Irenebrination: Notes on Architecture, Art, Fashion, Fashion Law, Science & Technology

Can Fashion Be Used to Raise Social Consciousness?

It was recently announced that fashion designer Peter Hidalgo, 53, died on January 17th in a homeless shelter in Manhattan. According to the reports, he was in the shelter hoping to qualify for subsidized housing.

Hidalgo, born in Santo Domingo, came from a creative family, but, while his father was a professional musician, he displayed a talent for illustration and fashion from an early age.

Selected by the fashion illustrator Antonio Lopez to enroll in a special studies course at The Altos de Chavon School of Design, an affiliate of Parsons School of Design, he earned the title of "Best Designer of the Year" from his school in 1987.

He then started creating clothes for local fashion boutiques and for private clients in the Dominican Republic where he also worked on set design for television and theater production companies.

In the 1990s he started travelling to New York and moved to Manhattan in 1994. While working as an in-house designer and designing the store windows in a West Village boutique, Hidalgo also became a well-known face in the House Ballroom Scene where Spanish-born fashion designer Miguel Adrover met him.

Eventually the two started working together and Hidalgo launched his own label when Adrover went back to Spain. Debuting in 2006, Hidalgo won the 2010 Fashion Group International's "Rising Star" award for women's wear, sharing it with Joseph Altuzarra.

He continued doing seasonal collections through 2013, but then shut his studio and mainly worked for private clients including Kanye West, Usher (he did suits for then for the 2011 MTV Music Video awards and the Grammy awards respectively) and Nicki Minaj who donned a Hidalgo gown (that looked like a modern interpretation of Dior's Tourterelle gown View this photo and betrayed Hidalgo's passion for classic fashion and Haute Couture) for the opening performance of the 2014 MTV Europe Music awards, which she also hosted.

In 2019, Hidalgo teamed with the artist David Salle and As If magazine for "The Collaboratory" project, designing a T-shirt dress, a cocktail and a strapless dress screen-printed with Salle's art that were modelled by actress Scarlett Johansson on As If. 

When Adrover's infamous repurposed Burberry raincoat was featured in the "Camp: Notes on Fashion" exhibition at the Met Museum's Costume Institute, the designer and Hidalgo updated it. 

Hidalgo's parable from success to homelessness brings memories of an ensemble made by his friend Miguel Adrover, who announced Hidalgo's death on his Instagram page.

Adrover was among the first designers who repurposed in a credible and fascinating way textiles and fabrics using impeccable deconstruction and reconstruction techniques that he employed to disassemble garments and make a critique of consumerism. 

He flipped Burberry macs inside out (obviously drawing the ire of the company that threatened a lawsuit at the time, asking that Adrover never use their plaid patterning again...), repurposed a Louis Vuitton bag into a mini-skirt, cut a Burberry blanket and re-pieced it in what he defined "Frankenstein-style", turned an American flag into a tailored jacket and shorts, added couture ruffled tulle sleeves to a simple "I love New York" T-shirt and fashioned shoulder pads out of New York Yankees baseball caps.

One of his most famous (and infamous...) creations was a coat and skirt ensemble matched with a vintage Fendi scarf with an interlocked "F" logo print included in his A/W 2000-2001 collection. The blue and white striped cotton twill of the Victorian-style overcoat, distressed and burnt on a stove in Adrover's basement on East 3rd St, was made using a mattress ticking. The discarded mattress belonged to the late Quentin Crisp. 

Adrover lived next to the English writer and actor and, after finding the mattress in the streets on a bitterly cold night covered by a thin layer of snow, he decided to rescue and salvage it and turn it into a garment to honour Quentin Crisp's memory. The designer dragged the mattress home and cut it (getting a rash from the textile as it was old and dirty...), then proceeded to create an elegant coat with it. This wasn't just a mere exercise in recycling and repurposing à la Margiela, but it had a deeply social purpose: while the tailored coat hinted at Quentin Crisp's style and the stained tickling established an intimate connection with him as a mattress is imprinted with the shape of the person who sleeps on it, with their smells and stains, becoming almost a tangible ghost of that person, the recontextualization of the textile hinted at homelessness.

By using the tickling to make a bespoke coat, Adrover attempted a comparison between middle-class, homeless, and upper-class people mixing on the sidewalks of New York City at the same time, and invited people to ponder about the dichotomy between uptown ladies and downtown ladies, at wealthy people in the latest fashion and at those people who don't own much and wear all their possessions everyday as they move around town, while also pointing at the policies on homelessness of the then Mayor Rudolph Giuliani.

In the '90s Giuliani proposed indeed to drastically curtail city services for the homeless, setting a limit of 90 days for stays in shelters and during his administration police conducted sweeps of parks and other public places to arrest homeless people and move them to shelters. 

Adrover's collection was political, representing how people fought to survive in the streets of New York, especially the homeless. Quentin's mattress as a tailored chic coat was the answer to a world that considers not just garments, but people as disposable. 

Or maybe people are more disposable than garments in the fashion industry, especially when you think about all those designers considered as geniuses one season who are then forgotten after a few years' time. Adrover's mattress overcoat together with the repurposed Burberry overcoat entered indeed the Metropolitan Museum's Costume Institute's permanent collection; Adrover nowadays keeps on doing his repurposing experiments in Spain, but he hasn't done a proper collection for quite a few years, while Hidalgo passed away. Maybe we should ponder more about how fashion can make or break you, and how it could still be used to make a powerful comment about society and raise social consciousness, rather than just make a single style statement. 

