by Francesca Granata

Leigh Bowery at the 1994 Lucian Freud Exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art

This Thursday, January 26, I am giving a talk titled “Fashioning the Grotesque Body,” at the Visual Arts Center of New Jersey, in which I will discuss the work of Leigh Bowery and Rei Kawakubo. The talk, which is taking place in conjunction with the exhibition Textility, is free and open to the public. Below is some more information on the center and the talk:

“The Visual Arts Center of New Jersey will feature Francesca Granata, ADHT Professor of Fashion Studies, in their Spring 2012 season of Thursday Evening Salon Series on January 26. The series, now in its fifth season, functions as a forum for current topics in the arts, humanities and the social sciences with artists, curators, philosophers and writers.

Dr. Granata’s discussion, called “Fashioning the Grotesque Body,” will focus on the proliferation of grotesque images of the body within contemporary fashion and will explore the link between art and fashion through the work of experimental designer Rei Kawakubo of Comme des Garçons to the designer and performance artist Leigh Bowery.”

Thursday Evening Salon Series
Visual Arts Center of New Jersey
Spring 2012 Season: January 12-May 17
7:30pm-9:00pm
68 Elm Street, Summit, NJ
Free to the public. Seating is limited and reservations are required.
Phone: 908.273.9121

Red Babydoll dress. Jeremy Scott, fall 2009, Photo courtesy of the Jeremy Scott Studio.

I am happy to announce that students at NYU Steinhardt’s Visual Culture: Costume Studies Program (some of whom I have taught in the past), in collaboration with Shannon Bell-Price (Associate Research Curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute), have curated an exhibition of contemporary fashion designs. Titled “Imprint (NYC): The Evolution of Motifs in Fashion,” it opens January 12.

“Polka-dots, stripes, camouflage, novelty/conversational prints, houndstooth, plaid, animal prints, and “digital rococo” will all be represented in Imprint (NYC) by current and emerging designers from the New York metropolitan area including Thom Browne, Norma Kamali, Diane von Furstenberg, Marc Jacobs, Proenza Schouler, Jeremy Scott, Anna Sui, and Jason Wu.”

The exhibition, which runs through February 4 at NYU Rosenberg Gallery, explores the critical history, potent symbolism, and iconic contemporary use of popular motifs in fashion. Imprint (NYC) will have an opening reception Thursday, January 12 from 6 to 8pm. An exhibition symposium will be held Wednesday, January 25 from 6 to 8pm. (preceded by a reception at 5pm). The Rosenberg Gallery is located in NYU’s Barney Building, 34 Stuyvesant St. (between Second and Third Avenues). The exhibition is free and open to the public. Gallery hours: Wednesday through Saturday, 2 to 8pm; Sunday noon to 6pm.

Francesca Granata

Summer Rayne Oakes and Benita Singh launched Source4Style, an online marketplace for independent fashion designers, in October 2010 (see Kimberly Burgas’ August 2010 post). They launched version 2.0 this past week. If the original website proved that sustainable sourcing is possible, the new version does so with style and ease. It’s slick and sumptuous and features an expanded selection of materials (fabric, yarn, buttons, zippers, lace, and trim), ample editorial content, and a robust trends section.

Oakes and Singh founded the website in response to what they saw as the “acute issue” of sourcing sustainable materials. Sustainable sourcing means weighing particulars like color, hand, and drape against social and environmental considerations like wealth distribution and the carbon footprint. These broad considerations require careful vetting and substantial investment, especially when designers source globally, as most do. It’s a rewarding process, but it’s also high risk, meaning that costs are high and returns aren’t guaranteed. Often, sustainability comes at a price.

“For too long,” Singh explained, “designers have had the limited and arduous option of trade shows for sourcing.” Trade shows are multi-day events that take place in cities around the world. Las Vegas. Paris. Tashkent. They’re intense and exciting, but require huge investments of time and money for everyone involved. Oakes cites the statistics: designers spend on average 84% of their time sourcing, and suppliers spend 43% of their marketing budgets on trade shows. These costs trickle down and subtract from resources invested in other aspects of building a collection, like design.

