Mono Kultur no. 20. Cover Image by Kai von Rabenau.

I recently found an interesting and imaginative publication while visiting the X Initiative “No Soul for Sale: A Festival of Independents”, that took place at what used to be Chelsea’s Dia Art Foundation. Appropriately titled Mono Kultur, it consists of a single interview with an art or design practioner. The publication is based in Berlin and its most recent issue features a long and engaging interview with the Belgian designer Dries Van Noten accompanied by images of his work by Kai von Rabenau. Past issues have featured interviews with Miranda July, David LaChapelle, Maurizio Cattelan, Massimilano Gioni and a number of others.

Francesca

A Lucien Lelong coat on the cover of the August 1925 issue of Tres Parisian, located in the Special Collections department of the Gladys Marcus Library at FIT. Photo by Sarah Scaturro.

The recent Business History Conference in Milan, Italy had a robust program featuring a large number of important fashion scholars. Thematically, the conference centered around the role of business in fashion, as well as the “fashions” that occur in business practices. At first it seemed a somewhat disjointed group of participants (it was easy to distinguish the fashion historians from the business historians due to their, er, more fashionable dress), but soon after the conference began, everyone could sense a unique cross-pollination beginning.

The Fashion Institute of Technology had a strong contingent present, as they were also sponsoring some of the conference events. Significantly, Karen Cannell, the new Head of Special Collections at FIT’s library, was actively encouraging scholars to use this amazing resource, which contains not only historical fashion periodicals and sketches, but also important documentation regarding the business end of the garment industry. Operating at minimal capacity with restricted access over the past few years, many fashion scholars are relieved that this important asset is once again accepting research appointments.

One session with a strong New York and FIT affiliation was titled “Innovation in the Business of Fashion, 1900-1940″. FIT Professor Lourdes Font started off the thematically unified session by tracing the beginnings of a globalized fashion industry with a paper titled “International Couture: Expansion and Promotion in the Early Twentieth Century.” Lewis Orchard and FIT alum Rebecca Jumper Matheson followed up with papers on the topics of merchandising and the self-promotion of female designers, respectively. Associate Curator at the Museum at FIT, Molly Sorkin ended the session with her paper titled “The Limits of Expansion: Contraction and Collapse in the Haute Couture, 1920-1940,” which effectively placed the end of the first real “globalization” period of fashion at the beginning of World War II.

Another extremely strong session was “From Vionnet to Dior: Strategies of Exclusivity and Dissemination of Paris Haute Couture.” Featuring influential fashion historians and scholars such as Caroline Evans, Alexandra Palmer, and Dilys Blum, this session also had a thematic undercurrent about the rise of a globalized fashion industry. Véronique Pouillard started off the session with an interesting paper tracing the problems of copyrighting French fashion designs in the USA, an issue which is still very much a problem today. Alexandra Palmer, Senior Curator at the Royal Ontario Museum, followed up with her paper on the importance of Christian Dior’s global reach, which was a tantalizing peek at just one aspect of her forthcoming book, Dior. The session ended with Caroline Evans’ research on Jean Patou’s “Américainisme,” which was an entertaining view of how Patou embraced American rationalization and the American “look” to market his designs and grow his business. The influence of emerging American fashion business practices on the French couture industry was also explored in my paper on the French couturier Lucien Lelong that I presented during the “Entrepreneurs and Fashion” session.

Other engaging papers included Rebecca Arnold’s on The Fashion Group in 1930s New York City and Phyllis Dillon’s thorough explanation of the influence of German Jews on the American apparel industry. Naturally, there was a session on the ethics of fashion, which was to include papers on the toxicity of beauty products and the sustainably-minded brand Comme-il-Faut. Unfortunately, neither of these presenters showed up. However, Efrat Tseëlon’s paper “In Search of the “Ethics” of Ethical Fashion” provocatively challenged the current notion of what constitutes sustainable and ethical fashion. She contends that today’s version of ecofashion effectively fetishes and oversimplifies certain issues (such as the use of organic cotton), thus merely reinforcing the current fashion paradigm. She suggests holistic and inclusive investigations into the meaning of what constitutes ethical (such as issues of toxicity in products and the skinniness of models), as well as actively searching for a new fashion paradigm that could challenge the current one based on consumption.