Inspirations for the Year of the Tiger From Vintage Fashion, Contemporary Collections & Art

Most brands nowadays launch special products or capsule collections to celebrate Chinese New Year (falling on 1st February 2022) and win in this way the loyalty of the Asian markets.

Oriental inspirations have always been trendy in fashion: the Orient was, for example, a popular theme in the '70s in New York, as proved by an issue of Life (December 10th, 1971). On the cover of the magazine a model donned a jacket decorated with red lacquered Chinese character-shaped scatter pins (meaning happiness, love and luck) by Willie Woo, "the enfant terrible of the costume jewelry world".

Inside the magazine a fashion reportage focused on all the latest collections inspired by the Orient: Halston created an elegant black "Dragon Lady" dress matched with Elsa Peretti's "Bone" cuff for Tiffany's and reinvented the Mao suit in a sensual key (matching it with a Peretti belt), the result was an Americanisation of this garment. 

Giorgio di Sant'Angelo was inspired by the splendour of the Orient and created instead rich designs patterned after ancient costumes, some of them in cotton upholstery chintz. 

The Chinese zodiac gives each year an animal sign and 2022 is the Year of the Tiger, so most collections celebrating Chinese New Year at the moment feature images of a tiger. 

Chinese born but New York-based designer Vivienne Tam for example created, in celebration of the Year of the Tiger an exclusive Pop Pop Tiger (普普藝虎) collection for the Shop at The M+, one of the largest museums of modern and contemporary visual culture in the world. The collection includes a range of garments and objects, from T-shirts, scarves and totes to face masks, postcards and prints.

The M+ Shop is also exclusively launching Tam's Tiger Together (老虎家族) collection, featuring garments such as T-shirts, Cheongsam Tops and dresses with a checkerboard of laughing tigers in pop colours and playful expressions, an idea directly connected with Vivienne Tam's early collections and with Andy Warhol's Pop Art portraits, that also hints at the current craze for NFTs portraying the same character, often an animal, with different traits and visual attributes (Bored Ape Yacht Club anybody?).

Those who prefer art to fashion can enjoy spotting tigers in paintings, sculptures and installations in museums all over the world. An example of a very unusual tiger is the mixed-media installation "1st Class" (2011) by pioneering Chinese contemporary artist Xu Bing, that was part of the exhibition "The Allure of Matter" last year at LACMA.

From a distance, the installation looks like a tiger skin rug, but if you get nearer you will discover that the "rug" is actually made with painstakingly arranged cigarettes that form the stripes of a tiger.

Xu Bing is well-known for his language based projects like his experiments with the Chinese written script that led him to create nonsensical Chinese characters and his transformation of English into legible Chinese characters.

Made with 500,000 "1st Class" brand cigarettes, Xu Bing's "1st Class" is part of his "Tobacco Project" (2000-2011), a research on tobacco, its consumption and global circulation. Using tobacco as both material and subject, the artist explored the history and production of the cigarette global trade and marketing, reminding us that tobacco was one of the first products from the United States to enter the Chinese market. The works that are part of this project can be seen as a way to comment on the US-China connection and explore the interwoven histories of the global economy, commodities, and Chinese art history.

While "1st Class" is obviously not your usual image of a tiger wishing happiness and good luck, it remains fascinating and inspiring for the way its creator used this material, arranging the cigarettes to form tiger stripes.
 

The Fantasy in Bloom That May Lead to a Slower Approach to Fashion: Rahul Mishra Haute Couture S/S 2022

Covid changed most of us in one way or another: while it kept us apart from dear ones, in some cases it also pushed us to think and consider our lives and work. Confined in his home country, India, designer Rahul Mishra didn't stop dreaming even when he and his family got Covid.

Passionate about nature, he started thinking about a home and studio in the Himalaya region, where he could create far away from distractions and just surrounded by striking views, colourful flowers and rare butterflies.

The dream became more real recently as he actually bought land in the Himalayan state of Uttarakhand, India. Here he hopes to build one day a sustainable home with a sublime mountain view, surrounded by nature and immersed in the purest air. In the meantime, as it takes time to build a proper house, he has transferred this obsession for a full immersion in nature in his new Haute Couture collection.

Entitled "The Enchanted", Mishra's new designs could be considered as studies of flowers and landscapes, interpreted in three ways: in the first case, the designer moved from the shapes of flowers, coming up with mini-dresses made of delicate pink and white petals that turned his models into flower girls. Volumes and puffed-up bubble-like silhouettes also contributed to recreate the silhouettes of flowers.

In the second case Mishra let flowers bloom and monarch butterflies fly on his suits and dresses: he literally covered these designs with three-dimensional embroidered floral tapestries and butterflies. For a while now, Mishra has been using butterflies as metaphors for the craftspeople working for him, they are indeed butterflies who must be protected by providing them with work. 

In the third instance he reinterpreted the perspectives and views at different times of the day using the fabric as a canvas and reproducing on it a landscape complete with sky and clouds, green hills and colourful flowers.

The embroideries of the flowers weren't actually the result of the designer kaleidoscopic imagination, but inspired by real flowers that he captured on his mobile phone. 

To accompany the collection Mishra also shot a video in a studio in Delhi: the atmosphere is unreal and fable-like, you can clearly see this is an artificial environment recreated inside and in a few scenes the lights hint at a futuristic space as if the models had just landed on a planet in bloom not with delicate flowers but with a poisonous vegetation.