For Oakes and Singh, technology is the obvious solution. On Source4Style, users browse materials and order swatches without spending a cent and members connect directly to suppliers around the world. The site isn’t angling to replace the trade show experience. It simply provides an opportunity for designers and suppliers to re-allocate their time and money, investing in sustainability rather than the status quo.

Sustainability is what counts for Oakes and Singh. “We feel that’s where the industry is trending, and quite personally, that’s what matters to us,” explained Oakes. The pair has been careful to tailor the site accordingly. Designers can perform what Oakes calls “meaningful searches,” based on color, fiber, fabric type, and worldview. One designer might focus on vertical integration. Another might promote women’s cooperatives. A third might advocate for craft preservation, and a forth might champion fair trade. As Oakes explains, the site allows designers to “decide which aspect of sustainability is important to them and what kind of story they’re going to share with their consumer.”

Source4Style doesn’t cheapen sustainability. It simply cuts costs associated with sourcing sustainable material. It supports a production process in which materials and information flow hand-in-hand. It advances a transparent system in which tangible products are imbued with intangible values. And most importantly, it inspires a climate in which fashion becomes an expression of ‘we’ rather than an ‘I.’

“Trends happen every season,” Oakes explained, “but movements are something more systemic.” As the first trends-driven platform for sustainable sourcing, Source4Style ensures that sustainability will remain relevant with every changing season.  It strikes a balance between seasonal and systemic change, and achieves both, naturally.

Summer Rayne Oakes and Benita Singh have been close friends and collaborators since 2004.  They launched Source4Style in 2010 and have remained invested in the project ever since.

Mae Colburn is a freelance textile researcher based in New York City.

by Francesca Granata

Blind Adam, Photos by Yiorgos Mavropoulos

Thanos Kyriakides started Blind Adam in 2007, with the intent of exploring the more poetic and artistic qualities of fashion. His work consists, for the most part, of creating ghostly exoskeleton of garments. Rendered in black wool acrylic thread, his pieces are reminiscent of photographic negatives, thus reading as a meditation on absence and loss. They also speak to the forgotten craft of clothes-making, as they carefully follow the place where the seams would have been, thus reading as a reference to garment construction and pattern-making. Previously to his work with Blind Adam, Thanos worked predominantly as a stylist for magazine editorial, where the careful construction of a perfect vision is paramount. Thus, his current work, in its very quiet and tactile quality—the thread used to construct the ghostly garment refer to the Braille system for the blind—seems an obvious departure from such work.

I met Thanos while in Greece this summer to give a talk about the grotesque in contemporary fashion, in conjunction with Vassilis Zidanakis’s exhibition “Arghhh Monsters in Fashion” at the Benaki Museum in Athens. I was so intrigued by his work that I later checked in with the artist via e-mail….

You started Blind Adam in 2007. What prompted your transition from working in editorial and magazines to doing this more experimental work?

After 17 years in fashion, it was about time for me to find a way to express more esoteric feelings and go beyond the limits of fashion, in order to orient myself towards a more artistic direction.

Your work now has as much more to do with a tactile quality than it does with a visual one, as well as being very time consuming. Could you describe your process, and the way in which you construct your pieces?

Yes, that’s true. The process has two stages: it starts by taking double acrylic wool thread, which is the material I always use, and making knots along its length. The result is something that is reminiscent of a chaplet or a “connect the dots” game. After having made miles of this, I pass onto the construction of a piece by assembling the hand-knotted threads.

If I understand your work correctly, you use wool thread to create an exoskeleton of a garment, as the thread follows the lines of where the garment’s seams would have been. In some ways, your work reads like the ghost of a garment, where all the cloth has left and only the silhouette of seams remains. As a result, your work suggests, at least to me, an absence—the absence of the body, but also of the cloth, which is meant to represent that body. Would you agree? This certain feeling of melancholia, past and memory is perhaps most obvious in your pieces that make references to historical pieces, such as the jacket with epaulettes.

