Summer Camp at the Textile Arts Center

I first heard about the Textile Arts Center (TAC) from my friend Isa Rodrigues, a textile conservator and fiber enthusiast who works there as the studio manager. She kept telling me I needed to meet the “TAC girls” because not only were they young and cool, they were doing something that nobody else in the city was doing – singlehandedly crafting together a vibrant community of like-minded people interested in textiles and fiber arts. I stopped by one of their free open-house weaving sessions that they have every last Friday of the month, and I was thrilled with the beauty of the space, the incredible looms, the colorful spools of yarn and the welcoming feeling that greeted me. Once I met Visnja Popovic and Owyn Ruck, the co-founders of TAC, I was instantly swept up by their enthusiasm and commitment towards forging a place where textile experts, novices, enthusiasts, and artists can learn and practice this most ancient of arts. Owyn took a moment out of her busy schedule to talk to Fashion Projects about their work and vision for the Textile Arts Center.

Fashion Projects: Recently TAC has gotten a lot of people in the local fashion and textile
 fields buzzing, even though it seems like you popped out of nowhere.
 Can you give us a little information on the backstory of the center 
and tell us about your gorgeous new space in Brooklyn?


Textile Arts Center: Buzzing?! Are they? That’s good to hear…I feel like we have our noses to the ground, pounding work out without taking a second to stop and see how much we’ve changed in the past year.

Textile Arts Center started just over a year ago in a small weaving studio in Park Slope. Visnja and I really wanted to expand to offer other programs, especially for adults, and create the “center” we envisioned. I think the main thrill was in bringing together everyone with a love for fibers, or even slightest interest, and creating the environment that was comfortable, fun and really conducive to making great work. The feeling of art school, without going back to art school.

We went through a long process of finding the right space, kind of with haste at one point… But we found this one after a few mishaps! And that’s what’s important. It felt like home immediately. Our move to Carroll St was in April and since then we’ve just sort of grown. I think a big part of that growth was feeling secure in what we were presenting to the public. The space speaks a lot for itself and we’ve been working hard to reach the right audiences with the confidence that we are doing something people could really love.
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by Marco Pecorari

What is the Future of Fashion studies? If one year ago affirmed fashion scholars met in Warwick to find an answer (McNeil 2010), “Finding Our Fashion Footing” was the occasion for Phd students to discuss their research future as a possible answer to such challenging question.

Organized the last 19th March by the research students at London College of Fashion and the Center for Fashion Studies – Stockholm University, this first International Fashion Phd workshop was hosted by LCF. The presentation of each project was the occasion to discuss, problematize and individualize personal experiences, methodological issues and future research connections. As the title of the meeting suggests, it was also an opportunity for placing each individual work in a global geography of Fashion research.

The one-day meeting started with a session on Style and Youth Culture that saw the presentation of “The Indie Project: style and youth culture in London” by Rachel Lifter. Her research cuts across three diverse trajectories: the London fashion environment, theoretical style’s approaches and contemporary youth culture. Despite the diverse disciplinarian affiliation, Lifter’s use of Foucault’s discourse is shared by Pecorari’s Phd that aims to argument an archeology of the fashion discursive formation on contemporary ephemera through three different but generative dimensions of such discourse: academia, museum and designers.

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Jane Fonda in Klute

by Sarah Scaturro

This spring there are a lot of events occurring around NYC with fashion as the main focus. Here is a breakdown of the ones that I’ve been able to find, and they are all free! Please leave a comment if I’ve left anything out.

April 9th – Richard Martin Visual Culture Symposium
Tonight is the Annual Richard Martin Visual Culture Symposium at NYU, which allows the graduating students of the Visual Culture MA program to lecture on their thesis topic. Worn Through has a breakdown of the topics and schedule.

April 13th, 20th and 27th – Fashion In Film: New York City
The brand new MA program in Fashion Studies at Parsons The New School for Design is hosting a fashion in film series for the entire month of April. Curated by Jeffrey Lieber, Assistant Professor of Visual Culture Studies, the series has some fashion classics – Annie Hall and Sabrina – but also some lesser-known films with impressive fashions, such as Klute (Jane Fonda) and On a Clear Day You Can See Forever (Barbara Streisand).

April 15th – 16th Bard Graduate Center Annual Symposium
Bard Graduate Center is having their annual symposium on April 15-16th on the topic of Secondhand Culture: Waste, Value, and Materiality. I can’t wait for to hear Senior Curator of Costume at the ROM Alexandra Palmer speak on “Back to Back: Retro-fitting Fashion within the Museum.” There will also be a screening of the film “Secondhand.”

April 19th – Anna Wintour Lecture
According to NY MAG Anna Wintour is giving a free lecture on the 19th at 6 pm at Pratt Institute.

April 22nd – FIT’s 4th Annual Sustainable Business & Design conference
This year’s theme is Redesigning for a Sustainable Future. Go here for more information.