Some may found Mishra's designs such as his bright tulle dresses and tulle ruffled tops with flower or butterfly appliqués matched with sequined trousers, maybe a bit too much (besides, a furry blue design covered in butterflies was a bit too reminiscent of a purple butterfly design in Moschino by Jeremy Scott's S/S 2018 collection View this photo and that may have been avoided), but there are skills to appreciate behind these pieces - some of them took indeed 2,000 hours to make.

Mishra supports sustainability and slow fashion and has currently got a team of 1,000 artisans divided between small villages and his 50,000-square-foot factory in the Noida suburb of New Delhi where around 300 people work. So, while this may be an enchanted collection about fantasy for Mishra, his hope to slow down fashion (the principle of slowing down production is an idea rooted in the Gandhian philosophy the designer studied at the National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad) and support artisans with work, may lead Mishra for real to a new and more ethical approach to fashion.

The Pencil Is Mightier Than the Sword: Lily Renée, Holocaust Survivor & Comic Book Pioneer

Comics are full of superheroes, extraordinary beings gifted with amazing powers who can save the world from all sorts of menaces, from assorted criminals and villains to aliens and monsters. Yet, at times, life unexpectedly turns us into unlikely heroes and heroines as it happened to comic book artist Lily Renée.

Born in 1921, in Vienna, Austria, Lily Renée Phillips (née Willheim) came from a well-off Viennese Jewish family. As a child she was surrounded by art and culture from an early age: her parents would take her to ballet and opera performances and she would often visit art museums, drawing as a hobby.

Her life dramatically changed, though, in 1938, when the Nazi army invaded Austria. When Germany and Austria formed a union, Willheim's family, like all the other Jews living in the country, found themselves in great danger. Her parents managed to put her on the Kindertransport and, at 14, Willheim left behind her parents in Nazi-occupied Austria, arriving in Leeds, England.

Things were hard as the young girl had to work as a servant, nanny, caretaker and candy striper (taking newborn babies down the shelter during the Blitz). When she was 16, she received a letter from her parents explaining they had emigrated to America and sending for her. Accused of being a spy and put on the list of "enemy aliens," which meant she was forbidden to leave England, she eventually managed to board a ship. She joined her parents in New York, living in one room under the roof in a building on 72nd Street on the West Side.

Lily started doing all sorts of odd jobs, from painting Tyrolean designs on wooden boxes to drawing catalogs for Woolworth's for 50 cents an hour and posing as a model for fashion illustrator Jane Turner. In the meantime, she also took night classes at the Art Students League and the School of Visual Arts.

In 1942 her mother spotted an ad in the paper for comic artists: Fiction House was looking for women to replace its male artists drafted into World War II. Unsure as she didn't know anything about comics, young Lily applied and was hired on a trial basis.

She first started with basic and dull jobs like erasing mistakes and notes in pencil on other illustrators' drawings, then became a penciler and inker, working alongside other female comic illustrators and writers including Nina Albright and Fran Hopper. Her first pencilling job was for the comic book "Jane Martin", about a clever and beautiful female pilot (she was actually first a nurse, then a pilot and a spy) in the male-dominated aviation industry.

Then she got a full strip, "The Werewolf Hunter", and became the illustrator of the series. The strip, about a professor and monster hunter, featured a lot of animals and costuming and allowed Lily Renée to integrate in it her passion for Viennese art and German fairy tales.

Other work included the science-fiction feature "The Lost World", but her big break came in 1944 when she took over "Señorita Rio", created by artist Nick Viscardi (later Nick Cardy) in 1942.

Renée soon became associated with the character, a glamorous and athletic actress called Rita Farrar who becomes a spy for the US government. The protagonist of the story, who fights the Nazis in Central and South America to revenge the death of her boyfriend, suited Renée, and her life as a Jewish war refugee in England and probably informed in some way this character. Renée couldn’t beat the Nazis in Austria, but, through Señorita Rio, she fought them on the page, using the pencil as a weapon that was mightier than a sword. 

Renée then worked with her artist husband Eric Peters at St. John Publications, penciling and inking Abbott & Costello Comics, while she also drew romance stories in issues of St. John's Teen-Age Diary Secrets and Teen-Age Romances.

While working as a comic book artist she often signed herself L. Renée using her first and middle names as a pen name, so people thought she was a man, but Lily is actually one of the earliest women in the comic-book industry.

Renée also wrote two children's books, "Red is the Heart" and "Magic Next Door", illustrated the book "Battle of the Bees" by Carl Ewald and a version of Aesop's Fables and wrote five plays. 

There is a component of fashion in Lily Renée's comics: at times Señorita Rio donned clothes inspired by Mexican and Latin-American cultures; in other cases she was transformed into a femme fatale with a high fashion wardrobe. In both cases she looked fierce and indomitable (Señorita Rio looked simply stunning in red...) and was portrayed in sets that were at times reminiscent of German expressionist films.

"Señorita Rio was a fantasy for me. She got clothes that I couldn't have, she had a leopard coat and she wore high-end shoes and had grand adventures and was very daring and beautiful and glamorous," Lily Renée states about this heroine at the end of "Lily Renée, Escape Artist: From Holocaust Survivor to Comic Book Pioneer" (Graphic Universe, 2011), a graphic novel about her life 

There is also a component of fashion in Lily Renée's life as she designed textiles for Lanz of California, and jewelry for Willie Woo, also known as "the enfant terrible of the costume jewelry world". Her life is worthy of a film and let's hope that at some point there will be one about her.