This engaging conference demonstrated that fashion studies could definitely use more of business history thinking - one of the leading scholars out there combining these two areas is Regina Blaszczyk, who just happened to be the co-chair of the conference. I hope that more professional history associations begin to seriously consider fashion as an important theme, as the interdisciplinary nature of fashion studies lends itself to many fruitful collaborations.

Sarah Scaturro

From poster for Caroline Evans’ talk at FBMC

I recently attended a lecture presented by the Research Centre for Fashion, the Body and Material Cultures, in London . Unique in its kind, the center opened in 2005 as a joint project between Central Saint Martins and the London College of Fashion (both members of the University of the Arts London). It covers under its umbrella theorists, historians and practioners which, as the title suggests, are interested in a broader view of fashion, clothes and their interactions with the body. Among its members are dance historians (director Helen Thomas), curators (Amy de La Hay and Judith Clark), as well as a number of practioners, including fashion designer Shelley Fox and artist Lucy Orta. (Full disclosure: I am currently a member as well, as I am completing my PhD at Central Saint Martins.)

Caroline Evans kicked off the summer lecture series—organized by one of the center’s directors, Alistair O’Neil—with a talk on her current research on the early history of the fashion show and the way it related to other quintessential modern cultural forms like early cinema and highly choreographed revues such as the Ziegfeld Follies. Her talk was titled “Mirrors, Magic and Multiplication: Early Twentieth Century Fashion Shows.” To follow will be Pamela Church-Gibson’s talk on “Fashion and Celebrity.” The center also organizes a yearly symposium, which this year revolved around the topic of “Magic and Fashion.”

Francesca

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A look from Susan Cianciolo’s Fall/Winter 2009 Collection. Photograph by Sarah Scaturro

I will be moderating a panel discussion on sustainable fashion this coming Wednesday, May 27th at the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum. The panel features Rogan Gregory and Scott Hahn from Loomstate, Julie Gilhart from Barney’s and Leslie Hoffman from EarthPledge. Issues that I’m hoping to explore with the discussants include the rise of greenwashing, the inherent tensions between eco-lux and mass sustainable fashion, the place of technology, and the role of the consumer. Please let me know if there are specific questions you might want me to ask (that is, if you can’t attend the discussion yourself!) The panel discussion is held in conjunction with the Cooper-Hewitt’s new exhibition called Design for a Living World, and the exhibition will be open for a private viewing an hour before the event.

Here are the details:

May 27, 2009, 6:30 - 8:30 pm

Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum
2 East 91st Street
New York, NY 10128
www.cooperhewitt.org

Members/Students: $10
Others: $15

Register online or by calling the education department at 212-849-8353

Sarah Scaturro

by Patty Chang

A still from the documentary showing Papa Wemba playing a concert in Paris (Courtesy of NYAFF)

Among the noteworthy films featured this year at the New York African Film Festival at Lincoln Center was George Amponsah and Cosima Spender’s documentary, The Importance of Being Elegant, which examines the Congolese subculture centered around the worship of clothes (kitende) known as la Société des ambianceurs et personnes élégantes (the Society of Revelers and Elegant People), or in short, la Sape. The film follows internationally renowned Congolese soukous musician, Papa Wemba (né Jules Shungu Wembadio Pene Kikumba) and his coterie of expatriate Congolese supporters in Paris and Brussels shortly after his release on bail in 2003 on charges of importing 350 illegal immigrants (at a little over US$4000 per person) to pose as members of his band. Beset with legal fees and an impending criminal trial, Papa Wemba records a new album and prepares to launch an extravagant concert in Paris to try to piece his life back together and uphold his central position in the expatriate Congolese community. In the meantime, young immigrant Congolese in Paris and Brussels who embrace the sapeur lifestyle, ‘battle’ each other for the title of “Parisien”—the equivalent of an exceedingly stylish man—by flashing their labels in ritual dances in night clubs and mounting challenges through preening displays of label versus label. They also pay an exorbitant price for a “dedication” or the singing of their names by Wemba into his new album.

