It is difficult not to be fascinated by sci-fi films about faraway worlds, trips to the moon or to mysterious planets and adventures that may provide us with a glimpse of things to come. The way people may live, move or even dress in a few decades' time is obviously an intriguing topic.
Yet what we often don't realise is that the fictional future we are presented with, usually derives from the past, especially for what regards the costumes we see on the screen.
Princess Leia's iconic minimalist white robe in Star Wars (1977) finds for example a precedent in Friede's look in Frau in Mond (Woman in the Moon, 1929) by Fritz Lang.
In the same way, the more you look at Daisy Ridley as Rey in the Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, the more your mind finds connections between her costume and Haute Couture designs from the past.
Rey's minimalist yet striking attire consists in a pair of white trousers matched with a finely draped white top reminiscent of Madame Grès' draped designs, like her 1945 silk jersey pleated gown currently on display at the Museum at FIT's exhibition "Paris Capital of Fashion" (on loan from Hamish Bowles' private collection).
Costume designer Michael Kaplan actually claimed in interviews about this film that, for what regarded the costumes, while Alexander McQueen remained an influence, he had more of an affinity with his friend Rick Owens.
Yet Madame Grès must have also been a reference as in Star Wars: The Last Jedi, Kaplan moved from Grès for Laura Dern’s Admiral Amilyn Holdo monochromatic lavender gown. In that case the admiral looked elegant and feminine, but also statuesque like a Greek goddess, representing a character that demanded respect.
Costume designers working on mythical, legendary or fantasy stories that don't have any connections with specific historical times, often create their own mix of inspirations, borrowing several ideas from fashion, traditional costumes and history and combine them together to produce something new. This happened for example in Pier Paolo Pasolini's film Medea (1969) and in Madame Grès' costumes for Ulysses (1954) by Mario Camerini.
Kaplan's combination of modern and contemporary designs with a Madame Grès' twist in both films proved a winning formula, especially because, while Grès created gowns that looked sculpted on the body, the soft fabric and the pleated and draped style, allowed her to come up with form-fitting, feminine and fluid silhouettes that in Rey's case guarantee the character to perform dynamic action scenes without restricting her movements, while retaining an elegant touch (besides, the white shade of the costume links it with Princess Leia's and Luke's costumes in the 1977 film).
Who knows, maybe this will be the successful fashion formula in times to come - garments made not just with rigid, synthetic and plastic-based materials, but incorporating some details and elements from the past rebuilt into an organic future.
The debate about considering fashion as art has been going on for decades and in the past we have seen not just fashion designers taking inspiration from art, but also people working in different branches of the fashion industry, such as textile and yarn designers.
But if fashion can be arty, can art be fashionable? Well, nowadays we have grown accustomed to seeing all sorts of collaborations between artists and fashion houses, but, in the history of art, there have been artists who actually moved from textile based materials to create their paintings.
Vincent Van Gogh, for example, studied a lot of books about colour theory that allowed him to discover how red and green, yellow and purple, blue and orange intensify one another. Yet, he also had another method for studying colours.
At the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, you can still see a red lacquer box that contains several little balls of coloured wool yarns.
Van Gogh used indeed threads of wool in various hues to test different colour combinations that could produce powerful effects, or variations of a single colour, before trying them out with expensive paints.
Yarns allowed him to play with intense colour contrasts and to create paintings such as "Grapes" (1887).
The colour of the two types of grapes are set off against strokes of paint in contrasting hues: blue against yellow and green against red.
A year later, in 1888, Van Gogh wrote "… the painter of the future is a colourist such as there hasn't been before."
Who knows, maybe in the next decade we will see more artists moving for fashion to take inspiration for the colours in their paintings or yarn designers launching threads inspired by Van Gogh's colourful wool balls.
We all take stock at the end of the year and look back at things that have happened to us or in the world. The fashion industry usually looks back remembering the designers who left us, celebrating a trend that was really popular or reminding us which were the most famous celebrities in their most amazing looks. But the end of the year should also be a time to ponder about the state of the industry on a global level.
In November this year the Carabinieri police force arrested a Melito-based (in the Naples area) entrepreneur who hid 43 illegal workers (all of them Italian) in a room with no windows nor toilets (the room was blocked with a reinforced door) for 6 hours. Among them there were a pregnant woman and two minors.