In the meantime, you can read the graphic novel about her, "Lily Renée, Escape Artist: From Holocaust Survivor to Comic Book Pioneer" (Graphic Universe, 2011). The story was written by comic artist and historian Trina Robbins, and illustrated by Anne Timmons and Mo Oh. It chronicles Phillips' escape from the Nazis and her early years at Fiction House and has some fashion references when we see Lily posing for Jane Turner in elegant outfits, but then going home in her outmoded dress as she couldn't afford anything else; or when she gets a bonus at the publishing house and can finally buy some new clothes for her and for her mother.

Today it is International Holocaust Remembrance Day, and we commemorate the killing of six million Jews and millions of others by the Nazi regime and its collaborators, so this is a perfect volume to read and ponder about this human tragedy and also learn more about the life of an extraordinary woman (please note, there is a mistake in the history section at the end of the book - the name of the boat sunk by the U-Boat is Arandora Star and some people survived the disaster).

Arty Campaign or Casual Coincidence? (Acne S/S 22 Vs Joana Vasconcelos)

In the last few posts we looked at legal matters, copyright infringements, designers getting inspired by rare antique pieces and a collective or artists turning an exercise in trademark infringement into a work of art. But sometimes you wonder if also certain campaigns that you spot on the Internet may be hiding some form of copyright infringement when they bear some visual resemblance to the work of a specific artist and if artists may be able to prove it.

Take the latest Acne Studios campaign for the brand's S/S 22 women's collection: photographed by Kacper Kasprzyk, with a set design by Aron Heinemann, the campaign, unveiled on Instagram, features Margo Whitley in a crocheted bodysuit.

Whitley moves in an environment covered in crochet doilies, actually everything seems to be covered in crocheted pieces, even her massive platform sandals, while her handbag looks like an assemblage of crocheted pieces.

The effect is very reminiscent of artworks by Joana Vasconcelos covered in Azores crocheted lace, such as her piano, textile pieces or earthenware animal sculptures by Rafael Bordalo Pinheiro.

Was the campaign inspired by her? Who knows, nobody has acknowledged her so far, so this may just be a weird coincidence and casual correspondence. But if it weren't, it would be legally intriguing to see how a lawyer or a judge would move to find a solution for such a case.

Trademark Infringement as a Work of Art: "Cease & Desist Grand Prix" by MSCHF

In the last few posts, we looked at a copyright infringement case and at contemporary designs that bear some resemblance with creations from a few decades ago or with rare antique pieces. Quite often everybody seems to be copying each other or infringing someone else's copyright and trademarks. Legal matters have therefore become as trendy as ever nowadays, with big brands lamenting the damages caused by counterfeit products, designers who often seem to rip off each other and students claiming their work was stolen by fashion designers and houses.

It was only natural therefore for MSCHF, a conceptual art collective known for a wide range of interventions engaging fashion, art and technology (you may remember their controversial "Satan Shoes" that attracted Nike's ire), to come up with a new drop aimed at provoking companies and to get a "Cease & Desist" letter from them.

The ironic project entitled "Cease & Desist Grand Prix" was launched yesterday: it consists in inviting consumers to buy from MSCHF's site a shirt that illegally incorporates logos of major companies (at the time of writing all the shirts are sold out).

The first company infringed upon that sends a Cease & Desist letter to MSCHF, will help shoppers who bought the shirt with a print of their logo winning a Grand Prix hat.

All the eight companies involved - Amazon, Coca-Cola, Disney, Microsoft, Starbucks, Subway, Tesla and Walmart - are large enough to be worth infringing upon, according to MSCHF, and all of them tend to be very alert when it comes to copyright infringements. 

While MSCHF is perfectly on trend with the "Cease & Desist Grand Prix", the idea behind the project is not merely that of provoking these huge companies: MSCHF receives so many "Cease & Desist" letters that they thought they could turn them into an artwork and comment in this way about the state of American copyright law that too often protects large companies (it is practically impossible for an independent creative mind to sue a huge group or company as nobody has the financial resources these giants have...). 

Yet MSCHF didn't maybe expect to see some companies embracing their project: Subway didn't seem too bothered and took the "Cease & Desist Grand Prix" with irony, posting on Twitter a shirt with MSCHF's logo and tweeting, "Two can play at this game. Who's interested in this bad boy? Hurry before @mschf shuts us down."

Maybe not all companies are ready to stop sending "Cease & Desist" letters to artists, but some of them may be willing to have a good laugh with the artists involved or maybe to establish not a collaboration but the same relationship that existed between Campbell's and Andy Warhol, that may grant them the permission to use certain logos in the artistic realm to make a comment about society, capitalism and consumer alienation without being intimidated by long and expensive legal battles.

The Auction House as a Trendsetter: From Sotheby's Mughal Spectacles to Tiffany's & Pharrell Williams' Partnership

It is undeniable: some auction houses have become trendsetters and not just for their attention to new forms of art like NFTs. Visit Sotheby's site, watch their videos, read about their auctions and discover inspiring lots, rare trinkets, vintage fashion pieces and intriguing juxtapositions between art and textiles. Yes, that's true, most of us can only look at these pieces, especially when it comes to rare fine jewels, as these sparkling gems, decadent diamonds, alluring aquamarines and magnificent opals are destined to the very few billionaires of the world. That said, we can all pretend we are shopping for something extraordinarily unique from an exclusive auction or from the vault of an eclectic collector.

Quite often these auctions end up being almost more educational than a museum visit, after all, official institutions may not have the money to buy certain pieces or they may not be interested. So the current selections offered by auction houses end up providing creative minds with some truly wonderful ideas. Obviously, I'm not the only one who feels this way. Tiffany's and Pharrell Williams seem engaged in the same window-shopping exercise at exclusive auctions that many of us are finding so entertaining and almost even educational.

