The Haute Couture shows in Paris will start on Sunday and high fashion is usually the place to go if you want to see some extraordinary hats and headpieces.
Millinery fans should be happy about it, but they should even be happier to hear that the functional stationery brand Fashionary, founded by graphic designer Penter Yip in 2008, has just released its first notebook dedicated to this art. Fashionary's classic diaries and notebooks mainly feature Men and Womenswear templates, while Fashionary Headwear Edition A5 is divided in two sections - a slim mini headwear dictionary and over 700 universal headwear templates for sketching hats from different angles.
The former includes pretty useful information such as sections on Face Anatomy & Head Measurements, Face Styles, Men and Womens' Hairstyles, Head Direction and Hat Anatomy, a Hat and Glasses Library and a Headwear Glossary.
Though compact, the headwear dictionary also looks at eyebrow, eye, eye-line, nose, ears, lip, chin and face shapes, quick reference information that will be useful also to beauty and make-up artists.
The pre-printed headwear templates will instead offer to professionals and amateurs the chance to draw headgear from the front and back, the left and right side, quickly sketch all sorts of silhouettes and jot notes. This is therefore the sort of notebook that may turn handy to milliners developing a headwear collection, fashion designers brainstorming about accessories to go with their creations, journalists who may like to take visual references with a personal touch rather than just digital pictures, fashion illustrators and, well, millinery fans who may want to try and recreate on paper the latest designs seen on a fashion runway.
Fashionary Headwear A5 follows last year's Fashionpedia, a visual fashion dictionary with extensive information and easy-to-read layout in a compact size, and a recent volume about footwear design.
The brand new notebook is available from the Fashionary shop (US $24.90), but you can bet you will soon see it in a museum bookshop or specialised bookstore near you as well.
You can keep updated on the latest Fashionary releases by checking out the brand's blog, and its Facebook or Instagram pages that often feature illustrations and sketches by Fashionary collaborator Vikki Yau.
All images in this post courtesy of Penter Yip/Fashionary.
During the menswear runways in Paris Demna Gvasalia, ever the contrary, decided for a "no show" for Vêtements's S/S 2018 collection, a practice that will become the rule, as the designer stated he will opt for presentations and performances from now on.
For this collection he and his team went around Zurich (where Gvasalia now lives) and took pictures of people in garments from the new collection. The images were then printed at life size and shown in a parking lot in Paris near the Gare Saint-Lazare (the actual clothes will be at Vêtements' sales showroom until tomorrow).
The shoot (by Gvasalia himself) features all sorts of people, from teenagers to families, from an accountant and an insurer to pensioners and a group of cool cousins, posing in front of grocery stores, a bank, a random strip joint, in a park and in other assorted places.
Each of them chose what they wanted to wear, picking the pieces from a wide range of clothes; all of them reproduced a pose they had seen in a book about modelling that Gvasalia had showed them. Some of them did their own version of the "elbows out, hands into the waist" pose, others went as far as pretending they were practicing at the barre.
The idea behind the collection - taking revenge on the elitist fashion industry and its prejudices on age, weight and race, and using real people - was clever, but there was something that didn't quite work out and that could be summarised in two words, the clothes.
Gvasalia digged in the brand's "archive" (one of those words that makes you cringe in connection with a young brand...), so there were slight variations in some of the clothes from the previous seasons, and some improvements in the accessory department.
The thigh-high boots were there and the printed tea dresses made a return, but there were further items as well such as a wrap skirt with a print of a vintage calendar on one side and the brand's logo on the other (Gvasalia may not know but many of us did impromptu skirts with vintage tea towels when we were 14-16 years old...); a "Vêtements Zurich" sweatshirt (the companion of Vêtements' Antwerp shirts...) and nylon tracksuits of the kind juvenile delinquents in Glasgow may have favoured in 2002.
The infamous DHL T-shirt also made a come back, this time with a matching jacket and and hat, items that will make most of us ordinary and sensible people wonder why not getting a job at DHL and get the original clothes and a wage as well at the end of the month rather than investing in expensive DHL for Vêtements designs.
Other dilemmas were represented by the appopriation of the names of Swiss companies and of brands such as Tommy Hilfiger and Umbro. The Hilfiger appropriation is actually a collaboration with Vêtements: a series of unisex garments by the two brands (including among the others an oversized hoodie retailing for $1,119.60 and a long-sleeve T-shirt for $719.70) will indeed be available from February.
In a nutshell, the clothes did not have anything special and, rather than making some of the people picked for the shoot incredibly cool, they made them look at times ridiculous or part of a photographic project about depression and miserablism (it would have been refreshing for once to see ordinary people from the street looking fabulous in designer clothes and not looking like fashionable parodies in dubiously cut clothes). Yes, we know, avant-garde fashionistas and Gvasalia's fans will say we aren't getting the irony and the beauty - the real humanity - behind this project, but, frankly, it's hard to find it.
