There's always a lot to do on New Year's Eve, but, if you can find two hours to stop, sit and relax, try and watch (or rewatch) George Stevens' Penny Serenade.
This romantic and melancholic drama tells the story of young couple, Julie (Irene Dunne) and Roger (Cary Grant), on the brink of separation. When the film opens Julie is getting ready to leave and Applejack (Edgar Buchanan), a good friend of the couple, advises her to ponder about her decision to break up her marriage.
Applejack leaves her with a scrapbook of records entitled "The Story of a Happy Marriage" and Julie starts playing various tracks.
Through the songs - from Nacio Herb Brown and Arthur Freed's "You Were Meant for Me" to "Just a Memory", "The Missouri Waltz", "I'm Tickled Pink with a Blue-Eyed Baby", and "The Moon Was Yellow" among the others - the audience is transported back to Julie and Roger's love story.
Roger had first spotted Julie working in a record shop and, after a brief romance, they quickly got married on New Year's Eve, a few hours before Roger is sent to Japan on assignment for the newspaper he has been working for as a journalist.
They have a romantic night on the train and, in the next flashback taking place three months later, they are reunited in Japan where Julie announces she is pregnant.
Julie learns that Roger has been lavishly spending advances on his salary in Japan and is worried about her husband's financial irresponsibility.
Soon after they have a quarrel, an earthquake strikes and she loses their baby when the house collapses on her.
Rushed back to the States for treatment, Julie is devastated by the news she will not be able to have children.
The couple move to the countryside to start a new life: Roger launches a small newspaper, but Julie feels often sad.
Applejack encourages them to adopt a child and eventually they do so. Little Trina brings a lot of love to their lives, but things don't got as planned and tragedy strikes again. A twist at the very end of the story will allow the couple to find new strength to get on with their lives.
Fans of dramas will discover in the film a lot of moving moments, the best one being the section when Roger begs the judge not to take Trina away from them because they are having financial difficulties.
Fashionistas will instead rejoice at seeing Julie's elegant New Year's Eve gown, her impeccable suits matched with lovely sculptural hats, her lavish Japanese kimono and Roger's coats characterised by ample sleeves.
Why is this the perfect story for the end of the year, you ask? Well, there's a New Year's Eve party and a children's Christmas play, but the final message of the film is about facing life's ups and downs, overcoming adversity and never losing hope. Not bad as a lesson to end a year and start a new one. Enjoy the film!
A few weeks ago it was announced that Italian architect, designer and member of the Memphis Milano group Michele De Lucchi will be the new editor at Domus magazine.
De Lucchi will direct it for one year only: after him the publication will see a new editor a year for the next decade until 2028.
In this way the magazine that started in 1928 will celebrate its 90th anniversary in a remarkable style. This sounds like a rather complex project, after all we live in a digital world, so who knows if the publication will still come out on paper in a few years' time. Besides, changing an editor a year may prove annoying with readers, though it will surely be successful with the fans of that particular architect directing the magazine. Hopefully Domus will reach this ambitious goal, yet this post is not about the magazine, but about something De Lucchi recently said.
The first issue edited by the architect and designer will be out on 8th January 2018, but De Lucchi recently wrote a manifesto for his editorial vision that came out with the December issue of Domus. Printed on a poster, the piece is entitled "Objects and Enigmas" and De Lucchi opens it with the statement "My Version of Domus magazine will be dedicated to objects and their meanings." De Lucchi gives objects special powers: "Objects activate relations. They have an interior. They can be seen from up close or from far away. They can be silent or noisy, bare or dressed, conservative or rebellious. They can console or offend, seduce or abandon, remind us or make us forget. They can create logics of chaos, be unique or all the same (...) Objects are enigmas that life places before our eyes. Thinking about objects and their meanings is a challenge by which we can see the world in a new perspective."
What De Lucchi says about objects is definitely inspiring and we could transfer such ideas and meanings also onto other disciplines such as fashion and wonder in which ways garments activate relations, create chaos or logic or represent enigmas for us.
Throughout his career De Lucchi has designed and created objects that conformed to what Gio Ponti stated: "I believe that every piece of furniture, although it must always be functional, it must engage the imagination of the person designing it and the person seeing it."