Yesterday, at Kenzo's show in Paris, Pharrell Williams donned sunglasses rimmed in diamonds and with an emerald studding on each temple. He didn't give us the details, but he announced a new design collaboration - or rather partnership (maybe to be unveiled next year) - with Tiffany & Co, now owned by LVMH. The exquisite sunglasses were just a sample, an idea of what may follow. This is actually not the first time Williams tries his hand at jewelry design: in 2008 he collaborated with Louis Vuitton on a fine jewelry collection and, being a Chanel ambassador, he often wears the French house's pieces.

The problem with these sunglasses, though, was that they aren't that original: they are indeed the revised version of two pairs of extraordinarily unique spectacles, incorporating lenses made of emerald and diamond rather than glass, that were on auction last year at Sotheby's.

The jewel-encrusted spectacles, believed to have originally belonged to royals in the Mughal Empire which once ruled over the Indian subcontinent, were part of the Arts of the Islamic World & India auction that took place last October and they were exhibited to the public in Hong Kong and London.

On Sotheby's auction catalogue the magnificent artefacts were described by William Dalrymple, Writer & Historian as "the work of a supreme master, both of gemstones and of optics. This is a slice of diamond and a slice of emerald; through which you can see."

The "Emeralds for Paradise" spectacles featured emerald lenses (from gemstones from the Muzo mines, at the foothills of the Colombian Andes; the richness of their saturation and depth of their green hue is an indicator of their origin) in diamond-mounted frames.

The drop-shape lenses (of approximately 20mm width, 30mm length and 2.95mm thickness) from the 17th century (circa) were made from two flat cut emeralds, and set in a silver frame (19th century) mounted with old-cut smaller diamonds and emeralds. The spectacles look exotic and glamorous, something that the Wizard of Oz may wear.

The second pair of spectacles, dubbed "Diamonds for Light", had transparent diamond lenses in an ovoid-like form (measuring approximately 26mm in length and 1.60mm in thickness). In this case the diamonds probably came from the famous Golconda mines of Southern India, known for supplying the largest diamonds to the Mughal treasuries (the region produced some of the most famous diamonds in the world). The spectacles got this name for the association of diamonds with light and the Muslim symbolism of light with the presence of God.

While the extraordinary pieces appeared on the market only last year at Sotheby's and were previously unseen, there are lengthy and scholarly researches about them as their conception and production fascinated many. The two pairs of spectacles bring indeed together science, beauty and belief.

Researchers were mainly fascinated about the way the gems (the lenses were made from a single 300-carat emerald and a single 200-carat diamond, possibly the largest ever found) were sliced to create the lenses as this stage would have required extraordinary technical skills and mastery (remember that the Mughal gemstone cutters carved them by hand…).

Another aspect that fascinated the researchers that studied the emerald spectacles is the Islamic association (the Mughal rulers practiced Islam) of the colour green with that of paradise, salvation and eternity. Emeralds were indeed held to have miraculous healing powers and to ward off evil.

According to Pliny the Elder's "Natural History", emerald could soothe the eyes; Emperor Nero used emeralds to watch the gory gladiator combats, thus protecting his sight from the bloody scenes, while beryls framed as spectacles were also found among the belongings of Charles V of France, confirming their status as reserved for Emperors and Kings. Mughal emperor Shah Jahan is said to have used emeralds to soothe his tired eyes after weeping for days following the death of his wife Mumtaz Mahal (for whom he built the Taj Mahal).

The frames of the spectacles also had a very interesting story: the lenses were probably part of an optical apparatus, probably in the form of a pince-nez. This style of glasses was favoured by Jesuit missionaries and their arrival at the Mughal Court at the end of the 1570s may have also influenced the spectacles' original frames.

Pince-nez often appeared in artworks found at the Mughal court such as Farrukh Beg's "Miniature with a Sufi Sage, after the European Personification of Melancholia" (Folio from an album belonging to Shah Jahan, ruler of the Mughal Empire. Ca. 1615-1616; if you analyse it carefully, you will spot two pairs of pince-nez on a table).

The lenses were later integrated into new frames (in silver for the emerald spectacles; gold for the diamond ones), that could probably be dated around the 1890s. The frames were decorated with rose-cut diamonds set in the Pachchikam technique, incorporating at the same time a European open claw design, popular in the 18th-19th century. When the emerald and diamond Mughal spectacles were auctioned, chairman of Sotheby's Middle East and India, Edward Gibbs stated in an interview, "As far as we know, there are no others like them." Well, now there is another pair around, a copy of those spectacles. 

Pharrell Williams' spectacles for Tiffany call to mind for their shape, use of diamond frame and single emerald studding on the temple, the emerald Mughal spectacles. In this new version, though, Tiffany replaced the emerald lenses with dark ones, something that transformed the concept behind the glasses, that turn from a masterpiece of craftsman with mysterious healing power into a high-end accessory. 

You do not need to wonder why Tiffany had to copy these magnificent artefacts, you can perfectly guess it - nobody can indeed sue you if you copy an extremely rare artefact from the Mughal era (besides, let's face it, they may be from the Mughal era, but they look remarkably on-trend...).

As members of hip-hop groups can often be spotted wearing diamond-studded spectacles, producing such a design is obviously a way to reach out to more fashionable, younger and extremely wealthy consumers. LVMH, Tiffany & Co.'s new owner, is also hoping to renew the historical jewelry house, through super hip collaborators like Williams. 

