There are fashion designs that can be described as architectural for their shapes and silhouettes. Then there are garments who may indirectly reference architectural elements.
Fashion designer Yeohlee Teng falls in the former category as she is well-known for her precise mathematical and geometrical patterns studied to guarantee zero waste to consumers.
Yet, while so far her collections mainly revolved around a dark or neutral palette, in her S/S 19 collection Teng added bright colours and patterns to her usual architecturally minimalist designs.
Teng employed bright shades to hint at optimism and joy, but the colours actually had an arty derivation. The designer was indeed inspired by the pigments stored at The Forbes Pigment Collection (currently housed in the Straus Center for Conservation at Harvard University).
Assembled between 1910 and 1944 by the late Edward Waldo Forbes, former Director of the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard University, the collection includes over 3,000 colorants from all over the world, stored in tincture bottles and vials (his private collection of pigments resides at the Institute for Fine Arts Conservation Center at New York University).
The Forbes collection features a bit of everything from pigments from excavated sites at Pompeii to a rich blue extracted from rare lapis lazuli stones mined from quarries in Afghanistan and an Indian yellow made from the urine of cows fed only on mango leaves. In recent years the collection has also been enriched with modern and synthetic pigments.
Was the saffron shade in Teng's collection inspired by cadmium yellow or by quercitron, a yellow vegetable dye, extracted from the bark of the black oak, or were the bright orange shades borrowed from annatto, a natural orange dye? And could the brown loose fitting pants and jumpsuits or the soft beige of the semi-sheer raincoat have been borrowed from "mummy brown", originally made in the 16th and 17th centuries from white pitch, myrrh, and the ground-up remains of Egyptian human and feline mummies?
That's difficult to say, what's for sure though is that the various shades, used separately or combined in checkered prints, were employed for a functional wardrobe of dresses and shirts gathered at the back and hanging loose from the body. A tropical print provided some variation, in long unisex caftans and dresses with a knot at the waist.
Some of the shades in Teng's collection call to mind the colours of the interior design elements showcased at the Case Design installation at the 16th International Architecture Exhibition, Venice (on until 25th November 2018).
The installation revolves around the Avasara Academy, a school campus close to the Lavale village near Pune, India, providing education for local young women.
Mumbai-based architecture and design practice Case Design often collaborates with artisans, craftspeople, designers and builders who make the models, tables, stools, lights and screens forming the spaces for the building the practice creates.
The installation at the Venice Biennale features a series of elements including woven benches, sections of floors, models of studies for instruments and scientific apparatus by Teja Gavankar and Vishal Kadam, and prototypes of chandeliers for the Library at Avasara designed in collaboration with LU Murano and made with fused glass from waste material (all these elements will be send back to the school at the end of the Biennale).
These items and objects become artefacts and narrative pieces that can show how Freespace (the theme of this year's exhibition) can be expressed also through decorative elements.
There are also natural pigments from India in one vitrine, accompanied by paint studies for the various buildings at Avasara by Danish visual artist Malene Bach.
The palette for the school was inspired by the surrounding landscape, the students' culture and the regional historical use of colour and, interestingly enough, it seems to have some connections with the colour combinations in Yeohlee Teng's S/S 19 collection.
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