If we apply this statement to De Lucchi's work, we easily see that the objects and prototypes he designed were created to stimulate our imagination, that's why they often inspired fashion accessories or were behind the palette of entire collections.
Yet De Lucchi will not just focus on objects: each issue of Domus under his direction will have a specific theme or keyword - such as rebellion, silence, emotion and chaos. Besides, the architect and designer will try and spark dialogues between different disciplines including anthropology, philosophy and economy.
Who knows, maybe there will be some space also for fashion in De Lucchi's Domus, while hopefully his design process and curiosity for the enigmas posed to us by objects may turn into a wider inspiration in art, architecture, interior design and, obviously, fashion.
2017 was the year of grassy and revitalising green, but, according to the Pantone Color Institute®, a consulting service within Pantone that forecasts global color trends, the shade of the year in 2018 will be a super vibrant nuance - Pantone 18-3838 Ultra Violet - as announced at the beginning of December.
According to the official press release, this unique purple shade was chosen since it "communicates originality, ingenuity, and visionary thinking that points us toward the future".
The color is therefore linked to one of the trends we have analysed in the last two posts - Space Age Fashion. There are indeed multiple images all over the Internet linked with space discoveries, the mysteries of the cosmos and the possibilities of exploring other worlds and planets, tinged in an alluring shade of violet.
For example, the color is evoked in the images taken from the Ultraviolet/Optical Telescope aboard NASA's Swift spacecraft showing the galaxy known as M31 in the constellation Andromeda (located more than 220,000 light-years across and lying 2.5 million light-years away), bathed in a mesmerising violet light.
Though projected towards the future this shade that combines red and blue (but it is more blue-based) also looks back at the past: in the UK, purple was (with green and white) one of the colours of the Women's Social and Political Union.
Art-wise it was the favourite shade of many artists and was often employed by (among the others) Pre-Raphaelite painter Arthur Hughes, Gustav Klimt, Wassily Kandinsky, Keith Haring and Andy Warhol.
The shade has also got an architectural twist since Guggenheim architect Frank Lloyd Wright's favorite color was purple, and it is linked to highly creaive minds such as late icons Prince, David Bowie, and Jimi Hendrix who represent counterculture, unconventionality, and artistic brilliance.
Pantone actually anticipated this connection with Prince in August 2017 when the institute dedicated him a custom shade of purple called "Love Symbol #2", inspired by Prince's custom-made purple Yamaha piano.
The nuance is also supposed to evoke modern dichotomies such as the highly chaotic and technological times we are living in Vs slower rhythms and mindfulness practices (think about amethyst crystals...), something evoked by the spiritual quality of this shade.
In September 2017 Ultra Violet was already among the a group of "genderless" (designed to appear in men and women's wear designs) shades (together with Little Boy Blue 16-4132, Chili Oil 18-1440, Blooming Dahlia 15-1520, Pink Lavender 14-3207, Arcadia 16-5533, Emperador 18-1028, Almost Mauve 12- 2103, Spring Crocus 17-3020, Lime Punch 13-0550, Sailor Blue 19-4034, Harbor Mist 14-4202, Warm Sand 15-1214 and Coconut Milk 11-0608) that the Pantone Institute decreed among the 12 colors that were going to rule the S/S 18 collections.
In a way the Pantone Institute was right: Ultra Violet actually appeared on quite a few runways such as Kenzo's and abounded in Alessandro Michele's vision for Gucci's S/S 18 collection.
Before that, though, it was anticipated (maybe to symbolise a union of opposed colours - blue and red - and identities as well - Republicans and Democrats) by Hillary Clinton who wore a dark pantsuit with purple lapels and a purple blouse when she admitted defeat to Donald Trump last November (husband Bill was wearing for the occasion a tie in the same shade).
Pantone hopes the shade will not reflect what is going on in our world at the moment, but will provide us with an optimistic message and an uplifting vision of the future. Sounds like we should definitely wish each other a very Ultra Violet year.
In yesterday's post we looked at the allure of the space travel trend, so let's continue the thread through some of the designs included in the exhibition "Expedition: Fashion From the Extreme", currently on at the Museum at FIT in New York (through January 6, 2018).