 At the end of last year Tiffany and cult streetwear brand Supreme came together releasing a logo T-shirt in Tiffany blue (Pantone 1837 C; rather than Supreme red), a bracelet, a pearl necklace, a heart tag pendant, heart tag earrings, and two keyrings, one of them featuring a pocket knife shaped like a key. The problem with such collaborations is that they generate immediate media revenue, but they do not contribute to create the next Elsa Peretti.

The Italian-born former Halston model who became a jewelry designer, created for Tiffany a series of iconic designs, from the diamonds and pearls "by the yard" concept and mesh pieces to her "Bone" cuffs, a fluid design incorporating organic forms that pay homage to the human body. Available in its small, medium and large version, this piece moved from anatomy as it consisted in a wide metal band with a protuberance that allows the bracelet to fit comfortably over the wrist bone.
 
Jumping on the hippest bandwagon is definitely rewarding for what regards social media, but lethal in the long run: Pharrell Williams in his amazing diamond spectacles was a perfectly Instagrammable moment with the potential of getting the media revenue skyrocketing, but Peretti's bone cuff remains an iconic piece that even mere mortals may be able to afford (if you opt for the small version in silver or black finish over copper).

Peretti's pure, minimalist and timeless designs had an important role in Tiffany's net sales, but they made history mainly because they were created for women who could buy the pieces for themselves (rather than being gifted them by men...).

Tiffany's diamond spectacles donned yesterday by Pharrell Williams remind us about two things: first and foremost while the Mughal Empire was renowned for advancing jewelry craftsmanship across South Asia and had master artisans, we, in 2022, have simply finished original ideas; second, while there will always be a sort of insurmountable gap between certain brands such as Tiffany's and most consumers out there, there is still something that definitely unites us mere mortals with them - a passion for looking at antiques on sale from top auction houses, with the difference that we can only desire such pieces, they, instead, are able to reproduce and resell them as well.

Everything Is Illuminated (Even When It's Not That Conceptually Strong): Loewe Vs Cinzia Ruggeri

Fashion is made of cycles, rhythms and patterns that keep on coming back almost on a loop and the older you get, the more you're able to spot certain ideas, inspirations and nuances. Take Loewe's A/W 22-23 menswear collection, for example.  

Creative director J.W. Anderson went down the surreal and bizarre path with these new designs: taking the piss out of our collective obsession with tecnology and the metaverse, he opted for fun items such as hems of shirts and shorts waistbands that seemed detached from the models' bodies like in a distorted digital picture on which a crazy filter had been added; T-shirts with prints of bodies and faces that created optical illusions and more random mad pieces such as a coat integrating metal sink eyelets rather than more ordinary grommets. 

The collection also featured bodysuits and clinging tops that incorporated fairy lights, while the sleeves and lapels of coats and trench coats blinked with tiny dots of lights.

The designer here was making a reference to the fact that, as we often stare at our mobile phones, the screens lit up our faces, so in this case the wearer is backlit. Throughout the last few years we have seen a proliferation of garments integrating wearable technologies, but the main attempt of the designer in this collection wasn't creating highly technological pieces.

The collection featured indeed quite a few Instagrammable pieces, some of them unwearable as well, but designed only for the purpose of the show. Still, the meaning attached to some of the designs, especially the luminous ones was maybe a bit superficial. 

The garments integrating lights also called to mind the first LED garments designed in the '80s and in particular Cinzia Ruggeri's LED dress and her suit with luminous elements that futuristically traced a silhouette in the space surrounding the wearer (entitled: "Evolution of the silhouette rendered in terraces, to favour excursions through wintry geometries with luminous signals for UFC (Unidentifed Flying Clothes)"). Ruggeri's designs returned throughout the decades in more technological forms and interpretations. 

Yet there is a key difference between Loewe's and Ruggeri's designs: Ruggeri's dress was an early experiment that was filed in the history of fashion under the "behavioural garments" category. A shy wearer or a wearer who had a speech impairment may have used to reach out and communicate, the late designer once explained. Ruggeri recounted indeed that she lent the dress to a friend for a party where also Umberto Eco had been invited. As he passed next to her, Ruggeri's friend switched on the lights via an embedded button in the belt to acknowledge the presence of the honourable guest, creating a surprising effect.

In Loewe's collection (that also includes sweaters with built-in gloves with fingers sprouting streamers View this photo, in a way vaguely reminiscent of Ruggeri's gloves sprouting grass View this photo - who knows, maybe Anderson is a fan of Ruggeri...) the conceptual message is less relevant and more passive - our lives are backlit through phones, so what? The thing is, nowadays in fashion it doesn't matter if something is not so conceptually strong, as long as it is visually striking and proves immediately Instagrammable.

Freedom of Expression or Copyright Infringement? Hermès Vs Mason Rothschild's MetaBirkins

We have recently seen how even the most unexpected characters out there are jumping on the non-fungible token (NFT) bandwagon. But the NFT bandwagon is also attracting legal cases based on copyright and dilution infringements. In the last few days, for example, there has been the case of Hermès suing American artist Mason Rothschild over NFTs inspired by the French luxury house's famous Birkin bags.

In May 2021 Rothschild launched a single "Baby Birkin" NFT in collaboration with Eric Ramirez. The NFT consisted in the animation of a 40-week-old fetus growing in a transparent Hermès' Birkin bag, launched on the curated social and shopping platform Basic.Space and sold for about $47,000. In that case Hermès didn't contact the authors to complain about the NFT as that was just a one-off.