Still showing Papa Wemba and his Cavalli fur coat (courtesy of NYAFF)

As the quintessential king of the sapeurs, Papa Wemba found commercial success in the 1970s through the innovative style of fusing traditional Congolese rumba with Western pop and rock influences. His new found critical acclaim became his ticket out of his native Zaire. Along with a number of other Lingala musical superstars, Papa Wemba started a new life abroad in Paris, touring Japan and the US via Europe with Peter Gabriel, and returning home to Kinshasa occasionally to perform for his doting fans. Dressed in expensive designer labels, Papa Wemba elevated style to a form of religion, replete with high priests, archbishops, popes, and even saints (in this case, Cavalli, Versace, Gautier, Burberry, Comme de Garçons, Yamamoto, Miyake, and Watanabe). His worship of designer labels (or griffes) and the musical lyrics which praise them, entice impoverished Congolese young men to take the oneiric pilgrimage to France and Belgium to acquire designer clothes, and eventually to return home with the hopes of an improved social standing. The turbulent political and socio-economic history of the Democratic Republic of the Congo with its widespread poverty and 5.4 million excess deaths from the Second Congo War, sets a brutally sardonic backdrop for these young men who desire to escape from the harsh realities of Kinshasa only to end up enduring an increasingly harsh existence when they reach the streets of Château Rouge in Paris or the district of Ixelles in Brussels. Often without the legal documents to stay in the country, the sapeurs beg, steal, and hustle (although the specifics of these illicit activities remain ambiguous in the film) for money to be able to afford the designer clothes to keep up with Papa Wemba’s fashion ideology. In the documentary, one such sapeur named the “Archbishop” attempts to establish a name for himself in the Parisian Sape scene only to later come to the realization that the extravagant and flamboyant lifestyle has been nothing more than an illusion.

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Emily Barletta, Center, crocheted yarn and beads, 2007.

Now showing at PS122 Gallery in the East Village is an exhibition titled “Yarn Theory: Knitting, Crochet, Math and Science.” As the title suggests, it explores the relation between these “feminine” crafts and the traditionally “masculine” fields of math and the “hard” sciences, partially in the attempt to show how inherently related those seemingly disparate fields actually are. “This exhibit contradicts the popular notion,” curator Martha Lewis writes, “that women are not as good at math and science as men are. Knitting and crocheting, traditionally seen as an appropriate occupation for women and girls, intrinsically requires much calculation to create the expansions and contractions necessary to model a garment from a piece of yarn.”

The works chosen for the exhibition are deliberately non-utilitarian. Among the artists included is Emily Barletta, whose crocheted pieces make references to imaginary body structures. Other practioners included are knitter and mathematician Sarah-Marie Belcastro, and Daina Taimina, who invented the method of “hyperbolic crochet.”

Make sure to visit the exhibition’s site to find out about related participatory events and workshops, which will take place while “Yarn Theory” is on view (until May 17th).

Gabi Schillig, artist and architect, has just completed her four month residency at the Van Alen Institute in New York City. A resident of Berlin, Schillig investigates the relationship between the body and its surrounding space. Her work as a Van Alen Fellow culminated in photo-documented performances around New York involving dancers interacting with her unique, transportable and transformable felt structures. These structures were temporarily grafted onto architectural elements in the city, a form of space mediation which instantly cleaved the wearer’s body to their urban environment. Now back in Berlin, Schillig has graciously answered a few questions regarding her provocative project.

What was the importance of felt to your project? Were there any other materials that you had experimented with? Did the fact that felt was traditionally used in housing in Central Asia play into your decision?

For me, there were many different reasons to use felt for my project. One, of course, is the tactile quality of the woolen felt, its variation in thicknesses, density and finally its initial pre-defined structural quality that it provides. Felt is very structural from the onset - fibers connect to each other through a dynamic production process, creating structural surface through density. Furthermore felt protects from environmental conditions such as rain, sun or noise, yet still has the potential to transform in shape despite its structural strength. There are other interesting social and artist´s positions that have influenced my choice of material. Felt’s tradition in general was certainly of great influence for me. But what fascinated me the most was, on the one hand the traditional notion that comes with the felt, but on the other hand its very contemporary and technical uses.

What was specifically interesting to me was to bring the materiality of felt into the urban landscape, a material that is usually considered to be alien to the hard, static and rigid surfaces of a city. Any form of textile materiality in the city constitutes an oddity. Textile structure, in conventional usage, relates clearly to the human body, figure and scale, and thus has the power to produce something new. Within the urban / built environment, the soft geometries and textural surface of textiles allow different social space and interactions to emerge.

