Right before the various fashion weeks take place, it's not rare to spot on the Internet brief articles or lists about designers' inspirations for their next collections. Some mention art, others architecture, music or even literature, but the truth is that the real inspirations may be hiding near you or maybe just in front of you.
Take Alexander Wang's collection: among the various pieces to file under the "neon coloured ready-to-rave athleisure" category there is a top that looks a bit like a relic from a 1989 house party as reinterpreted by AliExpress.
It features the slogan "Mind Detergent" and four images of random postcards from Miami, Florida. One of them shows (a slightly digitally altered version of) a postcard with palm trees and sunrise on the ocean that was on sale on Etsy, from a shop dedicated to vintage postcards from Florida.
The postcard went sold out on Etsy on 26th September, 2012, but (apart from buying it from Etsy, or receiving it from somebody else…) Wang may have stumbled upon it on Pinterest, as this image is also pinned on a board dedicated to palms in Miami (Palmier Miami 60).
don't want to guess where he got the other images, but check your attic or your Pinterest boards: maybe the inspiration for the next super-fashionable collection is that forgotten vintage postcard your Auntie Mame-like globetrotter aunt sent to your mum decades ago, or it's right in front of you on your own Pinterest board...
People lucky enough to be able to visit Gallery 1957 in Accra, Ghana, will discover (until 22nd October) a section of the exhibition entitled "Yellow is the Colour of Water" (this is indeed a multi-site project with interventions taking place in other locations as well), featuring Jeremiah Quarshie's latest hyper-realistic paintings from his new series.
The latter features beauty pageant contestants, businesswomen, mothers to labourers sitting among yellow "Kufuor" (after John Kufuor, the second President of the Fourth Republic of Ghana) gallon containers used to store and carry water and found throughout Ghana.
The water containers act as thrones and the subjects portrayed turn into modern-day tongue-in-cheek queens, while the artist uses the set and settings of these paintings to create social contrasts, and make us ponder about the conditions of different people.
Quarshie also employs the yellow colour in a symbolical way: water is transparent but in this case it is identified with the yellow shade, almost to tell us that colours are just temporarily defining and limiting categories.
Yellow will continue to be a trademark shade for Gallery 1957 as it gets ready to take part in 1:54 Contemporary African Art Fair (6th - 9th October 2016) at Somerset House in London with a solo booth by Serge Attukwei Clottey (stand G31).
Clottey is the founder of the GoLokal collective and the creator of "Afrogallonism", an artistic concept commenting on consumption within modern Africa through the utilisation of the ubiquitous yellow gallon containers that arrive from Europe as cooking oil canisters and are then reused to store water and petrol.
Clottey started to radically transform the containers into artworks a while back and exhibited his pieces in the event "My Mother's Wardrobe", that marked the opening of Gallery 1957 in March 2016.
"My Mother's Wardrobe" was inspired by the death of Clottey's mother and by the textile traditions of Ghana. In many parts of Ghana, a person's wardrobe is released to relatives a year after their death, and quite often the children of the deceased are left with no material memories.
As an only son Clottey wove his own sculptures to celebrate and remember his mother, using plastic pieces at times decorated with barcode graphics and recreating his own version of Dutch wax textiles. Slightly reminiscent of El Anatsui's tapestries made with found materials such as discarded aluminum caps and plastic seals from liquor bottles, Clottey's works are mainly made with squares of yellow plastics.
In a special performance at the gallery in March, the artist also invited men and women dressed in their mothers' wardrobes, breaking in this way assumptions concerning gender in clothing and in life. Visitors at 1:54 will discover Clottey's wall-based sculptural installations created through cutting, drilling, stitching and melting found materials and yellow containers.
The resulting bold assemblages and collages of materials pose questions about traditions and our global consumption and waste, but they also prove that basic materials can be recycled, elevated and transformed into new and visually powerful narratives.
Expect to see fashion designers starting to mention "Afrogallonism" as an inspiration, but also Clottey's large-scale installations being used as props in catwalk shows very soon.
Image credit for this post
Images 1 to 4, Jeremiah Quarshie, "Shooter", "Eyram", "Franklina" and "Manye", "Yellow is the Colour of Water" series, 2016, Acrylic on canvas
Images 5 and 6 Gallery 1957 shows Serge Attukwei Clottey at 1:54 Art Fair, Somerset House, London, 6-9 Oct 2016.