And yet there are ways to involve the public in a fashionable event and pay homage to the collectivity in a refreshing way: British artist Jeremy Deller will unveil tonight a special catwalk show entitled "What Is the City but the People?" for the Manchester International Festival.
Deller installed an 80-metre fashion runway above Manchester's Piccadilly Gardens, and invited 150 people from the city to walk up and down it (the project will be directed by Richard Gregory from the Quarantine theatre company).
Manchester bravely reacted to the terrorist attack at Ariana Grande's concert in May with a huge gig, and Deller's project is set to strengthen this sense of community and the will to celebrate people's lives.
Acity is not just an architectural space, but it is made of real people, on Manchester's runway there will therefore be a paediatrician, a preacher, a biker, a radio presenter, a bus station supervisor and the cab operator who gave free rides after the terror attack in May.
For Deller this is not a completely new project: in 2009 he was asked to make a public artwork for Manchester International Festival and he came up with a procession of the city's people and their activities, a celebration of public space and the people occupying it - buskers, smokers, car modifiers, The Big Issue sellers and so on.
Around the same time Deller also worked on another project entitled "What Is The City But The People?" that was aimed at providing Tube drivers and operational staff on the London Underground with a booklet of quotes to use in their daily communicatons with the public.
Well, the former employed ordinary people to sell expensive branded clothes; the latter combines art and architecture with real life and real people, reminding us that the power of diversity and inclusion can erode all sorts of boundaries.
Looks like Deller understood it a bit better; maybe Gvasalia should call him to direct the next season presentation/installation, after all the portraits published on The Guardian's site of some of the Manchester runway participants seem to be more uplifting and optimistic than the ones shot by Gvasalia.
In 1981, inspired by a Sardinian fairy tale about a girl saving her community from the collapse of a mountain following a blue ribbon, artist Maria Lai created an installation that involved all the inhabitants of her native village of Ulassai in Sardinia.
The project was also inspired by a request from the mayor of Ulassai who had asked her to create a war memorial to commemorate the fallen soldiers: Lai had refused explaining she would rather make a monument to the living.
Lai called the project "Legarsi alla montagna" (Tied to the Mountain): it consisted in a web of cloth strips that connected the houses leading up to the peak of the mountain overlooking the town.
In this way Lai and the community strengthened the physical bond between human beings and nature, while the knots and bows of the blue ribbons also symbolised the relationships between the families living in the town.
Lai's physical blue web is not too different from the global and invisible digital web that ties all of us nowadays, that's one of the many reasons why Maria Lai's works should be studied by a younger generation of people.
Many of us will get the chance to do so at the 57th Venice International Art Exhibition: several works by Maria Lai are indeed on display in the Arsenale and the section dedicated to her also includes a video of "Legarsi alla montagna", shot by Tonino Casula.
Born in 1919 in Ulassai, Sardinia, Maria Lai studied in Rome and then in Venice, before going back to Cagliari after the war.
Lai's early drawings revolved around portraits of relatives, friends and women at work; then she gradually moved onto landscapes populated with houses, shepherds and flocks.
In 1957 Lai exhibited at the Obelisk Gallery in Rome, she stopped exhibiting in 1961 and started again in 1971.
In the mid-to-late '60s Lai had indeed developed new pieces and created the "Telai" (Looms) - assemblages of wires, scraps of fabric, wood and everyday objects - artworks inspired by the primitive elements of Sardinian culture.
The artist kept on creating more pieces between the '80s and the '90s: by then fabrics and threads had become key elements of her practice and she employed them to build bridges between the past and the present, traditions and innovation, history and myth, artisanal and craft elements with conceptual art.
In more recent years Lai became a friend, muse and collaborator of Sardinian fashion designer Antonio Marras. In 1993 the artist moved back to Cardedu in Sardinia where she died twenty years later.
Most of her pieces show a strong link with childhood: for English poet William Wordsworth the child was the father of the man; for Lai all human beings are the heirs of the man who lost the earthly paradise because he had never been a child, and therefore we must spend our lives trying to play like children as much as we can to conquer back that blessed condition that we lost.
Bits and pieces of Maria Lai's songs "Il vento spegne le stelle" (The wind puts off the stars) and "Cammino sul fondo del mare" (I walk on the bottom of the sea), inspired by children's dreams, are printed on white sheets hanging from the ceiling of the Arsenale, reminding visitors of this strong link with childhood that Lai had.
Lai's works at the Arsenale are a sort of summary of thousands of years of traditions, poetry, culture, textile art and crafts. In this space visitors will find unfinished geographical maps and universal histories of the world rendered with abstract threads.