The event mainly focuses on different kinds of expeditions - to the North and South poles, to the highest mountain peaks and the depths of the ocean, and to "infinity and beyond" - and on the inspirations such events gave to fashion designers.
Did you know for example that Madame Grès began creating après ski wear that resembled garments designed for Western explorers and appropriated from clothing invented by the Inuit? Or do you remember iconic shoots on Vogue and Harper's Bazaar with models among Arctic icebergs?
The event nicely links history, technological discoveries and fashion: outerwear made with goose and duck down feathers was created for example around the 1930s, but the first patented, down-filled jacket was designed by Eddie Bauer in 1935. Two years later the garment was reinterpreted in its Haute Couture version in eider down and white silk satin by Charles James (the jacket was pilfered - pardon - reinvented by Rick Owens in his A/W 2011-12 collection) and the popularity of down-filled garments rose dramatically when, in 1953, mountaineers Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay became the first humans on record to successfully reach the summit of Mount Everest (the trend continues today with puffer jackets and hip versions of the down-filled coat by designers such as Junya Watanabe and Demna Gvasalia at Balenciaga...).
Space fashion occupies one section of the event that includes pieces that go from a silvery dress and coat ensemble from the Waste Basket Boutique by Mars of Asheville (circa 1966) to a jumpsuit from Helmut Lang's A/W 1999 collection inspired by water-cooled insulation garments and spacesuits.
One of the most colourful space-inspired pieces remains a bright pink dress featuring the scene of a rocket launch: it was designed in 1968 by Harry Gordon at the height of the international space race and, though it is characterised by a very basic A-line silhouette, it uses the imagery of technological advancement in a very convincing and still mesmerising way.
During the men's shows in New York, astronaut Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin, 87, was invited to take not a giant leap for humankind, but a small step for fashion on Nick Graham's space-themed runway.
Graham's collection was inspired by life on Mars and Aldrin, the second man to walk on the moon in 1969 during the Apollo 11 space mission with Neil Armstrong, modelled a metallic silver bomber jacket, a black T-shirt bearing the phrase "Get Your Ass to Mars", a slogan from the eponymous campaign launched by Aldrin as part of his ShareSpace Foundation, and black trousers accessorised with silver sneaker.
In February NASA also revealed that scientists identified via the infrared Spitzer Space Telescope seven Earth-size, habitable-zone planets around a ultra-cool dwarf star, an exoplanet system called TRAPPIST-1 located at about 40 light-years from the Earth.
The news, as you may remember from a previous post, coincided with other space fashion-related events, including the launch of Christopher Kane's Space Collection and the landing of UFOs on Alessandro Michele's A/W 17 collection for Gucci. The theme was expanded in the collection campaign that paid homage to science fiction and films from the '50s and '60s.
The Space Age shenanigans continued in Paris on Chanel's A/W 2017 runway: here Karl Lagerfeld launched space-themed clothes and accessories that included silvery capes, glittery boots, luxury hoods with prints of X-rayed spacesuits and eveningwear embroidered with constellations and matched with planet-shaped round bags.
At the end of the runway the life-size rocket in the background also lifted into the venue reaching its ceiling while Elton John's "Rocket Man" played in the background.
This Fall Buzz Aldrin lent his name to the "Mission to Mars" collection of coats, duffels and backpacks, in collaboration with streetwear label Sprayground.
Some of the pieces feature again Aldrin's slogan: the former astronaut has indeed taken the opportunity offered by these fashion collaborations to promote his passion for interplanetary travel and the vision of his ShareSpace Foundation.
The latter promotes science, technology, engineering, arts, and mathematics (STEAM) for children via hands-on activities, inspirational messages and educational visits.While Aldrin hopes to educate via this space age fashion collection, model Natalia Vodianova's Naked Heart Foundation (a charity helping children with special needs) is getting ready to raise funds next February with its Fabulous Fund Fair charity event that will be inspired by intergalactic space.
We do live in very bleak times and quite often even films present us with a twisted reality that, rather than transporting us on another planet for a couple of hours, fills us with fears and anxieties, offering us scenes of wars, violence and dystopian lives and plunging us into deep dark holes of depression. We therefore seem to have turned to space fashion to escape from such sad visions.