A few months later, in November 2021, Mason Rothschild launched instead 100 "MetaBirkin" NFTs and an Instagram account linked to the project: the artist's MetaBirkins are essentially Hermès' Birkin bags reinvented in bright coloured fuzzy faux fur. Some of them are also inspired by artworks by Van Gogh, Goya, Dali, Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Hokusai, Twombly, Rothko and Maurizio Cattelan. The NFTs were launched and sold on the OpenSea platform.

A month later Rothschild received a cease and desist letter from Hermès. On his Instagram page the artist wrote: "The First Amendment gives me every right to create art based on my interpretations of the world around me (…) MetaBirkins is a playful abstraction of an existing fashion-culture landmark. I re-interpreted the form, materiality and name of a known cultural touchpoint. MetaBirkins are also a commentary on fashion’s history of animal cruelty and its current embrace of fur-free initiatives and alternative textiles."

The artist also sent a message to OpenSea, as the latter agreed with Hermès request and removed the MetaBirkins from its platform (Rothschild started selling them on Rarible, another NFT platform).

After receiving Hermès' letter, the artist added a disclaimer on his site stating: "We are not affiliated, associated, authorized, endorsed by, or in any way officially connected with HERMÈS, or any of its subsidiaries or its affiliates. The official HERMÈS website can be found at www.Hermès.com."

Yet the saga continued with a trademark lawsuit (Hermès International et al. v. Mason Rothschild), filed by the French luxury company. Rothschild is currently accused of trademark infringement, false designation of origin, trademark dilution, cybersquatting, and injury to business reputation and dilution under New York General Business Law.

Rothschild took again to Instagram to explain that his lawyers at Lex Lumina PLLC highlighted that the First Amendment in the US Constitution gives him the right to make and sell art depicting Birkin bags, "just as it gave Andy Warhol the right to make and sell art depicting Campbell's soup cans."

That's an interesting example, but maybe that doesn't apply to him: Warhol was sued for other works that he appropriated such as the flower photograph by Patricia Caulfield, but Campbell's was instead happy to see their product on the walls of museums and collectors' homes. Warhol did not seek permission to use the cans from the soup company as Campbell's Soup artworks were seen as non-infringing because it was clear to the public that it would have been unlikely for the company to sponsor paintings. The use of the cans remained in the artistic realm and Warhol didn't do commercial products such as T-shirts, so Campbell didn't complain.

Now there are different issues to consider when it comes to the Hermès / Rothschild case. The French luxury house accused Rothschild of trying to get rich by appropriating the name of its famous bag, stating: "Defendant is a digital speculator who is seeking to get rich quick by appropriating the brand METABIRKINS for use in creating, marketing, selling, and facilitating the exchange of digital assets known as non-fungible tokens ('NFTs'). Defendant's METABIRKINS brand simply rips off Hermès' famous BIRKIN trademark by adding the generic prefix 'meta' to the famous trademark BIRKIN. 'Meta' and 'metaverse' refer to virtual worlds and economies where digital assets such as NFTs can be sold and traded."

In favour of Hermès you can argue that while consumers may have been aware of the distinction between Campbell's soup and paintings representing a can of Campbell's soup, the Hermès / Rothschild case may be more complex as nowadays we all hear about this or that collaboration between an artist and a fashion house, so some consumers may genuinely believe this is an official partnership. Besides, Rothschild added a disclaimer on his page, but he didn't add the disclaimer on any of the other channels selling or promoting his NFTs.

As stated in Hermès' claim, the Defendant's activities, "create the false and misleading impression that Defendant is sanctioned, assigned or authorized by Hermès to use the BIRKIN Mark to advertise, manufacture, distribute, appraise, offer for sale or sell infringing products bearing the BIRKIN Mark when Defendant is not so authorized."

The prices of the NFTs contributes to generate confusion: a Birkin handbag is an exclusive piece of luxury that can be bought only by people on a mysterious waiting list. The bag is extremely expensive going from $9,000 to hundreds of thousands of dollars and even millions, as proved by the Birkin bags you spot at auctions (Birkins current available from Sotheby's reach $65,000).  

Besides, while Rothschild mentions Freedom of Expression to use the name MetaBirkin, he was very annoyed when other people took his idea and started producing "fake MetaBirkin", that had him complain about possible infringements of "his" copyright.   

Rothschild may have appealed to parody if the project aimed at satirising fashion or art, but he stated he had more serious intents and claimed that the project was a critique of the fashion system as well.

Maybe a safer way out for Rothschild, apart from pointing out the differences (the material - faux fur and fur patterns never used in Birkin bags) would be to insist on the "metaverse" aspect of his project: Hermès and other fashion companies are registered in specific fields, they can sell perfumes, accessories, garments and in some cases home décor items. But most of them aren't registered to sell digital products in the metaverse. Birkin is a name registered indeed in connection with leather goods, and not in connection with virtual products.

So the most important aspect of this case is if the court establishes that, to be able to prove a possible infringement of copyright, Hermès should be registered as producing also digital products (or do specific rights automatically extend to the digital space and the metaverse, so that it will not be necessary to register digital designs separately?)

As things stand the situation may be further complicated: Hermès is seeking monetary damages, including Rothschild’s profits (according to OpenSea that amounts to over 200 Ethereum, around $900,000) and wants Rothschild to transfer the MetaBirkins.com domain to it and to "deliver up for destruction to Hermès all unauthorized products and advertisements in his possession or under his control bearing any of Hermès' Federally Registered Trademarks or any simulation, reproduction, counterfeit, copy or colorable imitation."