The Carabinieri were actually carrying out an inspection about a canteen, but, getting worried about his illegal workers, the entrepreneur hid them away. The workers made leather accessories for fashion companies, but, what may surprise some is the fact that they didn't produce fake items, but luxury items for designer brands (according to the reports for brands such as Fendi and Yves Saint Laurent).
Accused of exploiting workers and kidnapping them, the entrepreneur tried to explain the situation, saying that the workers weren't segregated in the workshop and added that the Neapolitan manufacturing businesses are the "new China", to highlight the fact that a garment worker in Naples is paid as much as a garment worker in a China (in this case 20 Euros for 9 hours).
No fashion company commented after the piece of news spread, and most of the names of the fashion labels the company worked for weren't revealed. This is not a new story, though, as the Italian fashion industry has always relied on seamstresses anonymously working from home for famous fashion brands and on illegal workers manufacturing garments and accessories in factories subcontracted by companies working for major fashion brands.
These workers do not have any guaranteed minimum wage, they don't have any paid holidays or safe working space. For the owners and managers of these plants legally registering them means having to pay extra taxes, investing in health and safety measures and therefore earning less. So, in the name of profit, the situation has remained the same for decades, without any major changes.
Yet, in a way, the Italian workers discovered by the Carabinieri were lucky as they were found before any accident happened to them.
Workers making handbags in a New Delhi-based factory in India weren't so lucky. In December a fire killed over forty people in a six-storey factory where labourers were sleeping.
The factory made handbags and other items and the raw materials stored in building tragically helped the fire to spread. According to reports, the building had no fire certification or emergency escape route, windows were blocked, flammable objects covered staircases and one of the building's exits was locked when the fire broke out.
There seems to be no ending to such news, but some companies aren't doing much to change things: in October this year The Wall Street Journal published an investigation that discovered that Amazon (but also other companies including Walmart and Target) sells clothes (albeit not in Amazon's case from its own brand, but from factories selling directly on Amazon and from third-party sellers) made in Bangladesh factories that leading fashion companies blacklisted after the Rana Plaza disaster in Dhaka, Bangladesh.
As you may remember, 1,134 garment workers were killed and hundreds of survivors were injured in 2013 when Rana Plaza, an eight-storey commercial building that housed garment units on its upper levels collapsed.
Five months before that accident a fire in the Tazreen Fashions factory in Bangladesh killed over 100 workers. The fire was probably caused in that case by a short circuit on the ground floor of the building, but rapidly spread trapping the workers as the emergency exits were absent and the windows on the lower floor were barred.
In a way the Rana Plaza factory collapse brought some changes with factories improving the safety conditions, investing in fire doors and sprinklers.
Two agreements between clothing retailers and manufacturers were also established to improve factory conditions in Bangladesh: Accord (a legally binding agreement between brands and trade unions involving mainly European companies) and Alliance for Bangladesh Worker Safety (destined to American businesses including Walmart, Gap and Target).
Signed by more than 200 retailers including H&M and Inditex, the 2013 Bangladesh Accord on Fire and Building Safety focused on workers' safety and led to some improvements.
Inspections were carried out and factories deemed unsafe were closed or blacklisted, so that brands could stop placing orders with them. Yet there have been companies (such as Amazon, as stated above) that kept on using blacklisted factories (some of them may not have fire alarms or may present weak structural columns; in other cases managers can still lock employees in, one of the causes of death in case of fire or other emergencies).
It is undeniable that there have been some interesting developments and improvements in the fashion industry, especially for what regards fast-fashion: H&M (sourcing garments from almost 300 factories located in Bangladesh) opted for transparency and, from 2019, consumers can read on its website information about its garments and their manufacturers.
Choose any garments, click on the Product Sustainability link, and you will see the name of the factory where that garment was produced, its address (you will discover how some products are made in Gazipur, Bangladesh, others in Shanghai and Dongyang in China, but the more products you check the more countries you will discover...) and the numbers of workers employed there (or you can get the same information in shop by scanning the clothes tag with the H&M app).