In Pier Paolo Pasolini's Il Vangelo secondo Matteo (The Gospel According to St. Matthew), religious leaders wear enormously disproportionate headdresses. Dominating the frames, the headpieces are symbolically employed to indicate the conceit and self-importance of the characters wearing them. By changing the proportions of these accessories, Pasolini therefore hinted at something hidden in his characters without mentioning it.
Yet hats and headdresses add and define status not just in films but in real life and Michaela Feurstein-Prasser, Andrea Hönigmann-Polly and Barbara Staudinger, the curators of the "Tip of the Hat! A Social History of the Covered Head" (until 30th October 2016) exhibition at the Wien Museum Karlsplatz(Vienna), perfectly know it.
Hats are not just a mere protection against wind and weather, but they are physical symbols of specific powers and roles or can be employed to make a statement about one's cultural affiliations or political attitudes, at times indicating a person's social rank and standing.
"Tip of the Hat! A Social History of the Covered Head" develops from this basic concept - discovering the hidden meanings behind key headpieces.
The exhibition features approximately over 100 objects, photographs and drawings, some of them borrowed from the Wien Museum's vast collection and in some ways also attempts to trace the history of Vienna's fashion.
The event is therefore a journey that moves from the political upheavals that swept Europe through 1848, with particular attention to the revolution that radically transformed Vienna.
With their Calabrese-style hats, the revolutionaries of 1848 set themselves apart from top hat-wearing reactionaries. Social democrats in flat caps struggled for workers' emancipation, while the Styrian felt hat symbolized loyalty to the regime during the Austro-fascist period.
Hats are symbols of power, of conspicuous expressions of affluence, and signs of status. They are key accessories to complement a uniform, or they can turn into a much-needed whimsical piece to enliven a dress.
While there is emphasis on military hats and on the local production in Vienna that boomed after 1870 (not a lot of people know about it, so it's worth remembering it...), there are also some ethereal and feathery hats from the 1940s by avant-garde Viennese milliner Adele List (1893-1983), some of them in wonderful shades of burnt orange or in vivid blue tones.
Shapes and silhouettes are also extremely interesting - with cloche and cocktail hats; top hats, fedoras and hamburg hats - while materials and decorative elements employed (felt, cotton, feathers and silk) can provide inspirations.
Curators chronologically follow the developments of hats moving onto hiking hats and straw hats, but also hoods, yarmulkes, headscarves and a bejeweled mitre designed in 2007 for Pope Benedict, pieces that function as personal "trademarks", symbols of religious and cultural identity, accessories that hint at devotion or trends.
Graphic designers and photography fans will discover adverts, pages from fashion magazines and portraits of milliners, while students interested in taking this art further will find out that today the Hetzendorf Fashion School is the only institution in the German-speaking world that teaches hat-making.
One key element of this exhibition is that it puts emphasis not just on the designs on display, but on the stories that they immediately reveal abour the wearers and their places in Viennese society. This is an intriguing way to use fashion history to read social history - chapeau to the curators!
In a previous post we looked at digital "Haute Mess" through Google's Project Muze, but, you see, fashion epic fails aren't just digital - as proved yesterday afternoon at the Yeezy Season 4 show, they can indeed be tangible and real, very real.
In the last few days Kanye West's casting call highlighting "multiracial women only" sparked debate on the social media; then there was the debate about the secret location and the announcement that the show would be streamed via Tidal.
This time the girls that formed this regimented group of people donned beige, cream, nude, chocolate, brown, coffee and black undergarments, while models walking around them on a triangular runway were dressed in the same clothes we have seen on other Yeezy runways that is oversized hoodies, puffa jackets, parkas, T-shirts, bra tops, ribbed body-con mini-dresses, knitted cut-out tops and tight-knit tank dresses in pale colors, mainly matched with over-the-knee boots, some of them in transparent PVC, a material that allowed to see the models' legs and feet positively perspiring. Accessories also included enormous backpacks.
There were a few catastrophes along the line: some models standing on the lawn in the centre of the runway fainted as they waited under a scorching sun and in unbearable temperatures; one model on the runway removed instead her shoes.
It soon became clear that West mainly focused so much on the four freedoms celebrated by the park - freedom of speech and expression, freedom of religion, freedom from want and freedom from fear - that he forgot about freedom of movement when a model in horridly looking, ill-fitting boots started stumbling on the runway and was eventually helped down it by Bruce Pask of Bergdorf Goodman, who stood up from his seat and walked her down the runway.
There are no excuses about this shambolic show (that may have had a great symbolism considering the space where it was held, and a wonderful architectural connection considering Louis Kahn was originally asked to design it). Instead the show and the clothes were a total mess.
