as a clever trick to get modern artists together and attract new audiences to a traditional form of art, Andersen's tale is particularly symbolic.
In this age in which we daily try and find the next big thing only to discard and destroy it, "The Most Incredible Thing" still fascinates us since it tells a story in which goodness and art prevail over chaos, tyranny and destruction and an ambitious Creator restores a much needed balance in his clock and in the entire universe. Though this may not be a great performance choreography-wise, there is therefore still a lot to see in it and a great metaphor to grasp.
"The Most Incredible Thing" runs on February 11 and February 19, at the David H. Koch Theater, New York. It returns to repertory in April and May. "Marcel Dzama and Richard Pettibon: Forgetting the Hand" is on view at David Zwirner, 533 West 19th Street, New York, until February 20, 2016.
Image Credits for this post
7. Marcel Dzama and Raymond Pettibon The ghosts in these walls, 2015 Pencil, ink, gouache, and collage on paper 14 x 11 1/8 inches (35.6 x 28.3 cm) Courtesy David Zwirner, New York/London
8. Marcel Dzama and Raymond Pettibon The circle of the lustful, 2015 Pencil, ink, gouache, and collage on paper 21 1/4 x 16 1/8 inches (54 x 41 cm) Courtesy David Zwirner, New York/London
9. Marcel Dzama and Raymond Pettibon Sunbather, 2016 Pencil, ink, watercolor, gouache, and collage on paper 15 x 11 inches (38.1 x 27.9 cm) Courtesy David Zwirner, New York/London
10. Marcel Dzama and Raymond Pettibon Be witness to me, O thou blessed Mother Moon, 2016 Pencil, ink, watercolor, gouache, and collage on paper 18 x 21 1/2 inches (45.7 x 54.6 cm) Courtesy David Zwirner, New York/London
11. Marcel Dzama Still from A Flower of Evil, 2015 Courtesy David Zwirner, New York/London
12, 13.Marcel Dzama and Raymond Pettibon Installation views from the 2016 solo exhibition Forgetting the Hand at David Zwirner, New York Courtesy David Zwirner, New York/London