Threads in Lai's practice symbolise the possibility of exploring a space (a needle pierces a piece of fabric, it passes through it, travelling through it), but she also loved exploring materials as proved by her bread encyclopedia and by her notebooks and books made of fabric and integrating pieces of ceramic and paper.
Some of these books evoke in their textures the raw Sardinian landscape; others feature cryptic messages such as "The poets work in the dark".
Among the most powerful pieces there are the bed sheet and the altar cloth, as they contain a deep sense of mystery and magic, almost a sacred ritual. From a distance you may think that the thread decorating it forms proper words and intricate texts, but, when you get closer, you realise that Lai wrote on these pieces words that are unintelligible for all those people who can read and write.
They can instead be perfectly understood by those women who couldn't read nor write but who used the language of embroidery to express their thoughts, feelings and stories.
Once Lai stated indeed that when she saw her grandmother mending bedsheets, she imagined she was writing stories to tell to her grandchildren.
These threads symbolise therefore the solemn act of transferring a secret code of a lost language on fabric, creating in this way a visual symphony and a memory as well.
Maria Lai's works are displayed in the Pavilion of the Common section of the Arsenale, dedicated to artists who try to build active links and relations with their audiences.
Visitors passing through the Pavilion of the Common will be able to directly interact with other installations such as Lee Mingwei's and David Medalla's, while they will be able to ponder more about the final meaning of Lai's works: art should fill people's heart with joy and reactivate our minds.
One of the first things you noticed upon entering the Arsenale during the press days at the 57th International Art Exhibition in Venice, was a man dressed in an elegant suit sewing something at a long table while chatting with a woman sitting in front of him.
Behind them Taiwanese artist Lee Mingwei was cheerfully explaining to the press the aims of his installation - "The Mending Project" - while standing in front of a wall dotted with spools of colourful threads, some of them linked to a small pile of neatly folded garments on the table.
Mingwei's project is an installation-cum-performance that has been going on since 2009 and that has so far stopped in various countries, museums and exhibition spaces, before landing in Venice.
"The Mending Project" is very aptly part of the Pavilion of the Common section of the Arsenale, that includes artists who attempt to explore the notion of the common world and try to build a community eliciting the participation of the public in their works to counter individualism and self-interests, two (of the many) threats in today's selfish society.
For this installation - that originated after 9/11 when the artist (who works between Paris and New York) used mending to react to a negative experience and transform it into something positive - Mingwei or one of his collaborators or volunteers (as it happened during the Venice Biennale press days to give Mingwei more time to welcome the members of the press) invites visitors to bring in a damaged item of clothing or textile item. While the artist repairs the item with random colourful threads or decorates them with embroideries, the visitor sits and talks.
The sewing action triggers indeed a dialogue with the person getting the garment mended and, quite often, the visitor recounts a story about their lives linked with that particular garment.
Once the work is finished the article is placed on the table with the thread end still attached and reconnected to one of the spools hanging on the wall.
In this way a new link is created between the artist and that specific visitor, but also with the latter and all the other visitors who pass through the installation.
Visitors usually get back their items at the very end of the installation, when the threads are finally cut, but, in the meantime, something cathartic happens as the mending interaction allows to forge and share new links between human beings.
In a self-referential art world revolving around money, huge exhibitions by celebrity artists and rather vapid yet glorified artworks, performances and installations, hearing an artist talking about sharing as the mission of his art is refreshing.
"I think it is important that, at least with the art form, there is some kind of communication and that this communication is not only one way, but it takes place in multiple ways," Mingwei explains me.
As we talk, I hand Mingwei one of my fingerless gloves: there's a hole between the thumb and the index finger and Mingwei takes it with glee. He or his assistant will mend it as soon as possible as there's a queue at the table while we are chatting, in the meantime, I recount him a fragment of my family's story and in turn he goes deeper into the meaning of his performance.
"With 'The Mending Project', a mender is sitting there repairing someone's clothes and it looks like the mender is giving the gift to the person who brought the item, but it's actually both ways, because I, as the mender, feel so trusted and loved when I receive this very intimate object for me to do a very intimate gesture upon it, I feel honoured and happy since a stranger does that for me."
The participatory approach is a recurrent modus operandi in Mingwei's practice: in previous projects he invited people to enjoy a meal prepared by him, spend one night with him in a museum or write a letter to people they wish they had written to but never did so.
"My art revolves around intimacy between strangers," he highlights, reminding me that, while this project may be linked with fashion, it is not about it or about crafts as the mending is not going to be perfect or impeccable.
Mingwei usually employs a thread in bright colours that immediately reveals the mending or adds embroideries around it almost to point at it (in the same way as the cracks are highlighted in gold in the Japanese art of kintsugi) and at times he builds on other mendings.