West states this is "apparel" and not "fashion", but his terrible garments and accessories at times copied from other labels (first we saw Margiela's boots being re-vomited by Gvasalia's Vêtements; then they were regurgitated in Gvasalia's Balenciaga and in this collection…how many times will we have to see them vomited yet again before we move on?).
Besides, if this is apparel, he should at least try to sell it: Yeezy's clothes haven't indeed been really produced so far, but the supposed 200 styles featured in one collection were reduced to footwear.
The reactions as a whole weren't positive at all: most journalists were angry about wasting time to get on the buses that took them to the secret location and then about being held captive there awaiting for something to happen and for the Kardashian clan to show up. Their reactions are also taking the form of interesting reviews: some of them heavily criticised the collection; others completely avoided mentioning it or compiled lists of notable trendy things (the diversity of the cast and varying shades of blackness; boots being "the new pants" and the cult of the underboob, as exhibited by "Fade" music video star Teyana Taylor) to make sure they didn't have to mention the actual clothes offending in this way West and Adidas.
Mind you, in many ways West is not to be entirely condemned here: he was crap at fashion from the very beginning, but the fashion media encouraged his forays into design being afraid of losing advertising money (and their jobs...) or of being sued for this or that (as it happens nowadays when you tend to tell the truth...).
So, let's face it, this was a bad collection and the overall experience left you as cold and bored as Beecroft's shambolic bronze and marble garden in the Italian Pavilion at the Venice Art Biennale in 2015.
At the same time, this collection has brought something good on the fashion scene as it may help purging fashion journalism from a few lies and mark the return of a tiny drop of honesty in writing. The reaction of many critics proves indeed that there is a limit to the shit you can take and that you can lie once to consumers, but you can't manufacture continuous lies, otherwise you will lose your personal integrity and credibility.
"The truth hurts in this nitrogenic atmosphere!" sings Mr Small from The Amazing World of Gumball in his "Honesty Rap", suggesting that the solution is in keeping lies to a "manageable size". In a nutshell, if you're a fashion critic next time you have to describe a celebrity-designed collection, rather than blatantly lying and screaming "fashion genius" in the name of advertising money, opt for blander definitions and descriptions. You will discover that being honest won't make you rich, but it will help you retaining your integrity. And that's no mean feat in the fashion industry.
In the last few months there has been a proliferation of articles about data-driven algorithms and how they are ruling and governing our lives. Fashion is actually one of the main industries where algorithms can be successfully employed: the purchasing behaviour of global shoppers, the items they search, like, recommend or pick, are indeed valuable data that, once screened and processed, can help defining trends and drive sales.
Yet, while Artificial Intelligence may be ruling the e-commerce side of things, robots may find it hard defining style and quality. The proof of this statement? Google's Project Muze.
Designed in partnership with European e-commerce company Zalando and with U.K.-based digital design studio Stinkdigital, this experiment - recently presented at Bread & Butter - employs Google's network-powered DeepDream computer vision program, is based on its open-source platform TensorFlow and consists of an algorithm modeled on the human brain.
The Tensor Flow system draws indeed information from a neural network trained on various design preferences including colour, style and texture as suggested by over 600 fashion trendsetters, by data included in the Google Fashion Trend Report and by styles that have trended on Zalando.
Want to play at being a fashion designer? Answer the questions the system suggests you regarding your gender, age, favourite music and current mood, and then the computer will attempt to generated creative decisions and produce a virtual outfit.
The main problem with the machine learning system is that, no matter your choices, this complex search generates more or less the main shapes and silhouettes over and over again, all of them rather cringing.
Two designs prevail: most unisex/men choices seem to produce a loose top and pants; most unisex/women choices will get you a mountainous bell-shaped construction with no holes for arms and some giant ruffles added around the hemline. Quite often the items are also covered by a disturbingly giant manta ray-like cape-cum-poncho floating in space, inspired by smoke (according to the site...).
There are occasional variations with mini-dresses covered in protruding spikes or tops and pants wrapped in bizarre ropes (mind you, the latter may turn useful in our urban jungles…), while patterns are simply crazy and could be filed under "animation" rather than textiles, even though they don't even look half as good as the ones you see in the clothes of characters in current animated feature films or in some experimental videos showing the latest wonders of computer graphics.
Surely this is not Haute Tech, but Haute Mess, the stuff of your worst acid-induced nightmares being conjured up on your computer screen (though these outfits may prove a success if you're trying to create Comedy of Manners costumes for an audience high on hallucinogenic substances…)..
