"Japan Fashion Now" Symposium at the Museum at FIT

Two fashion conferences are taking place in New York--only one week apart from one another. The first, the "Japan Fashion Now Symposium," is taking place on November 4th and 5th in conjunction with the eponymous exhibition at the Museum at FIT, the second at Parsons the following week (see below).

Among the participants to the "Japan Fashion Now Symposium," in addition to MFIT director and chief curator Valerie Steele and deputy director Patricia Mears, are Brian McVeigh who will speak on the personalization of students' uniforms in Japan, Sharon Kinsella who will talk on the transformation of cute in Japanese subcultural fashion "from naive subculture to Grotesque Parody." Similar themes might transpires in Laura Miller’s presentation titled "Perverse Cuteness in Japanese Girl Culture."

Lowbrow Reader Show at Housing Works

Mikkel Hess of Hess is More and designer Henrik Vibskov drumming...

Housing Works, a terrific charity known for its pioneering work fighting AIDS and homelessness, is pairing up with one of our favourite publications: The Lowbrow Reader--edited by Fashion Projects contributor Jay Rutttenberg--for a show on November 4th to celebrate the Lowbrow's new issue.

The show will include performances by the Danish-born, New York–based band Hess is More and the singer-songwriter Jeffrey Lewis as well as comedians, readings and more.

The show starts promptly at 7pm on November 4th at the Housing Works Bookstore on Crosby Street in Soho.

For more information, visit their site

Wrestling for Attention

Wrestlers' Performance in conjunction with Fashion Night Out at Project 8. Photo CK.

It has been interesting to notice how far fashion and the fashion week/show phenomenon has seeped into popular culture and public awareness. Fashion Night Out and the public show at the Lincoln Center seem to have aided the frenzied attention. Sometimes, the interest in the phenomenon is such that the spectacle is greater than the work on show, as commented by fashion critics such as Cathy Horyn in the New York Times. Hopefully, in the end all the frenzy will aid the awareness of fashion as an important socio-cultural phenomenon which mediates contemporary cultural anxieties and aspirations, in part specifically because of how central fashion is to the progressive spectacularizationof contemporary society.

As fashion theorist Caroline Evans writes: “In periods in which ideas about the self seem to be unstable, or rapidly shifting, fashion itself can shift to centre stage and play a leading role in constructing images and meaning , as well as articulating anxieties and ideals.” Evans, Fashion at the Edge, London: Yale University Press, 1993

My very favourite event/performance this fashion week was one at Project 8 in the Lower East Side. An ambiguous spectacle of male virility and physical bonding, it showed young wrestlers holding artfully choreographed wrestling poses. It seemed an ironic take on the choreographed and synchronized female dancers, such as the Tiller Girls, which Siegfried Kracauer placed at the center of the spectacle of modernity, or perhaps more simply an ironic reference to the fashion show as a carefully choreographed spectacle of bodies in space.

Francesca

Wrestlers' Performance in conjunction with Fashion Night Out at Project 8. Photo CK.

Elisava: Fashion, Film and Performance

Papabygote, Elisava, 2010

Another end of the year show which I visited in July was organized in conjunction with the graduation of the masters students in fashion design at Elisava, a school of design in Barcelona. It was great to witness the experimental and imaginative projects completed by the graduating class. In a testament to the multi-media nature of fashion today, the students were recquired to complete a collection, stage a performance to present their collection and produce a short video showcasing their work and the concepts behind it. Also in the spirit of collaborations, the majority of the students worked in pairs or more for the completion of the work—a system that brilliantly debunks the outdated notion of the “genius” artist (and by extension designer) for the more realistic idea of collaborative work.

The program is directed by Beatriu Malaret and Toni Miró; the year-end presentation was attended by Diana Pernet, the Parisian fashion critic and video journalist. Through Pernet, I learned that a number of different tutors from various disciplines work at Elisava (for instance, Alex Murray-Leslie of Chicks on Speed). This is probably one of the reasons for the experimental and innovative nature of the work.

One of my favourite pieces was the film and collection by Papabygote. Their short is witty and subtle and reminded me of the work of David Bestué and Marc Vives, the brilliant video artist duo, also from Barcelona.

Francesca

Fuzz &, Elisava 2010

Sustainable Exchange

Crochet Workshop

This past weekend the exhibition cum workshop "Sustainable Exchange: Methods and Practices for Collaborative Partnerships took place at TODA, a design studio in Tribeca. Curated by Megan Howard in collaboration with Rachel Littenberg-Weisberg (both study Integrated Design at Parson), the exhibition included the experimental eco designer Susan Cianciolo, the collective Eko-Lab, and the jewelry company Black Sheep and Prodigal Sons, which creates beautifully unsettling pieces using repurposed materials. The exhibition design was completed by the talented design team from the interior design graduate program at the Pratt Institute under the supervision of design director Jon Otis. The exhibition structure was, in fact, made of repurposed material from the exhibition "Ethics + Aesthetics," that Sarah and I curated this past Fall at Pratt.

Particularly interesting was the focus on process, participation and collaboration underscored by the exhibition design, which allowed people to interact with the clothes and furniture and leaf through sketchbook. The interactive nature of the exhibition was also underscored by the rather impromptu performances, which took place during the exhibition opening, as well as several workshops, which covered experimental crochet techniques, natural dying processes, organic cooking and collage-making, which took place throughout the weekend.

Susan Cianciolo, Sketchbooks, Details

Eko-Lab Installation