April 27th – Mannequins in the Museum: Perspectives on Curating Fashion
The lecture I’m most excited for is by Joanne Dolan Ingersoll, a truly talented curator from RISD. She will be giving a lecture for SVA’s Design Criticism MFA lecture series on a topic I have great interest in due to my work: “Mannequins in the Museum: Perspectives on Curating Fashion.”

April 29th – Predicting Color Trends in Fashion
FIT is hosting the seriously hardworking historian Reggie Blaszczyk on April 29th when she’ll give a lecture on the history of predicting color trends. I was fortunate enough to meet her at the Business History conference last year in Milan – I had just read her article on Dorothy Liebes called “Designing Synthetics, Building Brands” in the Journal of Design History. As someone who studies synthetics and has handled Liebes’ textiles, the article about blew my mind.

May 4th – Towards Sustainable Fashion Symposium
In conjunction with the Scandinavian House’s Eco-Chic exhibition, there will be a panel discussion featuring Marcus Bergman, Karin Stenmar, Sass Brown and Eviana Hartman, and moderated by Hazel Clark, Dean of the School of Art and Design and Theory, Parsons: The New School for Design.

May 8th – FIT’s Annual Fashion and Textiles Symposium
This year’s topic for FIT’s Annual Fashion and Textiles Symposium on May 8th sounds great – Americans in Paris: Designers, Buyers, Editors, Photographers, Models, and Clients in Paris Fashion.

May 21st and 22nd – Costume Collections: A Collaborative Model for Museums
The Brooklyn Museum and the Costume Institute are hosting a 2-day symposium about their new costume collaboration. I’m looking forward to seeing both exhibitions this spring!

We are pleased to announce a new regular contributor to Fashion Projects:

Rizvana Bradley is currently completing her Ph.D. in the Literature Program at Duke University. She is working to develop a variety of critical approaches to fashion and contemporary design, focusing on the ways in which technology is integrated into various artistic practices. Putting fashion in dialogue with the arts at large, her work also touches on video art, dance, architecture, and concept clothing. She has taught courses at Duke University that foreground fashion as a singular artistic practice specifically placing it at the critical intersection of current discussions about art, media and the body. Her writing has appeared in Hint Magazine. Look for her interviews, general coverage of lectures and exhibits, as well as other pieces for Fashion Projects.

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

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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

Sarah Palin’s Red Shoes

Sarah Palin’s much publicized fashion choices and, now, fashion budget make for an interesting argument about how the post-feminist look can be appropriated in ways which are antithetical to what the look was originally meant to portray. If we understand post-feminist fashion as a reappropriation of symbols of femininity—high-heels, form-fitting skirts and colors which have traditionally being coded as feminine—by a “sexually liberated woman,” we can see how the vice presidential hopeful has been sporting some tenants of that look against the grain, as she is campaigning on a platform critical of sexual liberation altogether.

Post-feminism is best exemplified (as media theorist Angela McRobbie has pointed out) by media representation of women, such as Sex and the City and the Bridget Jones’ Diaries. Ultimately, the fact that the Republican nominee is embracing at least some central elements of the look not only goes to show the popularity of such representations, it also stands as evidence that the longstanding criticism of post-feminism as reactionary might, in this case, be accurate.

Francesca

Erin Weckerle, Crocheted Chandelier

Sodafine—the Williamsburg-based eco-friendly handmade and vintage boutique—is hosting a cocktail night and holiday wish-list event together with its neighboring store Digital Fix. With clothes and accessories from artists and designers such as Feral Childe, Rosa Mosa and Purldrop, this is sure to make for a great soirée!

Tuesday, November 27, 6-9pm at:

Sodafine
119 Grand Street
Brooklyn, NY 11211
(718) 230-3060

By far the most interesting website out there, Flasher.com keeps getting better and better. Their interview-based format is so personable, close and real-time. The videos usually have the interviewer edited out, allowing for the subject to tell a story. Occasional headlines such as “fabrics,” “inspirations,” and “Japanese market”focus the direction. See in particular the profiles of the design duos Eventide and Cheap Monday. The designer Diane Pernet tells her engaging story about how she lost all inspiration in New York, and the hardships of moving to Paris in 1990 to start over again. Besides her blog, Diane talks about her curatorial role in the “You Wear It Well” short film competition and her love of finding new talent. The fashion journalist Sofia Hedstrom talks about her interests in the issues surrounding fashion, like China, fashion week or new materials.

Besides videos of creative types, Flasher has a riveting street fashion segment by photographer Fumi Nagasaka, wherein she questions people relentlessly about where they got their clothing. Other attractions of the site include a well-curated list of links to news stories.

Sarah Scaturro

Lenore Tawney, the 20th century pioneer in weaving, died in New York City on September 28, 2007 at age 100.  One of the first artists to use fiber as her medium, her innovative use of scale and weaving techniques bridged the gap between craft and art.  Although Lenore Tawney was not as recognized as other fiber artists such as Sheila Hicks, her sculptural works have been collected by major museums such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum.  The New York Times has a moving tribute to this wonderful artist.

 Sarah Scaturro