This is already a big step for a fast-fashion company, but there will be other issues to take care in future, from the mental and physical health of workers to work rhythms, from harassment to low wages.
What we learnt from fashion in the last decade and in 2019 in particular? That there is a possibility that things may change if we keep on raising awareness, educating consumers, putting pressures on companies (not just fast-fashion, but also luxury companies) to make sure that people come before profit.
In the last few years fashion has learnt new words - such as sustainability, health and safety regulations and workers' rights - but it is still struggling to speak fluently this language. Let's hope this will change in the next few years and that the industry will not just be about fast trends and endless collections, but about building a better and more human industry.
Every year there are new exhibitions, retrospectives, special installations, art fairs and biennale events to discover. Yet, at the end of every year, when you find yourself taking stock of what you saw, you usually realise there is one work that defined that particular year. In 2018 we were Banksy-ed at Sotheby's, 2019 will be remembered for Maurizio Cattelan's banana on a wall at Art Basel Miami.
At the beginning of December, the semi-retired Italian artist and prankster stuck a real banana to a wall in Galerie Perrotin's booth with a piece of duct tape. The work recalled a previous installation by Cattelan: in 1999 the artist taped indeed the Italian art dealer Massimo De Carlo to the wall of his art gallery.
According to a press release from the gallery, the banana was "Cattelan's first time debuting new work for an art fair in over 15 years."
The surprising artwork, which came with a $120,000 price tag (the banana is offered with a Certificate of Authenticity and buyers can replace the banana whenever they want or when it rots; so far there were at least three buyers who bought the limited-edition pieces of the banana at Art Basel), instantly became a successful work of art. A couple of days later performance artist David Datuna pulled it off the wall and ate it in plain sight, but soon a new banana replaced the previous one.
Eventually Galerie Perrotin had to remove it explaining that "the installation caused several uncontrollable crowd movements and the placement of the work on our booth compromised the safety of the artwork around us, including that of our neighbors."
Apparently, the simple composition comprising a yellow banana, stuck with grey duct tape on a white wall, was inspired by the fact that Cattelan had the habit of travelling with a banana and hanging it on his hotel room wall for inspiration.
But, somehow, the source of the inspiration for the Warholian banana didn't matter. The important thing about it was indeed the fact that it generated instant hype: posted and reposted on social media, it inspired other artworks, jokes, and multiple memes (write down #cattelanbanana in an Instagram search to get an idea).
Independent artists were very creative: Australian Leon Zhan started creating customised Nike Air Force 1s sneakers with a banana in the place of the Nike swoosh in July, and, for fun, he stuck a real banana on his sneakers, but soon further tributes started arriving.
Jacquemus taped a yellow micro Le Chiquito bag on a wall; Burger King France used "sculpture" to make a comparison between its price and that of one of its French fries.
Carrefour supermarket followed Burger King's example and created a campaign showing a series of its organic fruit and vegetables stuck to a wall with tape. More campaigns followed in the last few days by brands and companies advertising a variety of products including condoms and coffins (the latter by an infamous Rome-based funeral parlour known for its "fun" social media campaigns).
Now, it is interesting to note how in the world there are artists who have tackled rape, violence against women and gender issues creating works in conjuction with artisans or spending years researching a specific topic. Quite often these artists find it difficult to get grants and funds to develop their work further or to get represented by a gallery.
Hilarious, vapid and annoying, Cattelan's banana found instead immediate fame. But, in a way, it is only natural that it happened.
Cattelan's "Comedian" perfectly defines our society: while its simplicity and inflated price tag remind us that modern art has turned into a surreally absurd business and prove that we live in a deeply unfair and crazy world in which wealthy art collectors splash their money on a banana, Cattelan's duct-taped fruity sculpture tells us that art is not created nowadays to be enjoyed in museums, but to generate hype, and be shared, transformed, consumed - even eaten - and digested immediately and instantly on social media.
What's more surprising maybe is the fact that this lesson we learnt from art can be applied to other fields such as fashion: a hip product or trend are not created to be cherished and loved, but to be immediately shared, consumed, digested and forgotten to allow us to move onto the next one in an endless search for instant likes in a fast-moving digital world.