Yet, while we wait to see if the projects of entrepreneurs à la Elon Musk, the founder of SpaceX, and Robert D. Richards, the chief executive of Moon Express (mind you, also Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, has financed his own rocket company, Blue Origin, so this is a trend...) will ever be able to send colonists to a galaxy far away, there is an important point to make: the first Space Age fashion designers - think about André Courrèges, Paco Rabanne and Pierre Cardin - experimented with fabrics, materials and silhouettes and the history of Space Age fashion also includes designers who created space mission logos.
So, here's a lesson for fashion designers and creative minds out there who love this trend: remember that, while there is nothing bad about doing a line of clothes and accessories inspired by space, the real experimental Space Age fashion of the future should move from other inspirations and look at materials and textiles.
For example, in 1991 Sakase Adtech Co., Ltd. designed a triaxially woven carbon fiber textile that was then manufactured in 2002 (currently part of the collection of Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum).
This is a technical textile, specially engineered for high performance use in knee braces, skis, fishing rods and running shoes since it has got an extraordinary strength and it is nearly weightless. The structure of the textile allows it to be shaped and molded easily because it has three different axes.
The technology for triaxial weaving was actually invented centuries ago during the Nara period (710–794 AD). It was rediscovered by NASA in the 1960s for use in aeronautics (and in 1992 couturier Azzedine Alaïa developed a few designs using a very special carbon yarn originally developed by NASA for astronauts' uniforms...). This proves in a way that the future of fashion stands in readapting and transforming old techniques and not in manufacturing products that do not have anything innovative about them, but just vaguely hint at an impossibly hip but distant and fictitious future.
Most of us probably finished doing their Christmas shopping on Sunday afternoon, and now we're already onto the Boxing Day sales. The image accompanying this post does not refer to any Boxing Day shenanigans, but it is the 26th December 1953 cover of Italian magazine La Settimana Incom Illustrata.
It shows actress Lucia Bosé looking at a Christmas toy display in a window shop with the son of the family with whom she shared a flat when she moved to Rome at the end of the '40s. The image is dreamy, joyful and colourful, but it also celebrates simple things, hinting at children's hopes and wishes. It seems therefore to be the perfect image to extend the celebratory mood and get away from the post-Christmas/Boxing Day sale madness. Have a lovely day with these festive moods from 1953!
Art is always a great inspiration when looking for an image to celebrate Christmas. The image illustrating this post shows the "Adoration of the Shepherds" (almost unanimously) attributed to Giorgione (1505-1510; the painting is preserved at the National Gallery of Washington, D.C.).
Still known as the Allendale Nativity, after a former owner, the painting is divided into two parts, with a dark cave on the right and a luminous Venetian landscape on the left. The main scene features two shepherds in front of the Nativity grotto, visiting Mary, Joseph and the Holy Child. The large figures in the foreground are juxtaposed to the smaller figures in the distance.
The characters' gaze is focused on the Infant Jesus in the Nativity grotto. The two shepherds and Joseph form a triad of people contemplating the Child: there is one young shepherd standing, a midde-aged one kneeling and then Joseph inside the grotto, representing an elder figure. They symbolise the three ages of life and connect this painting to Giorgione's "Adoration of the Magi".
The colours of Joseph and Mary's draped cloaks stand out, rising from the darkness behind them and contrasting with the tattered dress of the poor yet dignified shepherds who are the first to recognise Christ's divinity.
After the shopping frenziness and madness that surrounded us during the weeks preceding Christmas (and during the chaotic festive days...), this scene is just what we need - it inspires indeed quietness, meditation and contemplation. Merry Christmas to all Irenebrination readers!
In the last few weeks most fashion sites have been busy suggesting us all what to wear during the festive season. Yet choosing the perfect Christmas outfit is not a modern obsession as proved by clothes and accessories stocked in famous museums all over the world. The Metropolitan Museum of Art features in its collection for example this embroidered lawn dinner or evening dress from Great Britain.