"The other day a gentleman who was 85 gave me a tiny sweater to mend," Mingwei recounts me, "I asked him 'Whose sweater is this?' and he said 'It was made by my mother when I was two'. It was so small and while looking at it I saw some mendings on it and I asked him who had worked on them. He said: "My mother", and then started crying. I just thought that was the most beautiful thing that had happened to me, this man entrusting me with such a precious and moving memory."
There are quite a few examples of participatory and relational art in the Pavilion of Common section of the Biennale, but Mingwei's installation has a cathartic effect on most visitors since, while retaining their personalities via the items they give to him, it turns them into one entity, transforming them from isolated individuals into parts of a whole.
When I come back in the late afternoon there are more people surrounding Mingwei's installation. My glove has been neatly arranged on a pile of garments and it has been cutely adorned with two tassel-like decorations - one pink, one yellow - that emphasise the damage, but also make the glove look more funny and original. The glove is also linked to the wall with a thin thread and seeing it makes me feel happy: somehow part of me, part of my story has turned into a line in Lee Mingwei's Venetian chapter of "The Mending Project".
Some of the pieces in Sandra Burton's menswear S/S 18 collection for Alexander McQueen, showcased yesterday evening in the orangery at the Luxembourg gardens in Paris, seemed to move from the same principle behind De Falco's notebooks.
Apart from the trench and top coats, leather suits, broderie anglaise shirts and jumpers based on a Fair Isle sock pattern, the collection featured indeed a series of garments inspired by explorers and pioneers - such as a dramatic white leather cape and a few denim separates - with prints of leaves, orienteering maps and lines of poetry from Rudyard Kipling's The Explorer.
Long strands of red yarn seemed to sprout from the surface of these garments and they were left hanging, maybe symbolising blood rivulets, maybe hinting at the fil rouge that unites some of these designs to the womenswear S/S 17 and A/W 17 collections. While the former was indeed inspired by a trip to the Shetland Islands (an inspiration that was intergrated in this menswear collection as well), the latter featured quite a few pieces in which red thread was used as the main decorative element.
There was also another connection with the womenswear S/S 17 collection: a section of a Shetland carpet from that runway show was reversed (reversing things, Kawakubo docet, may be a trend for the S/S 18 season...) and tufted to decorate a jacket and a trench coat. Threads also returned in a multi-coloured coat and a black one, and in an ivory jacket: these pieces were indeed covered in a delicate silken fringe.
Nature reappeared in the two final pieces, with a crystal tree of life embroidered onto a jacket and topcoat, black threads hanging from the garments to symbolise the tree roots and create movement. These threads hanging loose from quite a few of these designs remain the most interesting inspiration for Burton's latest men and women's wear collections for McQueen, they indeed point at a make-do-and-mend ethos and call to mind the beauty of the non-finito – the unfinished look.
De Falco mainly works with the wrapping technique that originates in the ancient art of weaving tapestries on a vertical loom.
In his installations strips of textiles are tightly wrapped up one after another to create root-like formations. De Falco has actually got a strong link with nature since, as inspiration, he often stitches real leaves on fabric notebooks and then starts creating textile sculptures on or around them.
"Silenti", the installation in Città di Castello consisted in a man and a woman that stood between the two main octagonal pillars supporting the vaulted roof of the entrance.
Their bodies were wrapped in shrouds that called to mind mummies, but the woman had tentacular wrappings attached to her hair that extended up towards the ceiling; the man instead seemed to sprout textile roots from his hands and arms that spread all over the floor.
Though the main theme behind "Silenti" is the lack of communication between human beings as the two subjects involved in the performance never meet, the installation has also got a strong link with architecture. The two bodies seem indeed to extend towards the ceiling or the floor, anchoring themselves to the architectural features surrounding them, almost creating a link with the architect who designed the solemn Mediaeval Palazzo dei Priori, Angelo da Orvieto (1322-38).
The most fascinating thing about the wrapping technique is that, quite often, the people taking part in De Falco's installations seem to turn into scary and disturbing yet powerful gods and goddesses with the textiles wrapped around their bodies elongating and extending them in a near-superhuman way. You can bet we will soon see De Falco's textile performances and installations on some fashion runway.
Image credits for this post
All images by Hisayuki Amae
Image 1: Thomas De Falco, Artist's Book, showcased during the performance at the Palazzo dei Priori, Città di Castello, Italy.
Images 2 to: Thomas De Falco, "Silenti", performance and installation, Palazzo dei Priori, Città di Castello, Italy, 22nd June 2017.
Garments we wear on an everyday basis can at times become more controversial and unpredictable than what's on the runway. Want some recent examples?
Temperatures soared past 30C this week in many countries all over Europe and, while the menswear shows were taking place in Paris this week, in Nantes six French male bus drivers working in the heatwave responded to their company's ban on shorts by turning up in skirts in protest. After all, as a union representative stated, it is a form of discrimination if women can wear skirts and men can't do the same.