You seriously wonder what's the point of wasting resources on this when there are designers out there that are successfully developing a path towards the future of fashion by finding a way to combine hand-made and machine-made, in the same way as architecture has introduced innovative shapes by combining the human touch with parametric design.
As it stands Project Muze proves that, by searching through our favourite things and moods, "deep learning" algorithms may be able to analyse our collective buying trends and maybe even make general predictions, but they will not be able to generate the next big thing design-wise because they can't inject emotions and a much-needed human touch in fashion.
In a nutshell, if this is the result of the potential of algorithms in clothing design, fashion creators out there can sleep sweet dreams, as machines will never steal their jobs (well, there's vapid celebrities and their "collabs" with fashion houses/brands doing that already anyway…).
Yet, while designing clothes is not for algorithms, there is a place for them in the fashion industry: Condé Nast has just turned to IBM's Watson to help building social influencer campaigns for brands advertising with publications such as Vogue, Vanity Fair and The New Yorker.
When you think about fashion and about "displaying it", your mind easily conjures up some of the thoughts, quotes and ideas featured in Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project, a collection of writings about life in Paris and its iron-and-glass covered "arcades". Early centres of consumerism, these glass-roofed rows of shops were also fashion stages where the act of displaying (and triggering desire in the passers-by...) was performed.
You may argue that nowadays we have created further and very different arcades: the screens of our computers, smartphones and other devices can indeed act as windows that guarantee us access to all sorts of things.
Yet brick and mortar shops are still playing a big part in generating desire and attracting the attention of consumers via collaborations with artists and exclusive installations at times worthy of museum spaces.
A few months ago Barneys in New York worked with artist Margaret Lee for example. Lee designed and created two windows at Barneys Downtown Flagship and four windows at Madison Avenue that focused on the concepts of desire and consumption and that had a surreal touch about them.
One window featured a polished stainless steel baby crib with a motorized swinging pendulum swinging from above and Rimowa luggage; another opened onto a custom metal refrigerator filled with watermelons and a Maison Margiela 5AC bag in Silver Tape.
A third window included a visually striking gold prismatic upholstered couch and a pair of Maison Margiela gold sneakers.
At the moment - in time for New York Fashion Week (and on display through October 2, 2016) - Barneys has partnered with Margiela, creating in its Madison Avenue windows four surreal tableaux.
The windows are the result of a conversation between the department store's Creative Director Dennis Freedman, his team and the current Margiela Creative Director, John Galliano.
The main starting points for the windows were the house's Spring 2016 Artisanal and Fall 2016 ready-to-wear collections, but once Freedman and Galliano met in the latter's atelier in Paris, conversation led them to talk about deconstruction, juxtapositions (between time periods, materials, techniques, and colours), surrealism and the creative process behind a collection.
This theme is tackled in the first window, featuring an invisible model walking through a field of waving sea grass wearing a plaid blazer, a black leather skirt and a knit muff covering her hands.
Enormous 3D models of the hands of God and Adam from Michelangelo's painting "The Creation of Adam" from the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel emerge from the bushes.
In another window a shearling aviator cape on another invisible model is surrounded by knee-high riding boots (sculpted replicas cast from those seen on the runway), while a conveyor belt with five identical wigs (again based on the hairstyles from the Maison Margiela runway show) revolve around it, hinting at order and disorder, originality and replication.
Flight is celebrated in the third window with a draped metallic gown floating in the space and sprouting a pair of kinetic and mechanical cold-rolled steel wings that extend out almost 15 feet from the dress.
The fourth and final window includes two designs from the house's "Artisanal" couture line. Couture (this is the first time Barneys shows pieces from a couture collection) often features the seeds of the ready-to-wear collections and the designs included here are a sort of introduction to the themes distilled in the other pieces.
The off-white trench coat that falls into a pleated skirt and the black blazer layered with a pink jacquard dress with bright orange lining were inspired by birds and they are displayed inside revolving brick structures that call to mind dovecotes.
The clothes or accessories on display are not the most interesting features in these windows: the most striking thing is indeed the fact that the windows attract passers-by, and generate desire, but they do not necessarily force people to buy the pieces on display (by the way, even if you could afford them, the pieces from the "Artisanal" collection aren't even available in the store).
So the windows become almost museum installations (especially the Margaret Lee and Margiela windows featuring mechanical/kinetic machines) and while in the past we have seen fashion houses commissioning artists to create backdrops for shop windows, in these cases the windows turn into stages where imaginary worlds are created and where a story unravels (passers-by are invited to come up with their own story in a way...).