Exactly! One could say that it is the bare of the bare minimum or a metaphor,
but of course the structural form of the clothes is present in a ghostly way. This is especially true of the pieces that represent the garment’s skeletons. There is a strong reference to the “Emperor’s New Clothes” tale.

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Andrea Diodati, Friends of the Flowers, An Absurdist Tableau

We had been meaning to continue on our artist/designer series, and we couldn’t think of a better way than to feature Andrea Diodati’s work. An inspiring young artist/designer whose work has been featured in Artforum, Andrea has worked with some of our favorites, including Susan Cianciolo and Pascale Gatzen.

In her own words:

electric love light seeks to unite feeling and object in a bespoke design practice that challenges contemporary notions of production. Handmade by artist, Andrea Diodati, each piece explores the history of materiality through local sourcing at thrift stores and flea markets. The quiet joys of an anonymously crocheted doily are relived on the body in fashions that tell our common material history.

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by Francesca Granata

The second issue of Fashion Projects, which focused on collaborations and collective, was partially dedicated to the topic of clothing and protest—a topic that has currently come to the forefront in conjunction with Occupy Wall Street, as well as in the context of my graduate teaching. Clothing, of course, has traditionally held an important function as a vehicle for protest, something that comes to the fore, most obviously, through the history of European carnivals.

In recent years, perhaps one of the most striking uses of clothes by protest movements was represented by the now defunct “Tute Bianche,” which had been formed in Italy in 1994 in response to the Milan mayor’s attempt to shut down the “Leoncavallo,” one of the city’s biggest squatted social centers. Their donning white overalls was, in fact, an ironic take on the mayor’s quote: “From now on, squatters will be nothing more than ghosts wandering about the city.” And it soon came to symbolize the invisibility of those excluded from capitalism.

The anti-globalization movement that began in Seattle and moved to European capitals also brought the by now well-known black bloc, but also the less known Pink movement. “Supporters of self-proclaimed frivolous tactic,” those belonging to the pink movement were armed with fans, sequins, wigs, pink paint and balloons, thus embracing a carnivalesque aesthetic. As a result of their colorful attire, they were often able to bypass security forces, particularly, in 2000, the protest in Prague on occasion of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank meeting, where they made themselves known for the first time. (Lidia Ravviso, “Clashing Hues: European Protest Movements and Costume,” Fashion Projects 2).

And of course, clothes took on a central element at Occupy Wall Street both insofar as functionality is concerned—as with the need for certain kinds of weather specific clothes as well as the fact that a system for laundering clothing together with blankets and a free clothes swap developed, at least prior to their recent displacement from Zuccotti Park. The protesters’ clothes came to symbolize a range of meanings at time conflicting, and as has been amply documented, there was no aesthetic cohesion among the protesters or uniform of dissent. Rather, the garments worn spanned from business casual to carnivalesque costumes with anarchists’ garbs and weather-resistant clothing in-between.

Interesting discussions arose in the course of my graduate seminar, as we discussed Robert Stam’s work on Tropicalia, the carnivalesque and 1960s Brazilian protest movements. The question that came up was what the most effective garb to protest in might be. Since it was in the context of a fashion studies class, the notion of whether clothing was, in fact, relevant to protest was quickly resolved! However, the debate heated up in relation to whether protesters (functionality aside) should be wearing the more “credible” costumes of business casual even suits or outré` carnivalesque costumes. The importance of the suit to OWS was explored in the work of Suits for Wall Street, an artists’ group that, as the name suggests, provided suits to the protesters under the moniker of “ Subversive Business Outfits as Tactical Camouflage.”

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By Mae Colburn

Rebecca Burgess in the indigo field she planted this year with support of Monica Paz Soldan and her son Jaemus, Rick Raddue, Michael Keefe, and a host of lovely volunteers here and there. Indigo dyed tunic was handknit by Heidi Iverson with Sally Fox's cotton.

Rebecca Burgess: What a Fibershed is, is taking responsibility for the biological context of your clothes. I’m interested in the revitalization of my community’s economy and green jobs, but I’m also interested in reconnecting to the plant and animal communities that are responsible for our clothes.  It’s quite a beautiful narrative, if we could support it.