Fun, annoying or simply silly, memes have invaded social media in the last few years. The Merriam-Webster defines "meme" as "an idea, behavior, style, or usage that spreads from person to person within a culture" and as "an amusing or interesting item or genre of items that is spread widely online especially through social media".
The definition "interesting items" refers to an entirely new picture or video created by somebody or to media based on a movie still or an image of a celebrity or a popular character, at times personalised via a slogan, a motto, a filter or another visual alteration.
For their nature, memes have sparked a debate about copyright: the creator of a specific image has usually got the rights on the reproduction, modification and distribution of such image and memes naturally infringe such copyrights.
That said, when an original image is modified, reproduced and posted, maybe altering a particular feature or adding a catchy slogan that ends up making that image popular and go viral, the copyright of that particular alteration remains with the person that has created that change.
So, creating new work without permission and within certain parameters (think about parody or criticism), may fall under fair use of a copyrighted image, even though things may change from case to case.
But what happens if a fashion designer takes a meme and copies it? Let's look at a couple of cases.
Between 2018 and 2019 we have seen a proliferation of big jacket and big bag memes, with Instagram accounts such as @itsmaysmemes and @thebigbagclub altering puffer jackets, sneakers and bags donned by models to gargantuan proportions, taking them to an entirely new and comical level.
Jeremy Scott played along the same lines in Moschino's Pre-Fall 2020 and Fall 2020 menswear show, that took place at the Transit Museum in New York last week. The collection tried to recreate a trip through the New York subway, but was also a journey through the city's subcultures.
Scott altered the proportions of faux fur stoles, thick gold chains, bags and puffer jackets and included in the collection items like super sized jackets and rucksacks that may prompt wearers to find new and unusual ways to access doors, lifts and means of transport.
The baseball hats with the house logos also went through a magnifying process achieving in some cases the same effect obtained by Lonnie Walker IV and his "floating hat" look at last year's NBA draft (in his case it was his sky-high hairstyle that allowed him to come up with the unusual look View this photo).
This process of "taking inspiration" from popular culture is nothing unusual for Jeremy Scott, who likes to define himself as "the people's designer", even though he has often proved he is more of a remixer of other people's designs.
Yet Scott wasn't the only one who jumped on the meme bandwagon: Opening Ceremony recently created the "Super Large Tote", a giant yellow PVC tote bag that could be considered as the ultimate reaction to the curse of the mini bag.
This trend for oversized items poses a few issues: first and foremost these items are made using more materials than needed, putting more stress on our planet and on the wardrobes of consumers (how many of us have enough space in their houses to store such pieces?), but it also prompts us to ponder a bit about copyright issues.
If certain memes and images produced by specific Instagram accounts have spawned a trend for oversized jackets and bags, who infringed the copyright, the owners of the Instagram accounts who altered the original images to create new and fun artworks, or the designers who then created surreal items that, based on those images, will generate a profit for their fashion houses and brands?
Unfortunately, copyright law doesn't help us in meme matters: the authors of the memes we have seen in this post created static images of celebrities or models wearing huge jackets and bags, so, in a way, they created an idea that may not be protected under copyright.
Yet this story makes you think: while the creators of image-based memes are reminded to always check the source of the image they want to use or the person featured in it, and maybe opt for an image or clip that is already labeled for reuse or is in the public domain to avoid legal issues, it looks like fashion designers may not really abide to these rules, but are free to take ideas from those same memes that may put their creators at risk of a legal action. Will laws regarding memes and copyrights change in the next decade and take into consideration the power of meme-spawned trends in the fashion industry?
But, rejoyce, if you have stolen a specific design you may have stumbled upon on the Internet and you are now caught in a copyright infringement case, you may be able to blame...the algorithm.
But let's look at this story from the beginning: a couple of weeks ago, artist @Hannahdouken ran an experiment to test the power, skills and copyright infringement possibilities offered by algorithms. The artist posted in a tweet a request, saying "Can y'all do me a favor and quote tweet/reply to this with something along the lines of 'I want this on a shirt', thank you". The image accompanying the tweet simply stated "This site sells STOLEN artwork, do NOT buy from them!" accompanied by a little heart and a smiling face.
