There's been a lot of interest about Georgia O'Keeffe in the last few months especially after last year's exhibition "Living Modern" at the Brooklyn Museum that looked not just at her artworks, but also at her lifestyle, displaying selected pieces from her wardrobe.
As a consequence, in some circles such as the fashion industry, a lot of people started claiming they are influenced by O'Keeffe (a new addition in the names dropping exercise considering that until a few years ago the main reference, especially for those designers who didn't know much about art, was the Bauhaus...). Yet there's different ways of being inspired by an artist: Issey Miyake's Resort 19 collection moved for example from O'Keeffe's New Mexico landscapes, widely considered as icons of American Modernism.
O'Keeffe first visited New Mexico in 1917, returning there in 1929 and travelling in a Model-A Ford turned into a mobile studio that she used to reach desert landscapes.
Fascinated and amazed by limestone cliffs in a palette of red, ochre and yellow and by the light playing on them, Georgia O'Keeffe created mesmerising works during her travels and finally moved to New Mexico in the '40s.
Quite often O'Keeffe's abstract landscape paintings took a geometrical twist, with experimental forms and shapes offering intriguing alternatives to more popular urban American scenes.
Among the various features and elements of the landscapes that amazed the artist there were the changing colours of cottonwood trees along the Chama River Valley visible from her studio in Abiquiú.
The theme of transformation and the possibilities offered by changes has always been behind the innovative textiles produced by Issey Miyake.
For the house's Resort 19 collection designer Yoshiyuki Miyamae started with an earthy palette, broken by tones of deep forest green and ruby red applied to perfectly pleated dresses, and with some variations added via lightweight denim designs. Then the designer introduced dresses and separates with images of desert paintings by Georgia O'Keeffe.
The artist's fascination with nature and her abstract forms were also replicated in the curving lines of the garments that recreated organic shapes calling to mind cacti, flowers and petals.
Miyamae's interpretation of O'Keeffe's works is based on a transformative creative power as the garments in the Resort 19 collection are made with the trademark steam stretch technique, consisting in creating pleats with thread that shrinks with heat and then baking the pieces to achieve perfectly sculpted effects.
The collection also features garments that could be conceived as the results of further textile experiments in morphing, such as designs featuring wave stripe pleats that change direction with each stripe, and a blazer with strategically placed pleats that can be turned into a bolero jacket.
Fans of Issey Miyake who like art and don't want to wait till the Resort 19 designs are available to add a new piece to their personal collection, should instead check out the latest capsule collection (the third one) with Japanese graphic artist (and Issey Miyake historical collaborator) Ikko Tanaka.
Three of Tanaka's works were chosen as motifs - Gradation (letters and characters), Work: Q and Rope, and they were applied to simple yet timeless designs made with textiles (pleated fabrics and 100% polyester for the sporty coats in super bright shades of red, yellow, blue and green) that freely flow on the body.
The objective of these capsule collections with Tanaka that include both clothes and accessories, is not using the iconic graphics merely as motifs, but infusing in them a new energy and life by reinterpreting the artworks in a three-dimensional format.
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