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Members of ThreeASFOUR in their Chinatown studio. Photo: Mara Catalan

Last night’s talk, which was part of the Graduate Center Great Issues Series on Culture and Power, evolved into a discussion on the homogenization of fashion and the role the economy might have in spurring greater creativity in cities like New York through renewed affordability. Moderated by fashion theorist and historian Eugenia Paulicelli, the panel included designers Gabi Asfour (of ThreeASFOUR) and Anna Sui, and New York Times cultural critic Guy Trebay.

Anna Sui gave a candid account of the way the economy changed her company’s situation, in some ways for the better: She was able to retain the lease on her garment district work space, thanks to the fall of the housing market in New York, which stopped the ongoing conversion of industrial spaces in the area into condos. Trebay seemed less sanguine about the creative future of New York, resigned to the fact that the level of affordability and the other elements which allowed the flourishing of New York cultures in decades past (in particular the 1970s ) is behind us for good. Gabi Asfour found New York cultural centrality indispensable to his work—the reason he chose the city over Paris as the basis for the company, despite its lack of support for experimental fashion. Interestingly, what they all agreed on was that collaborations could be a way forward—both collaborations between creative individuals and between companies (i.e. Uniqlo and H&M tapping into designer’s fashion).

Another thread of the discussion was the homogenization of fashion across cities and countries, which the three speaker saw epitomized at international airports, where the pervasiveness of casual clothes can be observed: What Anna Sui saw as the Californization of the world’s wardrobe.

A felt structure by Gabi Schillig

The Van Alen Institute is hosting a discussion tonight between designer Yeohlee Teng and architect Calvin Tsao on the relationship between fashion and architecture, civic identity and public spaces with regards to the possible rezoning of New York City’s Garment District. This program is in conjunction with their current exhibition by outgoing Van Alen Fellow Gabi Schillig, titled “Public Receptors: Beneath the Skin”. Stay tuned to Fashion Projects for an interview with Gabi regarding her work in attempting to mediate the relationship between private users and public spaces using her portable, detachable felt structures.

The program tonight is from 6:30 – 8:30pm at the Van Alen Institute, 30 West 22nd Street (between 5th and 6th Avenues) 6th Floor. $8 for non-members, payable at the door; free for Van Alen Institute members and one guest. RSVP required to rsvp@vanalen.org.

Valentino sourrounded by his work and pugs.

The Matt Tyrnauer-directed documentary, Valentino: The Last Emperor, which is currently playing at Film Forum, is rather touching, as it shows the swan song of the Italian designer. Most poignant is its depiction of Valentino’s relation with his life and business companion Giancarlo Giammetti, who seems to have patiently supported the designer throughout his career.

From a fashion historical point of view, the film remarks on the end of an era of finely hand-made couture gowns. One of the most interesting parts of the movie shows the highly skilled seamstresses draping and constructing the garments entirely by hand. It’s also significant to hear Valentino recount how his interest in fashion stemmed from watching Hollywood films such as the highly choreographed Busby Berkeley extravaganzas and the 1946 musical the Ziegfeld Follies—which was, in fact, a precursor to the fashion show as spectacle. Valentino, like many Italian designers of the post-war era, was thoroughly inspired by Hollywood glamour, especially by way of Via Veneto, which was famously immortalized by Fellini in La Dolce Vita. In the case of Valentino, this fascination with Hollywood met with an interest and a thorough knowledge of the Parisian haute couture.

Ultimately, the designer’s fondness for the art of dress-making, his attention to the details of the craft combined with his love of an opulent over-the-top lifestyle, put him at odds with the market forces at hand. His 45-year career, however, has extended an influence on generations of designers and consumers alike, while the man himself, in his studied mannerism, has certainly left a strong impression. As a kid, I remember my father recounting how in the early ’70s he shopped in Valentino’s menswear boutique, which was then in Rome’s Via Condotti, and was greatly flattered that the designer himself advised him on what to buy—a fact that to this day my father considers an undeniable stamp of approval on his style.

Valentino and his head seamstress at work in his atelier