The tweet wanted to prove a theory: automated bots are currently actively looking on Twitter for phrases like "I want this on a shirt" or "This needs to be a T-shirt" accompanied by an image. After detecting such sentences and the images posted with them, they steal the visual artworks and create with them print-on-demand T-shirts (obviously without permission) for a variety of sites.
Followers complied with @Hannahdouken's request and, shortly afterwards, a Twitter bot replied with a link to the newly-created T-shirt listing available on print-on-demand t-shirt service Moteefe (more followed on other similar sites, such as Toucan Style and CopThis).
The debate expanded in the days that followed: Twitter user @Nirbion realised that @Hannahdouken had just proved the theory was right, but there was no punishment for the thieves. So he upped the ante and created an image that infringed Disney's copyright, adding under the image "This is NOT a parody! We committed copyright infringement and want to be sued by Disney. We pay ALL court and tribunal fees."
Again bots detected the image and immediately created a T-shirt inspired by the design. Since then some sites removed the "Not Licensed by The Walt Disney Company" Mickey Mouse image, but more Twitter users created copyright infringing images featuring popular characters, including Pikachu and Super Mario.
Creating quick selling garments using algorithms is not a new practice and perfectly explains the wondrous and instant proliferation of a wide range of items with modern and popular designs, logos and graphics on sites such as Aliexpress (motifs that, in some cases, end up providing inspirations for more expensive and exclusive fashion collections).
In 2011 T-shirt producer Michael Fowler wrote a simple computer code that stated "Kiss me, I'm a ____". The slogan could have been completed using a database of vocabularies and word variations selected by an algorithm.
Fowler's idea dramatically increased sales for his company, but, a year afterwards, the company was betrayed by its own algorithm when the latter started generating disturbing slogans moving from the WWII propaganda phrase "Keep Calm and Carry On" (including "Keep Calm and Rape Them").
In the last few years algorithms have often been employed to create a wide range of customizable items: you can indeed find on Amazon mobile phone covers with rather bizarre images stolen from a database of stock images and showing a woman getting a botox injection, toenail fungus, colostomy, and even the picture of a coffin that seems lifted from a funeral parlour brochure.
You may wonder who may want to buy such objects, but even if the T-shirt or mobile phone case in question would sell only one sample, they would still make money.
In most cases these objects are not produced until they are ordered, so there is no physical inventory, but some of the sites offering the T-shirts are integrated with other platforms which means the products immediately appear on other sites as well.
This means that, usually, the items end up selling more than just one piece, as they appear on Facebook users' feeds and they often seem to speak to the users in a very personal way thanks to hyper-targeted digital advertising that allow algorithms to get to know a user's obsessions, passions and personal details.
This is actually the most intriguing (and scary at the same time...), aspect about such products or about the experiments recently carried out by Twitter users: bots are scanning people's tastes to find a design that they may really want to buy, without paying the artist who created it or without caring about what's written in a slogan or an image, and immediately creating a product with it.
How to protect the artists? At the moment there is no legal solution and the identities of print-on-demand providers are often protected by the platforms they work with.
While collective effort is proving effective at carrying out experiments and at spreading the results (and the hilarity as well...), a way to protect artists who may have posted their artworks on social media and avoid them wasting time and money asking a site to take the bootleg merchandise down, is not to enthusiastically answer their posts saying you want a specific product (T-shirt, mobile phone cover, etc) with that particular artwork on. Bots track text, so you can maybe add an image expressing your enthusiasm about a particular artwork.
As for automated design processes, well, let's hope that fashion houses and designers will not start using the excuse "It wasn't me, it was the algorithm" (even though this sounds like the sort of excuse Jeremy Scott may use...) to explain why a specific print, design or work featured in their collections may look too similar to that created by an independent designer and posted on social media. We often talk about how to get Artificial Intelligenceto perform human tasks, but at the moment it looks like we have managed to successful teach to it how to steal from human beings.
Fashion inspires each and every one of us in different ways: for example, her passion for this discipline led Vanessa Barragão to attend a Master in Fashion and Textile Design at Lisbon University.
After graduating, though, Barragão realised that fashion wasn't really her path, but remembered how much she loved her crocheting and knitting sessions as a child with her grandmothers. She therefore first explored the possibilities of yarns, creating artisanal and eco-friendly threads that she employed to make textiles.
