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!

Djurdja Bartlett, “FashionEast: The Spectre that Haunted Socialism” and Paulina Olowska “Applied Fantastic.”

Paulina Olowska, Ela, 2010, Oil on canvas.

Update: Bartlett will speak at the Museum at FIT Friday the 4th at 6pm

An increased interest is being paid to fashion under the Eastern Block. Chiefly, Djurdja Bartlett’s “FashionEast: The Spectre that Haunted Socialism” was recently published by MIT Press. The repository of over ten years of research by Bartlett—a research fellow at the London College of Fashion—this ground-breaking book is an in-depth and beautifully illustrated study of fashion’s relation to socialism throughout the twentieth century. By employing a vast array of sources, it traces the history of fashion under socialism in the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, East Germany, Poland and Yugoslavia.

An interesting parallel to the book was a recent exhibition at Metro Pictures showcasing the recent work of Polish artist Paulina Olowska. Titled “Applied Fantastic,” the exhibition was comprised of paintings as well as actual sweaters based on home-knitted patterns from late communist Poland, which were in turn based on adaptation and re-interpretation of Western fashion, thus showing a protracted engagement with Western fashion in communist Poland.

The title of the show is a reference to Polish writer Leopold Tyrmand, who, “describing the localized re-creations of Western styles,” coined the term ‘Applied Fantastic’ in 1954. Thus, similarly to Bartlett’s book Olowska, in a strikingly different medium, explores the Eastern block’s fascination with Western fashion, or as described in Bartlett’s book fashion’s role as “the spectre that haunted socialism.”

Francesca Granata

Paulina Olowska, Sweater 3 (Ela), 2010

The 3rd Fashion in Film Festival: Birds of Paradise

Festival Poster

The 3rd Fashion in Film Festival titled "Birds of Paradise" and curated by Marketa Uhlirova is now running in venues accross London--among which are the Tate, the Somerset House, the BFI Southbank, and the Barbican:

"The 3rd Fashion in Film Festival is proud to present Birds of Paradise, an intoxicating exploration of costume as a form of cinematic spectacle throughout European and American cinema.

There will be exclusive screenings of rare and unseen films, plus two special commissions as part of the season: an installation for Somerset House by the award-winning Jason Bruges Studio and a London-wide Kinoscope Parlour, an installation of six peephole machines designed by Mark Garside after Thomas A. Edison’s kinetoscopes.

From the exquisitely opulent films of the silent era, to the sybaritic, lavishly stylised underground films of the 1940s -1970s, costume has, for a long time, played a significant role in cinema as a vital medium for showcasing such basic properties of film as movement, change, light and colour. The festival programme explores episodes in film history which most distinctly foreground costume, adornment and styling as vehicles of sensuous pleasure and enchantment.

"Hemline: the Moving Screen" by Jason Bruges Studio at Somerset House

Experimental films by Kenneth Anger, Jack Smith, Ron Rice, José Rodriguez-Soltero, Steven Arnold and James Bidgood constitute one such episode. Their decadent, highly stylised visions full of lyrical fascination with jewellery, textures, layers, glittering fabrics and make-up unlock the splendour and excess of earlier periods of popular cinema, especially ‘spectacle’ and Orientalist films of the 1920s; early dance, trick and féerie films of the 1890s and 1900s; and Hollywood exotica of the 1940s."

Please, visit their site for full programming.

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