In more or less the same fashion (pun totally intended), at a school in Exeter, England, young boys who had been told by their headmaster that, despite the high temperatures, they had to wear long trousers rather than shorts but, if they wanted, they could have worn skirts (the headmaster was being sarcastic here...), turned up on Thursday in nice and short tartan skirts.
Comme des Garçons' Rei Kawakubo must have enjoyed hearing these stories, after all she always loved men in skirts, but for her S/S 18 menswear collection she turned her back on skirts while retaining the fun moods.
The menswear show took place at the Salle Wagram, but, rather than opting for a conventional runway, Kawakubo went for a raised stage bathed in multi-coloured disco lights. Loud music did the rest, setting the tone for Kawakubo's terrifically optimistic uniform.
Rather than skirts, her models donned glittery basketball shorts that had in some cases clownish silhouettes. The shorts were matched with ample or elongated jackets in a collage of fabrics: floral textiles were combined with leopard spotted and ladybug dotted fake fur bits and pieces; brocade seemed to be glued to velvet.
Kawakubo dubbed the collection "What's on the Inside Matters" and, if you looked more closely you understood what she meant. Most jackets displayed indeed the inner labels on the outside and, when some models opened them, you realised that the designs were worn inside out. Or maybe that was just a clever optical illusion and the pieces were constructed to be worn like that.
A couple of jackets that seemed to be covered with a crocheted tablecloth reinforced this suspicion, and that was when you realised that innovation is clearly still possible through such tailoring tricks and not through some copying exercises.
Towards the end of the show there were also jackets covered in bits and pieces of dolls of the kind you may see in the windows of a historical doll hospital in Italy. Prints representing assemblages of dolls and textile elements were also replicated on shirts. These pieces were actually collaborations with sculptor, textile artist and jewellery designer Mona Luison.
Initially working as a jeweller (under the name Tetsko), a while back Luison started developing wearable sculptures that she makes by upcycling all sorts of materials such as old clothes, coffee cups, tiny toys, ephemera and assorted found objects. The results are surprising hybrid items suspended between art pieces, crafts and fashion accessories, always inspired by a sense of joy and playfulness and often evoking childhood.
More recently Luison became known for her enigmatic and at times disquieting fabric creatures with their heads locked in plastic domes.
Kawakubo must have liked Luison's freedom of creation and her use of a broad variety and type of materials. Choosing Luison, Kawakubo joined the list of fashion designers, including Fendi and Yohji Yamamoto, who teamed up with a female artist for a menswear collection. In a way it made sense also because Comme des Garçons' Homme collections often feature pieces that young men and women alike can relate to.
There was another (more comercial) collaboration on the CdG runway, pardon, CdG dancefloor, that materialised as colourful Nike Air Max 180 sneakers.
Slightly disoriented by the lack of incredibly conceptual messages, nobody in the audience stood up to dance, but maybe that's what Kawakubo would have wanted. The doubt remains, but the final message here was definitely clear: rather than stealing and recreating the fashion of the raves, we should recover their spirit and the exuberance and freedom of those times.
On one of the long coats on Yohji Yamamoto's menswear S/S 18 runway there was a print of a drawing portraying a woman ready to chew on something, her lips slightly curled in a scary expression, the sort of smile a cannibal may give you.
The illustration is by Japanese artist Suzume Uchida and, if you check her site, you will discover the full portrait, and understand its meaning a bit better: the woman is actually eating her own entrails that are spilling out of her body.
The work is not inspired by a horror story, but could be used as the perfect definition for fashion: it is indeed entitled "Anorexia and Destruction" and somehow this title perfectly defines what we have seen so far on the latest menswear runways.
Ripping ideas off each others and revomiting the past without even updating it has indeed become the favourite sport of the fashion industry, as if the latter was eating itself in a sad continuous vicious circle.
The final message at the end of most catwalk shows seems indeed to be "increase the sales" rather than "offer something desirable to the consumers".
On Yohji Yamamoto's runway things were a bit different, though, as the designer let his clothes speak. He did so in three different ways: through details he scattered in his tailored pieces; via prints and illustrations, and through strips of fabrics attached to a garment and printed with slogans in English and Japanese.
In the first case he tweaked the lapels of jackets and coats, reshaping them with a botanical theme: leaves unbalanced with their forms the perfect geometry of the designs in a casual way and in some garments they even fell in the exact place where a pocket should have been.
Zips were also employed as decorative and functional elements on black jackets and one jacket seemed to integrate a large backpack.
For what regards the prints, Yamamoto turned to a painter's studio, adding splashes of paint, casual patterns and graffiti scribbles to his suits.