Considering the skills, techniques and mechanical elements featured in these windows and thinking about how fashion runways are currently being radically transformed in a more commercial key by the "see-now-buy-now" trend, it's easy to wonder if in future the "window as installation" will become more and more popular. After all, we have already seen some intriguing examples of this trend during Milan Design Week.
A great example of this principle is represented by the "Locus Solus" pool side collection, originally created by the late Italian designer Gae Aulentiin 1964 for Centro Studi Poltronova.
Including loungers, tables and chairs, "Locus Solus" was considered as a uniquely original and irreverent collection of pieces: the designs were indeed made using a steel tubular framework (a reference to Aulenti's iconic curved wooden chair designs) varnished in vivid colours and decorated with handmade cushions characterized by vividly bright and lively prints with a Pop Art edge.
Fans of stylish films will immediately make the connection and remember how Gae Aulenti's table and chairs from this collection appeared in Jacques Deray's 1969 French film La Piscine(The Swimming Pool).
The movie revolved around lovers Marianne (Romy Schneider) and Jean-Paul (Alain Delon) spending their vacation in a villa with a large swimming pool, located near Saint-Tropez. Their quiet holiday is radically transformed by the arrival of Marianne's former lover Harry (Maurice Ronet) and his teenage daughter Pénélope (Jane Birkin).
The swimming pool mentioned in the title is obviously one of the main architectural protagonists, but so is Gae Aulenti's set of garden furniture.
The yellow table and chairs sit in a corner of the garden, providing the main characters with a space (that they at times co-ordinate with their clothes, as proved by the screenshot posted above) where they chat, relax, have their breakfast, or simply plot revenge. In a nutshell, the pieces of furniture are not just a symbol of their outdoor lifestyle, but they are a sort of theatrical stage where the drama unravels.
After being relaunched by Exteta in collaboration with Archivio Aulenti at Milan's Salone del Mobile in April, the pieces of furniture will reappear this week not in Saint-Tropez, but in Cannes.
Exteta has indeed been chosen to decorate the outdoor spaces of the Cannes Yachting Festival (from tomorrow till 11th September). The Palais VIP Restaurant setting will therefore feature the irreverence of the "Locus Solus" collection. Among the pieces included there will also be Aulenti's Sun Lounger.
Yes, vacations may be over, but iconic design pieces with a timeless mood can provide an inspiration throughout the year with their materials, shapes and decorative patterns.
The last two posts were dedicated to the power of colours. Let's continue the "thread" today (pun totally intended as you will see from the contents of this post...) by looking at a colourful and arty "yarn", the one feautred in this installation by Franco Summa entitled "De Pictura: Il Filo di Arianna" (De Pictura: Ariadne's Thread; 1978-2009).
The artist painted a long canvas strip in vivid colours and then spun it on a big wooden spool. At the same time he applied a strip of colours on reproductions of paintings from the 1200s to the 1500s (there are different versions of this installation, a longer one includes reproductions of paintings by Giotto, Duccio, Piero Della Francesca, Paolo Uccello, Michelangelo, Raphael and many more).
By following the coloured line you discover it ends up on a blank canvas portraying an artist with his back to the audience painting the line. The colourful thread evokes Ariadne helping Theseus finding his way out of the Minotaur's labyrinth with a ball of thread, but in this case the physical and metaphysical coloured line is a way to explore the past and look into the future.
Summa is indeed hinting here at the fact that chaos and confusion reign supreme in the art world, but also in our lives, which means that quite often we feel confused about the creative paths that we should choose.
The colourful thread becomes therefore a way to trace back our origins to the masters of art to find new strength and inspirations to write our future, a great message to give out at the beginning of September, as we slowly leave Summer behind to embrace next season's challenges.
Colours employed in architecture to decorate, highlight or embellish the features of a building are often absorbed by the urban context surrounding them, becoming a way to entice emotional and imaginative responses from passers-by.
There are a few projects by Italian architect Franco Summa that could be taken as examples of great architectural and fashion correspondences. At the moment there is an exhibition entitled "Urban Rainbow" celebrating him at the Michetti Museum in Francavilla al Mare (until 24th September 2016), and the event is a good way to rediscover some of these links and connections.
In 1975 Summa painted for example the steps in front of the deconsecrated Baroque church dedicated to Saint Augustine in Città Sant'Angelo.