It’s a beautiful narrative, and an imperative, according to Rebecca Burgess.  Burgess’ blog chronicles Fibershed-related events, projects, and the Fibershed Challenge: her quest to live for one year in clothes made from fibers sourced within a geographical region no larger than 150 miles from her front door. Her book, Harvesting Color, explains the dye potential of 36 plants, including pokeweed, elderberries, indigo, and coyote brush. Her restoration education curriculum gives children the opportunity to “investigate macro-environmental issues of our day” and “create solutions within their own landscape.”  Finally, the Fibershed Marketplace website, to be launched later this month, will provide resources for those interested in starting their own Fibershed Project.

Somehow, Burgess also finds time to work on her 45-acre organic farm in Northern California, where she grows and harvests over 4,500 natural dye plants.  She often does phone interviews from the farm: “I put my headset in, do my work, and answer calls.”  Burgess works hard, fueled both by sheer enthusiasm and by a distinct sense of urgency.  Her vision for a “thriving local textile economy” answers to a growing concern about the environmental, social, and economic impacts of the clothing industry.  Likewise, the Fibershed model serves as both a functional and symbolic antidote to the prevailing system.  Burgess’ commitment to local fiber reminds us of the physical labor involved in creating a garment from – as she puts it – “fiber to skin,” and forces us to reconsider the relationship between our bodies and our clothes.

RB: These little realities about living and working with plants and animals – it creates a difference in your body.  I know this because I observed the changes in myself.  You really learn how to work.  It’s like systems theory; you can get a system to start producing good results if you get the pendulum swinging in the right direction.  My body is different now; I’m sunburnt most of the time (even though I wear a lot of sunblock), but I’m strong, and I can endure long hours, and I have a much greater sense of confidence in what I can do physically because I see the product of my labor.

Tomorrow I’m driving up to the Capay Valley, where I have 2,000 indigo plants that I’m going to harvest.  I’m going to be harvesting from nine to nine at night, and I’ll have six or seven days like that in the summer.  Then once I harvest the indigo, I have to dry it all, stomp it, separate the stems, bag it, bring it back to the facility that I’m renting.  This summer has been a lot of maintenance; I have to do a lot of gopher trapping at the farm.  I’ve been dealing with irrigation problems, pressure valves, dripping stuff that’s not dripping the right way.  I’m getting tired, but I’m building capacity.

MC: Do you see this as a creative outlet as well as a manual, physical experience?

RB: Creativity is definitely expressed through the body, and I get to use my whole body while I’m farming.  I’m lifting.  I’m carrying.  I’m dragging.  I’m walking around.  I’m bending up and down.  All of that is a form of self-expression because you’re making all these small decisions for yourself.  You’re applying your own ideas and concepts second-to-second.  It sounds like mundane stuff, but oddly enough for the modern person, this is new terrain – at least for me – to have a total flow out on a land base, being out on 45 acres of organic farm, working.

MC: Do you see yourself as part of a movement of people interested in local textiles?

RB: I see myself as part of a continuum, a historical continuum, around textiles in this area.  In my region, a lot of retirees started raising sheep and alpaca, but not a lot of people were raising fiber for money.  When ‘fibershed’ became a useful word for people, and the community at large, some of those who’d been doing it a long time started to become recognized in a new way, and to feel the power behind what they were doing.

Rancher Robin Lynde and artisan Kacy Dapp at Meridian Jacob's farm in Solano County sharing their collaboration.

MC: On your website, you state that your mission is to “go beyond the one-year wardrobe and create a thriving local textile economy.”  What do you see this thriving local economy looking like?

RB: A thriving local textile economy would include current and existent land-owners working with young people, putting second housing on their land – for example, green modular trailers with solar panels.  If farmworker housing were a top priority, we could start training people who don’t yet have the skills, but have the energy [to begin farming].  The really important thing is continuity, and the only way to cultivate continuity is to put young people in proximity to people who have the skills.