The designer then added portraits of actress Eiko Koike on the back of biker jackets and enlisted the help of Japanese artist Suzume Uchida for the portraits of ghost-like women replicated on the long shirts and coats that closed the show.
A graduate from the Department of Art and Design at the University of Tsukuba, Uchida favours drawings in ink, watercolours and oilcolours in which she plays with lights and shadows creating spooky chiaroscuoro effects such as in her works "Pinky Swear" or "Red Fruit".
There was an undeniable sense of doom in some of the garments decorated with such prints, but the designer pointed at vitality and enregy via the suits that "spoke", thanks to messages, slogans and titles of Toshiyuki Horie's books carved out of the velvet devoré fabrics or printed on the bands of fabrics appliqued on shirts and jackets that read "Too old to die", "I'm gifted" and "No clothes to wear".
Maybe Yamamoto had gone all serious, or maybe he was being ironic, after all some of the slogans featured occasional spelling/grammar mistakes. What's for sure is that he built a credible wardrobe: the collection still revolved around the basic pieces of the male wardrobe, but shirts, jackets and pants were reinvented thanks to Yamamoto's will to play with volumes.
Conceptually speaking, the final fluid robes that liquidly fell on the models' bodies could be interpreted as shrouds and therefore they maybe hinted at the possibility of rebirth; it is actually worth remembering that two of the themes of the collection were Buddhism and reincarnation.
From a commercial point of view, you can expect quite a few women will maybe buy or borrow these pieces and wear them as dresses: in a way the garments remind us that, while nowdays the adjective "genderless" is on everybody's lips, Yamamoto had gone down this path a long time ago. Inviting a female artist to contribute to a menswear collection (like Fendi has done for the next season) with her portraits of rather scary women strengthened Yamamoto's passion for walking the thin line between feminine and masculine styles.
It is maybe easy to suspect they spray something funny in the air or they spike the drinks at Demna Gvasalia's shows. That would be the only explanation to the dichotomic reactions his runways get.
Indeed, people sitting in the audience see the clothes on the runway as the expression of a radical genius, while ordinary consumers who do not identify with vapid fashionistas see second-hand clothes being interpreted as conceptual attire. Obviously, when the latter do so via comments underneath reviews and features, the fashion elite tells them they can't get the irony, the spirit, the satire and, yes, the revolutionary moods behind the designs. Frankly, quite often, it is better not to get them, but see the clothes for what they are.
Take Balenciaga's S/S 18 menswear show: Gvasalia opened it with roomy and oversized light linen jackets and coats, matched with washed out denim pants of the kind you wore between 1989 and 1993 (and that simply looked cringing).
At times the trousers were reinterpreted in different versions with three tiered zippered sections (hands up who had a pair of two tiered zippered denim trousers in 1983/84; I did, but I was also a child at the time...) in mismatched fabrics or in different materials such as denim, velvet and leather. Other designs included Hawaiian-print shirts, ample anoraks and a random black leather fringed coat.
Tracksuit tops also made a re-appearance, together with hoodies for all those Gvasalia fans who love wearing them tucked inside their trousers like juvenile delinquents.
Two models walked down the runway with bicycles, reminding us of the practicality of the accessories like the large new woven totes, or maybe hinting at the fact that the Balenciaga logo bike (retailing for 3,500 euros) is exclusively available at Colette.
The more conceptual items arrived towards the end of the show with shirts or sweats printed with optimistic slogans such as "The Power of Dreams" (printed on a piece of yellow fabric randomly applied on an orange hoodie), "Think Big", and "Europa!", the latter maybe a hymn at joining our collective forces in the face of divisions and hate.
Some of these garments were covered by a layer of clear plastic as if they had been vacuum-packed or had just returned from the dry cleaner. This is a trick we saw at the end of the '90s at Margiela and that was reused often by Raf Simons for example on Calvin Klein's A/W 2017 runway.
The rain ponchos with "Europa!" printed on the front also seemed suspiciously similar to the see-through poncho by Maison Martin Margiela that was actually the fashion label's A/W 2013 runway invitation.
There were other ideas borrowed or more simply copied: the large leather shopping bags looked indeed like the identical bags Margiela did for the S/S 2011 season or like Jil Sander S/S 2011 market plastic bags.
Now, if you go to a critic from a prominent and mainstream fashion magazine, they will tell you this is radical like the time Gvasalia turned the Ikea "Frakta" bag into a luxury item (yes, ah-ah, so postmodernist, they will emphasise, spotting in whatever Gvasalia does David Lynch's transcendental irony; just to confirm the feeling, win Peaks' Kyle MacLachlan was sitting in the front row at this show...).
Go and explain such critics that clothes should make you look better rather than making you look fresh out of a time machine from 1991, and they will tell you that the garment are deliberately studied to make you look uncool, they feature indeed weights in the pockets and linings to reproduce this sort of crinkled, loose and unfitting look (those teenagers who were after the same effect in 1991 would wear their father's own coat; I did it with serious consequences as I picked my father's best coat).