But NFTs are stored on the blockchain where records cannot be altered once they are entered; and if an NFT of a Birkin that was sold became inaccessible, the individual owners of the allegedly infringing NFTs would be damaged (and will Hermès also end up going after them? and is it actually legal to go after the people who bought a MetaBirkin NFT, if the non-fungible token in question is not actually a picture of a bag infringing someone's copyright, but a smart contract and lines of code on the blockchain?). So there is a lot to be decided by the court here, besides, what may happen if a contemporary artist that Rothschild took inspiration from for one of his Birkins - say Cattelan - or if a museum preserving a painting Rothschild moved from for one of his bags decided also to sue? 

What could have been the best solution? A collaboration. After all the MetaBirkins look cool enough to be desirable, at times cooler than original Birkin bags, and Hermès isn't at the moment producing any NFTs nor virtual accessories.

In previous posts we have looked at bootlegged designs that are more desirable than original pieces and at fashion houses ending up collaborating with people that only a few decades ago they would have sued (think Dapper Dan).

More recently we saw Los Angeles-based streetwear brand Cloney, that usually produces parody designs, releasing a Covid-19 vaccine inspired black hoodie with the trademark Valentino "V" signature logo accompanied by the word "Vaccinated" in Valentino red. Valentino Creative Director Pierpaolo Piccioli bought five hoodies, kept one for himself and gifted the others to friends. Then, humoured by the design and realising its potential, Piccioli decided to actually contact the brand's founder, Duke Christian George III, but not to sue him. Together they reached indeed an agreement, turned the hoodie into a Valentino x Cloney collaboration and produced the same hoodies featuring both logos (100% of the profits from the project were donated to UNICEF to support its work with the World Health Organization's global COVAX program).

Hermès may have arranged a similar solution rather than getting angry at not having thought about such an idea before Rothschild. Maybe that was what Rothschild was hoping for, attracting the attention of the luxury fashion house with an unsolicited unofficial project that may have scored him a proper collaboration, something that didn't happen.

The case teaches us that, while artists should maybe be more careful and aware of copyright issues, companies should also realise that artists, independent designers and bootleggers quite often have better ideas than their own teams and that collaborating with them may be a better solution than starting complex litigation procedures.

Will Melania Trump's NFTs Shed Any Light on Her Puzzling Style Choices?

Since NFTs (Non-Fungible Tokens) became trendy last year after Beeple's purely digital work set a record in March, selling at $69,346,250 USD, many people - maybe too many - jumped on the non-fungible token bandwagon. There is undoubtedly some great digital art out there, but there are also cringing commercial experiments. One of the latest and most unexpected supporters of non-fungible tokens is, surprisingly, Melania Trump. In December the former First Lady of the United States announced she was going to release from then on NFTs in regular intervals.

"I am proud to announce my new NFT endeavor, which embodies my passion for the arts and will support my ongoing commitment to children through my Be Best initiative," Mrs. Trump claimed in an official statement.

The first NFT was entitled "Melania's Vision" and consisted in a watercolor of her eyes by Marc-Antoine Coulon. Available for two weeks in December 2021, the limited-edition digital artwork was sold at 1 Solana, a form of cryptocurrency like Bitcoin or Ethereum, or $150, and also included an audio message from Mrs. Trump ("My vision is: look forward with inspiration, strength, and courage"). Melania's NFTs are currently minted on the Solana blockchain, but a representative of Solana spoke to disassociate the blockchain from any political connection and explained that the former First Lady's project was not part of any Solana-led initiative.

A new item became available earlier on in January - "The Head of State Collection". This package is a commemoration of the Trump Administration's first official state visit and it actually includes three items: the white broad-brimmed hat Melania donned to receive President Macron of France (the French president and his wife were the first official visitors to the White House in April 2018), described on Melania's site as "iconic" and "one-of-a-kind" and designed by Hervé Pierre, the French-born, New York designer-turned-stylist; an original watercolor on paper by Marc-Antoine Coulon portraying Melania in the hat and a non-fungible token of the same watercolor with a detail in motion (Download Melania_NFT_Hat). The starting bid was set at approximately 1.800 SOL or $218,160.00 for the group.

Melania is apparently trying to do some good through the sale as a portion of the proceeds derived from this auction (even though they don't tell us how much...) will provide foster care children with access to computer science and technology education. 

NFTs, considered as dubious artworks by skeptical art critics, are already controversial, but you wonder why Melania jumped on this bandwagon. It's not rare to see biographies or even documentaries about former first ladies, recounting their time at the White House, but Melania seems to be hoping to profit opting for a completely new approach.

Who knows, maybe her next NFTs will be interesting from a fashion point of view: the former First Lady often had many of us wondering what was she thinking when she opted for specific ensembles, such as colonialist evoking attires when she visited Kenya and Egypt; inappropriate super high Manolo Blahnik stilettos to visit the Hurricane Harvey victims and the army green hooded jacket of "mass distraction" by fast fashion brand Zara that featured on the back a painted slogan that read, "I really don't care, do u?" when she went to a Texas border detention centre to visit immigrant children who had been separated from their parents.

Maybe Melania's next NFTs will feature a selection of her most bizarre and puzzling style choices with some audio explanations that may shed some lights about them. Or maybe she's just releasing the NFTs to get distracted from the Capitol Hill riots investigations or the possibility of her husband Donald Trump running again for president in 2024 (the metaverse is a safer and fun place compared to this scary possibility...) or this is just a way for her to build a crypto empire and disappear before Donald comes back. For her sake, you can just hope this new and ephemeral venture will not end like her jewelry line or her "Caviar Complexe C6™ with Lipid Matrix Receptor™ Technology" skincare range that never got into the shops.