Soon she decided to expand and five years ago she founded her own studio in Porto, where the country's textile industry is located. Here she started producing hand-made pieces employing a wide range of hand-crafted fiber art techniques, including tufting, crocheting, latch hooking, carving, embroidering and needle felting.
Inspired by her love of nature and the ocean (Barragão was born in the South of Portugal, on the seaside), she focused on making rugs and large wall tapestries and textile installations inspired by themes linked with the environment.
Barragão's three-dimensional underwater scenes have a great visual and tactile power and, if you stand in front of one of her pieces, you will definitely want to stretch your hand and touch the densely arranged protruding corals and sea anemones.
Yet, if you look a bit better you will realise that, quite often, her corals have lost their colours and they are made with white or ivory yarns. In this way the artist reminds us that the corals are being suffocated by the trash accumulating in the oceans and they are getting bleached of colour due to rising water temperatures.
Through her pieces Barragão also raises awareness to the conditions of the Earth's flora: her 12 metre-long tapestry on display during the summer at Terminal 2 at Heathrow Airport (a piece that aimed at raising funds for Kew Gardens), consisted in a map of the world that featured several threatened species of plants and flowers, among them the cypripedium calceolus and the pulsatilla vulgaris, the ginkgo biloba and the orchid bulbophyllum ankylochele. It took the artist 520 hours to make the botanical tapestry, eight kilograms of jute and cotton and forty-two kilograms of recycled wool.
This is actually a key aspect in Vanessa Barragão's works: as the textile industry is one of the most polluting in the world since it employs chemicals in different stages of production, requires a lot of energy and produces waste, Barragão has decided to employ in her pieces only materials from the deadstock of several local factories.
Last week her artworks were on display at the Context Art Miami fair, but art is not the only discipline Barragão she moves in: a while back she collaborated with architect Marta Figueiredo to create an interior design piece.
Entitled "Coral Moon" this composition, featuring two shifting half moon forms hinting at the tides and incorporating textiles, stone and brass, reminds us about the fragile balance of the coral reef ecosystem, and hopefully Barragão will develop more of such pieces with architects or interior designers.
We have grown accustomed to having access to water or electricity, but such facilities are still a luxury in some parts of the world. According to international NGO WaterAid, one in ten people have no clean water close to home in the world, while in Ethiopia almost four in ten people don't have access to clean water.
Water scarcity has a negative impact on the health of people and it is estimated that a child dies every hour from diseases resulting from lack of clean water. Besides, over 70% of the people who have the responsibility of collecting clean water for their families are women and girls. They spend hours every day walking long distances to get water, something that affects their health and wellbeing, but also reduces their opportunities to access education.
Hoping to raise awareness about water scarcity, Ethiopian photographer Aïda Muluneh created a while back a series of 12 striking images.
Entitled "Water Life" and commissioned by WaterAid, the beautifully arranged compositions in vivid colours wouldn't look out of place in a fashion magazine. The series revolves indeed around a palette of yellow, electric blue, white and red, and features beautiful women in African body paint, walking around a stark landscape carrying with them jugs of water or dragging along yellow water containers.
Yet there is more behind the pictures created by the Ethiopian photographer: some of the images were created at the photographer's studio in Addis Ababa (where the artist was born and where she relocated in 2007, after she left Canada); others were shot in extreme landscapes in one of the hottest and driest places on earth, Dallol, Afar, in Northern Ethiopia, where temperatures can reach 120°F (50°C).
The images were inspired by all the women walking and carrying heavy containers of water Muluneh often encountered while travelling all over Africa. Their presence in the images aims at bringing awareness about access to clean water, but also prompts us to think about the responsibility of women - especially those ones in rural areas - to collect water and about the risks they run into while walking long distances.
The women portrayed look like goddesses: they wear long robes and turbans, and they represent perseverance, courage, strength and dignity.
At times they drag behind them the yellow "Kufuor" gallon containers used to store and carry water that can easily be spotted in Africa. The cans tied to a rope look like shackles and hint at the fact that carrying the water is like being imprisoned. Some of the women in the pictures hold a coffee pot or "jebena", a reference to a woman's traditional role and to the burden she's got to carry.