The church was located at the bottom of a street and Summa painted the 24 steps using a double series of 12 well-ordered colours: warm shades - symbolizing materiality - were located at the bottom; while cool colours - hinting at spirituality - decorated the top of the staircase.
From a distance the colours gave the impression of seeing a series of coloured lines in front of the church, while the order the artist had given them elevated the perspective in a metaphorical and metaphysical way.
The project was entitled "Un arcobaleno in fondo alla via" (A rainbow down the street), and, shortly afterwards in the same year, Summa launched another project, this time a wearable representation of the coloured church steps.
Entitled "Sentirsi un arcobaleno addosso" (The rainbow on your skin), it consisted in a series of sweats characterized by the same chromatic scale he had used for the church steps in Città Sant'Angelo.
The tops were donated to 24 artists, architects, designers and friends, among them Michelangelo Pistoletto, Franco Raggi, Pierre Restany, Enrico Crispolti, Gordon Matta Clark, Adina Riga, Franca Sacchi, Paola Navone, Almerico De Angelis, Ugo La Pietra, Tommaso Trini, Achille Bonito Oliva, Ettore Sottsass, Alessandro Mendini, Lidia Prandi, Achille Cavellini, Alfredo Di Laura, Franco Nicolini, Iano Villani, Mario Brunetti and Salvatore Aia.
By putting on the sweaters, the wearers would create an interesting fashion correspondence with Summa's architectural intervention in the urban landscapes they inhabited.
Summa used the same combination of rainbow colours for a scarf contained in a vase, part of the "Nessos" section of his installation at the Venice Biennale in 1978.
A few years later, in 1981, Summa painted in the same shades thousands of bricks in the Pineta Dannunziana park in Pescara with the help of local children and grown-ups.
The project - "Architettura" - lasted thirty days attracting many people (I was a young child and one of the onlookers…) and the final result was a mountain of polychrome bricks.
The final effect was stunning and crazy at the same time, imagine a gigantic Pointillism landscape made real and you get the idea. What happened to the mountain of bricks? It was dismantled in the following days and the bricks were employed by people to create colourful geometrical structures and towers.
The meaning of colours varies from one culture to the next. At the same time, colour perception changes from person to person, depending on the brain's intepretation of a stimulus received by the eye.
Colour perception is actually an intriguing subject that can be studied from different points of view, for example in conjunction with art and culture, but also with chemistry, science, neurology and psychology.
In fashion, colour percetion is a key point as different shades can greatly influence a collection, while a specific palette of colours may be the key to unlock the hidden meaning behind a design or can show a designer's attempt at making a statement or at being experimental.
Evelin Kägo, a graduate from The Swedish School of Textiles in Borås, went down this path and attempted to play with simultaneous contrast (the result of placing two colours side by side), and colour constancy (the accomodation of the eye for changes in illumination).
The result was a graduate collection - entitled "Color Perception" - focused on the influence of different nuances on each other, but also tackling the relationship between knitted and transfer printed textile layers, characterised by visual merging effects engineered to create constantly changing surface expressions, movements, animations and optical illusions.
As the garments visually "react", they can also be used by the wearer to communicate and entice emotional responses to light and colours, turning therefore into "behavioural garments" that help interacting with other people.
There is actually also a sort of architectural dimension to the project, as Kägo explains on The Swedish School of Textiles site: "I developed and programmed a knitted fabric with great shape holding properties to be able to create an illusion/animation effect between the layers. With this project I want to expand the thinking of patterns from being one surface decoration into multi-layered surfaces. I believe patterns have more potential in their essential way of being. I am working with the pattern designs through their 'construction' – through layers."
The collection won Kägo the Lindex (the Swedish fast-fashion brand, a sponsor of the graduation show that took place in August during Fashion Week Stockholm) award for upcoming designers (best design idea and collection) with the motivation, "A collection that is visually energetic and voluminous with a delightful balance between solid and transparent surfaces. The look is experimental, artistic and colourful."
The winner receives a grant worth SEK 50,000 and Lindex will be initiating a collaboration with Kägo in the autumn that will result in a joint design collection for the "Tomorrow" line that will be launched in early 2017.
This will be the third "Tomorrow" collection launched by Lindex. The purpose of the initiative is to support new designers and to create unique collections together with them.
In the 19th century Edwin D. Babbitt gained fame with his colour healing theory that led him to publish his bestselling bok The Principles of Light and Colour in 1878.
Maybe this collection will not heal the actual physical pains of consumers, but it will definitely improve the mood of the wearers and of those ones interacting with them thanks to its energetic balance between different nuances, textures and surfaces.