The cotton, silk and wool gown dates from around 1824-26 and proves that Christmas-inspired outfits were all the rage even then. The museum notes explain that, at the time, dressmakers incorporated in their creations inspirations from literature, theatre costumes and history paintings of Medieval and Renaissance subjects.
In this case the decoratively slashed sleeves of the 16th century through which linen undershirts could be seen, inspired the puffed sleeves and the elements encircling the hem of this dress.
The wool crewel-embroidered holly boughs at the hem are the most striking features of the dress: they indicate that the design was worn in winter as the motifs call to mind the colours and plants of Christmas decorations (you can imagine the wearer going to a ball with a thick cloak that protected her from the cold).
The design was part of the "Masterworks: Unpacking Fashion" exhibition that took place at the end of last year at the Met Museum, but maybe the time has come for museums around the world to think about events dedicated to Christmas fashion throughout the centuries as they would prove inspiring for the materials, the decorative elements, the symbolism behind them and the techniques employed to make them.
Angels are part of the Christmas iconography, but so are feathered tutus, if you think about famous ballets such as "Swan Lake" that have entered the Christmas tradition.
There have been some Pre-Fall 18 collections that featured designs incorporating feathers. As you may remember from a previous post, Chanel's 15th Métiers d'Art Collection included for example Chanel's classic tweed suits reinvented with a striped motif created in tiny feathers.
The same motif was repeated in black and white mini-dresses in which the classic sailor's collar was transformed into a plunging neckline. In all these cases the feathers were hand-dyed and sewn onto the fabric.
Christelle Kocher's continued in her Pre-Fall collection the football theme that she had explored in Koché's S/S 18 show and that was inspired by a multi-year agreement with the Paris Saint-Germain soccer club. She expanded it with logo tracksuits and collaged asymmetric polo dresses.
Yet she also added to the collection a white top covered in white feathers and sprayed with graffiti in black paint for a urban touch and a hooded jacked covered in multi-coloured feathers. Kocher elevated in this way the uniforms of the street to a form of art.
Kocher is also the artistic director of Maison Lemarié, owned by Chanel and known for its fabric flowers and feathered decorative elements (the maison is among the last ones representing the art of the plumassier), so it is natural for her to use this material.
Maybe there will be further references to feathers in new collections next year, but where does this inspiration come from - arty angel wings or tutus like the one designed by Léon Bakst and donned by Anna Pavlova in 1905 as the Dying Swan?
Who knows, but feathers were already a trend in 1860, as proved by this white-on-white Latvian coat from the Costume Institute at the Met Museum archives.
The texture of this coat was formed by eiderdown feathers in round bundles secured with thread, the coat was then decorated with untethered eiderdown used as trim.
Angels or ballet costumes then? This fashion dilemma may not be easily solved, but it is interesting to consider how classic decorative elements such as feathers have been recently incorporated in more modern and even urban designs.
The event focuses on products, projects and services developed by and with people with physical, cognitive and sensory disabilities, exploring how innovative devices can radically change and improve the lives of people in different situations from everyday activities to competitive sports and recreative events.
"Access+Ability" includes more than 70 works, among them adaptive clothing and eating implements, accessories such as functional canes, customized prosthetic leg covers, shirts with magnetic closures and shoes with a wrap-around zipper system, and includes items developed with the latest and most innovative technologies and fabrication methods.
The designs are divided in three categories - Mobility, Connecting and Daily Routines - and they are the result of a selection cleverly carried out by co-curators Cara McCarty, Director of Curatorial at Cooper Hewitt, and Rochelle Steiner, Curator and Professor of Critical Studies at the University of Southern California, in collaboration with users, designers, caregivers, activists, occupational therapists and neuroscientists.
A section on wheelchairs looks at devices with folding and collapsible wheels, and features the Motivation Rough Terrain Wheelchair, that can move on rough, unpaved or uneven terrain, specifically in the developing world where the ground may be muddy or sandy.
This part of the event also includes the Racing Wheelchair, designed by BMW Designworks, in collaboration with athletes Tatyana McFadden and Chelsea McClammer. These customised wheelchairs in carbon fiber, aluminum and titanium with added 3D-printed parts offer improved aerodynamics, safety, and ergonomics, and led McFadden and McClammer to win gold and bronze medals, respectively, in the 2016 Summer Paralympic Games in Rio de Janeiro.