The doors that can be seen in some of the pictures also assume metaphorical meanings: they may be painted in blue to represent access to water, or in red and in this case they may be placed at a higher level to express a lack of access to water; windows represent a quest for a better future.
The moon framed by red fabric forming wing-like shapes behind a woman reminds us that lack of clean water also means that girls are forced to stay home from school during their cycle, missing out on their education.
The taps and pipes in another image remind us that Ethiopia has got a water reserve underground, but there is no infrastructure to get the water out of the ground.
Through all these metaphors and symbols the images recount the stories of different women, while refocusing on the hardships they go through, on the challenges they face and on issues such as health, sanitation and education, reminding us that water can't just be a luxury for a few people, but must be normal for everyone, anywhere in the world.
Muluneh considers herself an Afrofuturist: traditional African body paint is reinterpreted in a futuristic way, while stereotypical images of the continent are challenged to provide us with a different perception of contemporary Africa.
Aïda Muluneh's images were showcased at London's Somerset House during the 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair, and are currently part of the exhibition "Crossroads Ethiopia" that just opened at the Nobel Peace Center in Oslo (on until the end of November 2020).
Muluneh also curated the exhibition that is divided in two parts, one featuring images taken by seven of Ethiopia's most famous photographers, and the other dedicated to pictures by British photographer Finbarr O'Reilly, who documented the effects of the conflict with Eritrea and also took pictures of the Prime Minister of Ethiopia Abiy Ahmed Ali and of the women in his government. Earlier on this week, Abiy Ahmed Ali was awarded the 2019 Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts to achieve peace and international cooperation and for his decisive initiative to resolve the border conflict with neighbouring Eritrea.
All images in this post by and copyright Aïda Muluneh
There are quite a few artists who in recent years have developed works inspired by data, conceived as a crucial form of cultural communication and a complex of diverse information. Among them there is also Orkhan Mammadov, who uses Artificial Intelligence (AI) to create new patterns directly inspired by traditional decorative motifs, structures and architectures.
Born in Ganja, Azerbaijan, in 1990, the artist and graphic designer first studied at the Khazar University Computer Science faculty, but then moved to Turkey to study visual communication and to Czech Republic where he focused on art and experimental media.
Currently working between New York, Prague and Baku, Mammadov created a while back an installation entitled "Circular Repetition"(it was also part of the Azerbaijan Pavilion at the 58th International Art Exhibition in Venice). The latter employs the latest state-of-the-art machine learning algorithms to process 15,000 ornamental images from the archives of several museums and libraries.
Sampling and colliding all these images together, the Artificial Intelligence creates new and unlimited combinations based on the similarities between traditional ornaments.
The AI redefines the concept of repetition: patterns taken from the Azerbaijani tradition are recreated and the AI continuously builds alternatives upon them.
There are pros and cons in this infinite generation of patterns: new graphic signs and elements are generated on a continuous basis, and the machine never seems to run out of ideas or inspirations, so this is an exciting aspect. At the same time, the alternatives generated by the machine are perfect but cold, as they are the result of an artificial synthesis that has nothing to do with the historical authenticity of ornamental patterns, or with the traditional learning processes beyond the creation of such graphic elements that is usually handed down from generation to generation.
By accessing the data of authentic ornamental images, the AI becomes an invisible master that independently processes and generates new ideas, patterns, symbols and new concepts to update a culture. In this way the non-human intelligence replaces traditional craft tools and continuously generates new cultural developments as the AI blurs the boundaries between authentic traditional patterns and fake modern ones, between physical decorative motifs traced on paper or sculpted on walls and intangible digital ones. The final effect is that of staring at a dynamically digital kaleidoscope in constant flux that keeps on mutating under your very eyes.
What do crystal structures have in common with textiles and patterns? Many of us may be tempted to answer this question with a single word – nothing. Yet, by going back in time to 1951 and to the Festival of Britain, you may discover an interesting connection between textiles and the work of Helen Dick Megaw. The Irish crystallographer developed indeed patterns derived from images of crystal structures that were then incorporated in industrial products.