The uniform on the runway was actually supposed to be interpreted as the off-duty attire of the corporate workers seen on Balenciaga's A/W 17 runway. The final proof were the kids (some of them the models' own kids) on the runway in trademark Gvasalia designs.
The designer apparently was hinting at strolls with your (cool) dad in the park (the show was held in the Bois de Boulogne, a public park on the outskirts of Paris) or maybe he was just hinting at the possibility of starting a children's line like many other desperate designer label out there and hopefully getting invited at Pitti Bimbo to be hailed as a saviour of children's wear (obviously, this Balenciaga show will probably turn some selfish egomaniacal fashionista bloggers into children's wear experts...).
Mind you, I'm not sure how many dads will be adopting the triple layered pants in denim, velvet and leather, but, if someone does so, please remember to keep away glitter, non-washable paints, glue, slime, mud, sticky drinks, vomit and other interesting substances you deal with when children are around.
The problem with this collection was the fact that, while the idea behind it was a positive and optimistic one (children playing with their dads), the execution was dubious.
First and foremost most of these designs seemed stuck between 1989 and 1992 and, if you lived through these years, I doubt you would want to go around like a raver in baggy clothes from the pages of a random issue of The Face (as cool as the magazine was, there is a limit to what you can reborrow from the past without reinventing it in a credible way).
Second (but maybe it should be first and foremost...) the levels of appropriation in Gvasalia's runways are becoming utterly ridiculous with hints at Margiela turning into total rip offs.
Last but not least, the children: most designers employ children in catwalk shows for collections directed at grown-ups to distract the attention from messed up clothes. Children on D&G's runways are usually supposed to show how much the Italian design duo love the concept of "family", even though their real intent is usually selling matching mother-daughter looks.
In this case it felt more or less the same, as if Gvasalia was thinking at lovely images of fathers and children, reminding us that they can also have a matching cool look if they have the money to do so.
The final verdict? Ah, well, if the fashion avant-garde wants to look as the world looked between 1990 and 1992, it is definitely fine.
But don't come and tell us that this is the most radical revolution in fashion or you would be offending young fashion students who have invested money and time in a career in design and who may be spending sleepless nights on how to make their graduate collection look incredibly unique, before actually entering the fashion industry and discovering they were sold a lie since you can tweak the past, borrow from the present and put the results on the market at immoral prices.
More embarrassment arrived indeed today when hip hop artist and producer Swizz Beatz bravely (yes, bravely 'cos most fashion critics are shutting up about Gvasalia's exercise in borrowing and copying) accused the fashion house in two Instagram posts of stealing a Ruff Ryders shirt design from 2000.
In a first post he commented "@balenciaga we must have a talk about this Ruff Ryder shirt ASAP Dapper Dan with Gucci now this (…) ". In a second post the artist added "This is the Ruff Ryders original version from 2000 @balenciaga @vetements_official what are we doing? Call me back blessings. I Might just want you to open up a fashion school in the Bronx or Harlem just so you can give back to the culture!" Who knows, maybe Gvasalia in this case was trying to capitalise on the Ruff Ryders Reunion Tour, but with all the "collabs" he has done so far, he should have been aware that collaborating costs less than being ashamed by a lawsuit.
Gvasalia actually missed in this Balenciaga collection the chance to do another collaboration - shoes with Kickers. That would have offered the ultimate step into the past (pun intended) for the nostalgic raver (ah, so many memories, my Kickers were the classic red and white combination) and they would have worked for grown-ups and children as well. Guess we can expect it in the future, who knows, maybe together with anoraks by Gio-Goi and Bez on the maracas.
It is not rare for some companies and fashion brands to organise a small exhibition during a trade show about their story. Yet, while that can be exciting, it also means that, unfortunately, you only get the chance to see its contents for a very limited amount of time.
Yarn manufacturer Lanerossi offered the chance to Pitti Uomo visitors, for example, to look at its history with a compact event entitled "Lanerossi - Threading Ideas for 200 Years". But those ones who missed it and are heading to Florence at the end of the month for Pitti Filati, will get a new chance to see it. The event is indeed on again (in the Teatrino Lorenese area inside the Fortezza da Basso) from 28th to 30th June.
The event - curated by Alessandra Bosco and Fiorella Bulegato - was organised by the Gruppo Marzotto and Filivivi (owned by the Marzotto Group) to celebrate the bicentennial of Lanerossi, the company founded by Francesco Rossi in Schio.
Marzotto (some of us who are interested in reading behind the mere catwalk show and are not afraid of analysing the financial news as well may remember it in connection with a tax evasion story in 2012) bought Lanerossi in 1987 and currently designs, manufactures and sells blankets and textiles under the Lanerossi brand.