But on a macro level, from a very specific supply chain perspective, we need to be able to take our wool, alpaca, mohair, then cotton, and eventually bast fibers (linen, hemp), and mill them at small-scale milling facilities that can be run off of solar technology.  There hasn’t been farm-based milling equipment designed for fibers except for wool, and there’s very little farm-based milling equipment for wool even, but for cotton it’s almost nonexistent, and for bast fibers – I have to put a call out there to anyone who understands how to engineer bast-fiber processing equipment and can scale it down to a farm size.

Pre-industrial revolution, we were relying on massive manpower, indentured servants, slaves.  Now we’re in a new era.  If we go back to a human-powered economy, this can’t be about indentured servants and slaves.  It has to be about cooperatively owned businesses, about people working for the common good – that’s how we’re going to inspire people to get involved in this.  We need equipment that honors our humanity; we’re not going to be slaves to technology, but we’re also not going to be slaves to each other.  We need this new human-scale technology combined with continuity of the generations.  We already have world-class fibers.  We have no lack of fiber, but there’s no processing equipment in my region, so all of those pieces – how to get the wool off the sheep, how to wash it, how to card it, how to blend it, spin it – all of this needs serious improvement.  To me, it’s about enhancing human infrastructure, technological infrastructure, and communication.  We’re talking about a revitalization of the whole economy when we talk about the revitalization of a Fibershed.

MC: Do you have any recommendations for people interested in learning more or starting a similar project?

RB: The website that we’re going to launch in the next week and a half will have a reading list and the protocol that we followed.  We started a one-year challenge, so we had a prototype wardrobe.  I started a Kickstarter campaign.  How did I organize farmers and artisans?  I used Google Docs.  I used Doodle Calendar.  I did community-building projects where instead of charging for workshops, I gave free classes for artisans and farmers, to bring them together.  You need to be able to build a network.  You also have to be in good health, because it takes a sound mind and body to create these networks and keep them alive.  It’s kind of like running a marathon in the beginning.

Mae Colburn is an independent textile researcher and writer and professional seamstress based in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Rebecca Burgess is an ecological restoration educator, curricula developer, author, and textile artist and a fifth-generation resident of the watershed where she works in Northern California.

Photo Courtesy of Modacult

An exciting conference in the field of Fashion Studies is taking place in Milan from June 7 to 9 at the Universita` Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, The conference is organized by Modacult (Centro per lo studio della moda e della produzione culturale.) Abstract are due November 30th!

Since its beginnings in the middle of the XIX century, fashion has been narrated through multiple media, both visual as well as verbal, and for different purposes such as marketing and advertising, art, costume history, social research and cultural dissemination. At the same time, fashion has worked as an important piece of material culture in the modern industrial urban societies: artifacts that embody workmanship, tastes, lifestyles etc. Fashion, namely, has always been both material and intangible, a system of material production and a system of signs. It has always involved differently skilled people whose purposes have often been divergent and barely overlapping. And the same has happened also with fashion events, tales and writings, i. e. the narrative representations of fashion. Media professionals, communication and marketing consultants, academic scholars and curators develop discourses, use similar languages, try to sometimes work together, comparing and sharing jargons and methodologies, in order to create their products: art exhibitions, catwalks, photo books, movies, magazines, ads, blogs, scientific essays and interviews etc. These tales are a part of fashion imaginary, as well as of collections.

For the full call for paper, please visit here.

by Ingrid Mida

Harold Koda by Karin Willis (Courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art)

Harold Koda has served as the Curator-in-Charge of the Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York since 2000 and is the author of 19 books. He agreed to an interview on the subject of art and fashion with Ingrid Mida and this is a transcript of their conversation on September 16, 2011.  Harold will be speaking tomorrow, November 8, 2011 for the Bata Shoe Museum Founder’s Lecture on the topic of Fashion and the Art Museum.

Ingrid Mida is a Toronto-based artist and writer who recently gave the keynote address at the Costume Society of America mid-west conference on the subject of Fashion and Art.

by Ingrid Mida

Valerie Steele by Aaron Cobbett

Ingrid Mida is a Toronto-based artist. writer and researcher who recently gave the keynote address at the Costume Society of America mid-west conference.