Born in 1907 in Dublin, Helen Dick Megaw studied in Dublin, Belfast and Cambridge. In 1915, the invention of X-ray crystallography allowed scientists to study the structures of atoms in molecules and crystals at a sub-microscopic level.
Megaw was fascinated by the architecture of crystals and, after graduating in 1930, she became a research student in crystallography under J. D. Bernal.
Her first speciality was the structure of ice: Megaw Island in the Antarctic was later on named in her honour.
She was awarded a PhD in 1934, followed by a Hertha Ayrton research scholarship and, in 1935, Megaw co-published with Bernal an influential method for fixing the position of hydrogen atoms (the Bernal-Megaw model).
After teaching for several years, in 1943 Megaw became an industrial crystallogropher with Philips Lamps where she worked out the crystal structure of an important industrial material, barium titanate, used in capacitors, pressure sensitive devices and other electrical and optical applications.
This material, which crystallises in the so-called perovskite structure (a perovskite is any material with the same type of crystal structure as calcium titanium oxide (CaTiO3), known as the perovskite structure, or XIIA2+VIB4+X2−3 , with the oxygen in the face centers), belongs to the class of materials known as ferroelectrics, originally discovered around 1935.
Its structure is of such significance that Megaw's name became associated with it and with perovskite structures in general. Megawite (CaSnO3), a perovskite-group mineral, is indeed named after her.
In 1945 Megaw returned to working with Bernal at Birkbeck College in London, before taking a post at the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge.
Impressed by the beauty of crystal structures, Megaw started thinking about how to introduce patterns made available by X-ray crystallography to designers.
In 1949 Megaw had a conversation with Mark Hartland Thomas, Chief Industrial Officer from the Council of Industrial, and was appointed scientific consultant for the Festival Pattern Group of the Festival of Britain in 1951.
The event was organised to promote the British manufacturing industry and innovations after World War II, bringing back optimism and faith in the future.
The project consisted in gathering the crystallographic images and crystal structure diamonds Megaw researched and passing them onto industrial designers who used them as the basis for decoration in the textiles and products displayed at the Festival.
The project involved 28 manufacturers (11 from the textile industry) who selected the crystal structure diagrams that suited them most. Among the others they opted for the structure of kaoliny, beryl, apophyllite, haemoglobin and insulin, all supplied by Megaw and other scientists.
Even though the project was strictly non-academic, scientific accuracy was an essential priority and Megaw and Thomas provided the manufacturers with feedback.
Mainly displayed at the Regatta Restaurant in the South Bank, the works of the Festival Pattern Group included a variety of patterned wallpapers, carpets, curtains, lace, dress fabrics and plates based on crystal structures. Colour choices varied and went from muted to more daring, but, as stated above, the main focus remained scientific accuracy.
Though some critics didn't like the idea, others found it fascinating: The Times, for example, highlighted that it was exciting to see something as destructive as a bomb applied to a design object.
After this project Megaw continued her researches: she published the volume Ferroelectricity in Crystals in 1957, and studied the crystal structure of feldspars, the materials that make up most of the earth's and moon's surface. She retired in 1972 and published a second book, Crystal Structures: a Working Approach, in 1973. Megaw died in 2002.
Megaw proved that there can be a strong connection between design and science and that professionals from both fields can influence each other.
Through her work she also reshifted the attention on female scientists: women excelled in X-ray crystallography and Helen Megaw is often remembered together with Dorothy Crowfoot (later Hodgkin), who became the third woman to be awarded the Nobel Prize for chemistry (and the only British woman ever to win a science Nobel Prize).
It would be intriguing to see a new project combining science and design/textiles in our days, maybe a more daring one as well (while there was an appetite for patterns based on atoms, only a few of the Festival Pattern Group designs were mass-produced, and even fewer were commercially successful), considering that now such a collaboration may be perceived in a different way. When it was first organised and while it was developed, the project was indeed kept secret mainly to protect the scientists' reputations as it may have been damaging for their careers if a scientist were associated to a design project.
Those who want to rediscover the textiles can do so at "The Art of Innovation: From Enlightenment to Dark Matter" exhibition (until 26th January 2020) at London's Science Museum. The event looks at the interaction between scientific progress and social change and features a few samples created by The Festival Pattern Group.