Filivivi, the licensee of the Lanerossi Filati brand, manufactures and distributes rights for woollen yarns bearing the brand name. In addition to that, Filivivi also manufactures and distributes yarn under the Folco and Filivivi labels (their new collections together with Lanerossi's will be presented at the next Pitti Filati fair).
Apart from celebrating the company, "Threading Ideas for 200 Years" could actually be read as a celebration of early Italian graphic art and advertising design.
Adverts help a company shape its identity, they create a message that can reach out to people and Lanerossi was a pioneer in these fields since it often opted to employ styles and materials virtually unknown to the general public.
Besides, historians will easily be able to read behind the adverts from the Schio-based Lanerossi historical archive and discover the financial, manufacturing, social and cultural contexts that marked the history of Italy's textile industries.
Some examples? The conditions of the workers are highlighted by a poster for a "Workers' Day", a sort of fête with food, dancing sessions and fireworks to be held at the (very aptly named) Jacquard Garden in Schio on 20th February 1865.
A 1873 poster features instead the "Special regulations for spinners", showing the high standards for accident prevention measures in the Lanificio Rossi factory.
As the decades passed the company kept on focusing on the actual work of its artisans when advertising its products: while 1949 coloured photographs (by Pietrobelli, Ernst Mariner and Maria Freiberger) for window dressing for Lanerossi yarns, fabrics and rugs show the first trade fairs, ads from the '60s showed a factory worker checking the quality of the Lanerossi yarns and Rossifloor carpets.
Yet there is also an arty connection behind the images included in the event: the strongest part of the exhibition focuses indeed on the collaboration between Lanerossi and a group of artists and designers - including Adolfo Busi, Mario Dalle Nogare, Mario Panciroli (better known as "Marius"), Studio Stile, Armando Testa, Pino Tovaglia, Riccardo Manzi (who also collaborated with Pirelli), A. Maurizi, Severo Pozzati and Claudia Morgagni - or photographers such as Mauro Masera and Ugo Mulas and Italian animator Pier Luigi De Mas, who created some of the first TV adverts for Lanerossi blankets at the end of the '60s.
Colour and graphic-wise, the labels for yarns and blankets from the '20s and the '30s are particularly intriguing, while the sketches and executive drawings perfectly illustrate the development of the Lanerossi brand and logo from the early 1950s to the late 1960s.
The most interesting technique that emerges from the archives remains the collage: quite often the artists called to collaborate with Lanerossi combined their own sketches with samples of fabrics, labels and photographs to create eye-catching contrasts between different textures and layers.
Sketches from the '60s for Lanerossi advertising on a Fiat 1100 perfectly introduce the economic boom years and the pervasive influence of the mass media in the life of Italians.
Shame that Lanerossi seems currently focused on selling without promoting its product in a strong and innovative way as it did between the '50s and the '60s. "Threading Ideas for 200 Years" seems indeed to be lacking references to social media and ways to reach out to a new and younger consumers.
Still, if you're visiting Pitti Filati and you're into graphic design, take your time to look at some of the images and even textile samples from 1887, they will undoubtedly prove inspiring and even prompt some of the visitors to rediscover a few of the artists and illustrators who worked for the company.
Image credits for this post
Mario Panciroli (Marius), sketch with tempera illustration on paper for an advertisement for Lanerossi yarns, 1950s.
Collage sketches for the cover of the sample book for Lanerossi's Rossella fabrics, 1965.
Collage sketch for a Thermocoperte Lanerossi advertisement, late 1960s.
Studio Stile, publicity stand for Lanerossi's Rossella fabric, 1952.
Tempera sketch on paper with collage for a Lanerossi fabric postcard, 1960s.
Advertising postcard from the '40s.
Armando Testa, advertisement for Lanerossi fabrics, 1953.
Pino Tovaglia and Propaganda Lanerossi, advertisement for Lanerossi yarns, 1958.
Pino Tovaglia and Riccardo Manzi, collage sketches with tempera on card for advertisements for Lanerossi's Sandrina overcoat, late 1950s.
Collage sketches, advertisements and publicity stand for Lanerossi's Thermoplaid blanket, 1960s.
Cover of advertising brochure for lanificio Rossi thermotextiles designed by Adolfo Busi at the end of the '40s.
Detail of label for Sport Lane Rossi yarns from the '60s.
Advert for Superthermoplaid Lanerossi by Pino Tovaglia, 1958.
Photographs and sketches for advertising on a Fiat 1100 for Lanerossi, 1960s.
Pino Tovaglia and Propaganda Lanerossi, advertisement for Lanerossi yarns, 1958.
G&R Associati, sketches for Lanerossi advertisements, mid-1970s.