Fashion designers often find inspiration in art, sometimes interpreting it quite literally. They might use a painting as a print in their collections or ask an artist to customize an accessory or create a capsule collection incorporating the artist's signature palette or motifs. However, artists can inspire us in other, less direct ways. Let's consider the works of Frieda Toranzo Jaeger, for example.
Based in Mexico City, Toranzo Jaeger is primarily a painter, but her large canvases often incorporate elements of pre-Columbian Mexican embroidery.
These techniques are employed symbolically to highlight the dichotomy between the European art of Spanish colonizers in the 16th century and the art of indigenous peoples, which was often dismissed as mere craft.
In Toranzo Jaeger’s works, embroidery is used to embellish the painting but also to provoke, disrupting the perceived preciousness of a perfect canvas. While the front of the canvas features these embroidered motifs, the back is equally intriguing, revealing the reverse of the embroidery along with additional explanations about her references and inspirations.
Toranzo Jaeger's paintings frequently reference altarpieces carried by missionaries and multi-paneled works seen in churches. Her modern altarpieces, like the one on display at the 60th International Art Exhibition in Venice (until November 24th), address contemporary themes, particularly the future.
She conveys this through a dynamic aesthetic reminiscent of urban murals and airbrushed car culture. By re-appropriating elements from a male-dominated context, Toranzo Jaeger subverts the mechanical aspects of car culture, making technology and mechanics - cars, engines, spacecraft, and sci-fi - feminine.
Her work "Rage Is a Machine in Times of Senselessness" (2024), on display in the Arsenale spaces, celebrates queer freedom, communion with nature, and joyful spaces. It includes depictions of queer love-making, lush tropical greenery, and brightly colored flora, combined with mechanical elements.
The large canvas references Western religious altars and reflects her interest in cars, symbolized by mechanical parts and exhaust tubes expelling a red gas that forms the message "Viva Palestina" on the left. The watermelon on the right also symbolizes Palestine.
References to Frida Kahlo (symbolized by the heart of the Frida portrayed sitting on the left in the painting "Las dos Fridas"), Diego Rivera's Flower Seller (1941; Toranzo Jaeger often revisits Rivera in her works as she conceives him as a repressing figure), Rodolfo Morales' "Las Fumadoras", Juan O'Gorman's mural at the UNAM library (1949-1952), and Sappho, the poet from Lesbos and a queer symbol, are explained on the back of the canvas. Toranzo Jaeger's gigantic signature on the front of the canvas parodies the ego of male artists, reclaiming space for a queer female voice.
Will Frieda Toranzo Jaeger be the next artist embraced by the fashion industry? It's hard to say, but it would be intriguing if she could airbrush a new version of Thierry Mugler's iconic motorcycle corset with her signature mechanical motifs.
The lesson fashion designers can instead learn from Toranzo Jaeger goes beyond simply incorporating different techniques into their designs - that would indeed be too obvious.
Instead, they should consider adding elements that disrupt the notion of perfection and hiding meaningful details within their creations (well, we learnt already this lesson from a masterful concealer of messages, secrets and tiny objects, the late artist, fashion and interior designer Cinzia Ruggeri), much like how Toranzo Jaeger includes references on the back of her canvases. Besides, as her work is about envisioning an alternative future beyond colonialism and hyper-capitalism, she may inspire fashion designers to do the same and use their creations to challenge and question the status quo, provoke thought and inspire change, encouraging further moves towards more sustainable and ethical consumption.
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