Some designs are still at the prototype level, we will indeed have to wait till the 2020 US elections to see people using the Los Angeles County Voting Booth. Designed by IDEO, Digital Foundry and Cambridge Consultants, the booth will address all types of voters, including people unfamiliar with technology and who speak languages other than English, who are hard of hearing or have limited vision, in wheelchairs, and with learning disabilities.
Other projects are already a reality instead, among them the PillPack (2013), designed by Gen Suzuki and collaborators at IDEO, a service that assists people with managing multiple daily medications, pre-sorting and organizing medication into pouches.
New technologies have definitely helped improving the life of people with disabilities: inspired by Emma Lawton, a graphic designer given a diagnosis of Parkinson's in 2013, the Emma Watch (2016), developed by Microsoft researchers Haiyan Zhang and Nicolas Villar, is a wearable device that uses haptic vibration technology to allow users with active tremors to regain the use of their hand.
The stretch microfiber fabric with laser-cut decoration SoundShirt (2015-16), designed by Francesca Rosella and Ryan Genz for CuteCircuit, translates the experience of listening to music for the deaf and hard of hearing via 16 sensors corresponding to each part of the orchestra (strings, woodwinds, percussion and so on) embedded into the fabric.
"Access+Ability" also tackles the fashionable design of some of these pieces: the Prosthetic Leg Covers (ca. 2011), designed and manufactured by McCauley Wanner and Ryan Palibroda for ALLELES Design Studio, offer people the chance to choose among various colours and patterns.
The arm cover by Evan Kuester and manufactured by 3D Systems was instead designed for a specific user and created to blur the boundary between jewellery and prosthesis, to compliment an outfit rather than be used as a functioning hand. The intention is to look beautiful and perform simple functions, such as holding a wineglass at dinner.
Modern necklaces looking like minimalist jewellery are actually navigation systems for people who are blind and can be connected to a voice-controlled iPhone app and GPS. Hearing aids can be sleek and minimalist or covered in bedazzling Swarovski crystals like the ones designed by Elana Langer. But there are also cool compression socks with bold graphics by Matthew Kroeker and Ben Grynol, manufactured by Top & Derby. All these designs can be seen as functional pieces, but they can also be interpreted as fashion statements.
The event also offers an insight on a series of useful apps such as Blindways, designed and developed by Perkins School for the Blind to guide pedestrians who are blind to bus stops using community crowdsourced clues; the eye-tracking, speech-generating devices of Tobii Dynavox, which enable hands-free communication and computer access, and LOLA (Laugh Out Loud Aid, 2015), developed by Tech Kids Unlimited, an app that engages youth on the autism spectrum to learn digital tools and collaborate through technology.
A gallery next to the exhibition includes new work as well as crowd-sourced suggestions of innovative, accessible objects and services and, from a partnership between Cooper Hewitt and Pratt Institute, there is also a selection of six products that students designed in 2016 in collaboration with CaringKind, a nonprofit dedicated to Alzheimer's caregiving, to meet the needs of the community with empathy and care.
"Access+Ability" prompts visitors to think on different levels: first it shows how today's technology could be used to really improve people's lives rather than to create just frivolous designs and apps and takes stock of the latest innovative systems such as 3-D printing that have offered in the last few years new solutions to designers; second, it invites people to look at the future with optimism, demolishing stereotypes about disabilities. Last but not least, "Access+Ability" raises consciouness: ordinary gestures for some of us like getting dressed every morning can indeed be extremely difficult for a person with a physical disability and understanding this point is the first step towards finding real solutions.
The exhibition is accompanied by a series of collateral events, conversations, activities and workshops such as Cooper Hewitt Lab: Design Access (Feb. 2–17, 2018), tackling topics of accessibility and inclusion. Some of the programs included have an architectural twist about them, one is indeed entitled "Designing Accessible Cities Symposium" and may prove inspiring for different professionals and students alike (you can check out the rest of the events here).
Hopefully universities will also be inspired by "Access + Ability": new design courses could indeed be launched to create the objects, projects and services that may guarantee a better and more inclusive future.