Riotous Colour, Daring Patterns: Fashions + Textiles 18th to 21st centuries

TimeMagazine dress. Printed paper designed by Walter Lefmann and Ron de Vito, 1967, ROM967.77 Gift of TIME International of Canada Ltd. Image Courtesy of the Royal Ontario Museum

A new exhibition recently opened at the Patricia Harris Gallery of Textiles & Costume at the Royal Ontario Museum. Titled "Riotous Colour, Daring Patterns: Fashions + Textiles 18th to 21st centuries," the exhibition, which is curated by Dr. Alexandra Palmer, Nora E. Vaughan Fashion Costume Curator, features 120 textiles and costumes from the ROM’s extensive textile and costume collection.

Among the exhibition's higlights is the display titled "Clothing as Canvas," which presents "paper fashions that emulate textiles, and fashion and textiles that copy printed paper from the 1940s to the present. Included in this section are the first paper dresses made in 1966 by Scott Paper Limited, Bandana and Op Art, and MPH Design’s digitally printed World Trade Center Tyvek dress, as well as a silk dress imprinted with newspaper headlines, designed by John Galliano for Christian Dior."

Other sections include "Pattern-Dyed Textiles of Asia and Africa" and "Fashion and Interiors: Late 18th – 21st Centuries." For more information please visit the ROM website .

Susan Cianciolo, "When Buildings Meet the Sky"

Photo: Rosalie Knox, courtesy of Susan Cianciolo

by Angeli Sion

Towards the closing of this season’s relatively quiet New York Fashion Week, the National Arts Club in Gramercy was alive with warmth and laughter in a beautiful farrago of vibrant words and movements. This past Wednesday night artist and fashion designer Susan Cianciolo presented her Fall 2011 Collection, When Buildings Meet the Sky, in enchanting moments woven together by a play of prose titled She Stories of the Sky. Written and imagined by an emerging artist and designer Andrea Diodati, the play conjured up interpretive Noh theater with dance and chant complete with a live flutist and tambourine player.

The clothing was appropriately a riff of Japanese dress. In collaboration with Hinaya textile in Kyoto and kimono fashion stylist Hiromi Asai in New York, Cianciolo sent out colorful kimonos and wide obi-like sashes done in elaborate oriental prints. Many looks were accompanied by mask-like make-up, bright color thick around the eyes, and hair piled up in buns high on heads. Tinges of metallic gold could be found in the clothing and on faces. As the character Nobel Lady Time, Cianciolo herself donned a deep peach-orange kimono and golden make-up with her hair piled up high too.

Moreover, Cianciolo’s continuous support for friends and former students was telling not only in the latest February issue of Art Forum but also in the presentation’s program. Young designer Willie Norris contributed his bow ties while another emerging designer Su Beyazit helped out with the styling. To note, a few of the models were also current or former students.

Cianciolo’s collection as a whole was a performance of a collage of soft and vivid colors in rhythm with the fluid movements of the performers and the words.

The clothing was raw. The girls were barefoot. Beauty is found in strange spaces.

Photo: Rosalie Knox courtesy of Susan Cianciolo

Towards Sustainable Design in New York Fashion Week: Titania Inglis

Titania Inglis, AW 2011

A "new" designer Titania Inglis is developing a well-thought and consistent language, which explores the possibilities of modular designs in tandem with the use of recycled and organic material. Trained at the well-known Design Academy Eindhoven, she is presenting her fourth collection, which includes some incredibly well-constructed modular jackets.

Inglis developed the fall 2011 collection in the spirit of pairing down: "draping garments with fewer seams, including a skirt made all in one piece; slitting open seams, as with the slash back top; and literally cutting away the back of last fall's wrap jacket to create the arc jacket, with its removable back panel." This experimental, yet functional, construction techiniques were paired with an intelligent fabric sourcing: "a mix of dead stock wool and cotton from New York's garment district, and organic cotton from Japan's famed denim mills."

Below is a video of Inglis' first collection featuring members of the Merce Cunningham's Dance Company!

Students in the Body Garment Track at Parsons IDC present:

by Angeli Sion

Under the theme of love, a group of fourteen emerging artists will present and perform their varied works at Dacia Gallery on the Lower East Side this Saturday, December 11th. The presentation will traverse across diverse media such as video, performance, fashion, books, dolls, zines and illustration.

As students in the Body Garment Track in the Integrated Design Curriculum at Parsons New School for Design, they take inspiration for the exhibition's theme from their core studio titled Love. They describe Love as a "Collaborative collision collage of mammoth love-orgy proportions between 14 creative beings – alive, afoot, and well prepared to be inspired" under the direction of artists and fashion designers Susan Cianciolo and Gabriel Asfour.

The event is from 6:00 PM to 10:00 PM at Dacia Gallery on 53 Stanton Street between Eldridge and Forsyth.

For more information, please visit Dacia Gallery's website

Julie Gilhart leaving Barneys

Julie Gilhart speaking at the Copenhagen Climate Change Conference

It is quite sad to report that Julie Gilhart will no longer be Fashion Director and Senior Vice President at Barneys. Together with Judy Collinson, who will also be leaving Barneys, she championed emerging, often experimental designers in an otherwise often mind-numbing department-store horizon.

What’s more, Gilhart was an early and outspoken supporter of sustainable designers, such as John Patrick Organic and Loomstate, and also, more generally, of sustainable consumption/production practices of good design which followed a realistic tempo for fashion. She often brought Dries Van Noten, an independently owned company and designer, who produces two well-made collections yearly as an example of integrity in design. Gilhart has spoken on the topic of sustainability in design quite extensively, including at the panel Sarah Scaturro and I moderated at Pratt in conjunction with the “Ethics+Aesthetics” exhibition, as well as contributing to our exhibition catalogue. She also spoke at the 2009 Copenhagen Climate Change Conference.

Partially the victim of an incredibly ill-timed over-expansion, Barneys seems to be destined to go down-market or, perhaps more simply in a generic direction. This decision seems an ill-advised attempt at temporarily saving their bottom line while in the long run diluting their brand identity and potentially damaging their bottom line more permanently. (Brands like the Gap and/or American Apparel, albeit completely different in scope, are clear examples of such a downward spiral.)

If that’s the case—and taking away the unique and quirky aesthetic of Gilhart and Collinson from the mix seems to suggest it is—one will be hard-pressed to see why the so-called luxury consumer would shop at Barneys over Net-a-Porter, or, if outside New York, at a department store such as Neiman Marcus.

Francesca