Avant-garde Fashion, Art, Visual Culture, Fashion Theory, Fashion Exhibitions, Fashion Museums, Fashion Exhibition, Fashion Museum
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
In anticipation of the School of Visual Arts new MFA in Design Criticism program, the department will host a series of readings by prominent design scholars, writers and artists. The first reading takes place November 29 (from 7:00-9:00 p.m.) at KGB Bar in the East Village. "Addressing the concept of home from different angles are: Metropolis magazine columnist Karrie Jacobs, design, technology and culture writer David Womack, and conceptual artist Elizabeth Demaray."
The program, which starts the Fall of 2008, promises to be an exciting development within the field of design criticism in the US--particularly as it represents the first one of its kind. One hopes that it will include teachings on fashion design, considering its relevance to a number of other design disciplines, from architecture to interior design.
Francesca
Osklen in collaboration with Coopa-Roca
The Eco fashion panel at FIT presented a range of views from people discussing a quasi-artisanal approach to fashion such as Susan Cianciolo and Johanna Hofring, who produce small runs alongside one-of-a-kind handcrafted clothes to luxury store buyers like Barneys’s Julie Gilhart. Cianciolo, an unwitting early adapter of the slow fashion movement, lyrically described her production of entirely organic garments which involved going through the woods with her mother to find materials for her non-toxic dyes. She also highlighted the potential longevity of design by discussing how her clients often ask her to re-work her pieces after years of wearing them.
Gilhart came from the other end of the spectrum, working in the luxury corporate industry and its need of maximizing profit. However, she gave a compelling and honest talk on the ways in which the sustainable fashion movement is encroaching in the buying practice of Barneys, where buyers started to ask about sourcing and compliance, while the store produced an eco-fashion line in collaboration with Loomstate. She stressed the importance of good design both in terms of echo-fashion which should stand on its own as a design piece, as well as in terms of fashion more generally, where good design could hopefully supersede a trend-driven consumption.
Another perspective was given by Sass Brown who focused on social ecology and discussed the work of a Brazilian women-run co-op Coopa-Roca which collaborates with fashion designers (i.e. Carlos Miele), product designers (i.e. Tord Boontje) and artists (Ernesto Neto). What went undiscussed was the way FIT addressed sustainability in its teaching and its practice, besides the singular experience of Brown, who is also a professor at FIT.
Attention to sustainable issues, I believe, is sorely missing from the school, where a few years ago, upon asking about the need to use toxic substances (i.e foorwear glues and various dyes) in the classroom, I was told that it was just the reality of the industry. Hopefully that will change—yet for this change to occur, the impulse does need to start within education institutions like FIT.
Francesca
Nava Lubelski Side Dish, 2004 Hand-embroidered thread on ink stained cotton canvas. Photo: Nava Lubelski (courtesy of www.madmuseum.org)
Fall always brings out interesting museum exhibitions, and this season especially. Over the past week I was able to view three incredibly different, yet intriguing shows. Here in NYC, the Museum of Art and Design just opened Pricked: Extreme Embroidery, which is the sister show to the crowd-pleasing Radical Lace and Subversive Knitting exhibition held earlier this year. Taught to embroider as a little girl, I found Pricked an energizing and fresh take on the "virtuous art" of needlework. Thematic sections reflect on embroidery's rich history and then move on to its ability to express politics, words, memory, and the body. Artists such as Angelo Filomeno, Elaine Reichek and Judy Chicago are represented, but it is often emerging artists that provoke the visitor most. Benji Whalen's surreal tattoo sleeves cheekily mimic the still slightly-taboo body art while Nava Lubelski subverts the idea of a stain as something imperfect by emphasizing its abstract and dynamic possibilities. Other favorites of the show included Paul Villinski and Paddy Hartley.
On a completely different note, I had the opportunity to visit a few museums while I was in Washington, DC over the weekend. One exhibition that stood out for its pure beauty was the Textile Museum's show on the Textiles of Klimt's Vienna. This show contained an original Klimt, along with many examples of some the most talented artists in the first part of the 20th century. Represented in force were several Wiener Werkstätte artists like Josef Hoffman, Dagobert Peche and Maria Likarz-Strauss. Interestingly, a textile called Bavaria by Karl Otto Czeschka shown in this exhibition is also included right now in the Multiple Choice: from Sample to Product show at Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum in NYC.
A third thought-provoking experience was found at the National Museum of the American Indian. Identity by Design: Tradition, Change and Celebration in Native Women's Dresses elegantly illustrates the transition of Native women's garments in the Great Basin area, starting with the influx of new materials into the region during the early 19th century. Through garments and illustrations, the exhibition explains the difference in construction techniques, such as 1-, 2-, and 3-hide dresses, as well as the symbolic and economic importance of specific materials and motifs. Most touching were the Ghost Dance dresses tucked away into a silent and shadowy corner. These garments are rarely seen due to their sparse survival and intensely sacred meanings, and, as the text panels indicate, they should only be viewed with the utmost respect.
It's wonderful that we live in a time when museums are including fashion and textiles as serious arenas of exploration for the public. Each of these exhibitions offers a transporting experience to the visitor, whether it is subversive, aesthetic, or historical.
Sarah Scaturro
Hartmann Nordenholz, Photo from Unit F's Modebuch
Austrian Fashion seems to be expanding its reach. This is undoubtedly, in part, due to the protracted support from cultural institution like UNIT F, which was founded specifically to promote Austrian fashion together with the countries’ solid training grounds—and particularly Vienna’s University of Applied Arts and its conjoining museum the MAK (the Museum for Applied Art).
Among the fast-establishing Austrian designers is Ute Ploier—one of the finalists of the Swiss Textiles Award. Mario Schwab, who won the award—albeit strongly associated with London—counts some Austrian relations as well: His father was Austrian and he began his fashion training in Salzburg.
There are many other designers who enrich the Austrian fashion scene: Wendy & Jim, Carol Christian Poell (who is based in Milan), Claudia Rosa Lukas, Fabric Interseason, Rosa Mosa, and Hartman Nordenholz.
Many of the designers can be found under one roof in a showroom in Paris sponsored by the Austrian government on occasion of the city’s fashion week. Additionally, two books on Austrian fashion have been recently published: the Austrian Fashion Guide and Modebuch, which places current Austrian design in the context of the city’s museums, schools and in relation to previous decades and particularly the work of Helmut Lang, who wrote the book’s introduction.
Another way to keep up-to-date with new developments is to sign up to Unit F’s newsletter “Short-Cuts.”
Francesca
Fashion Projects is a journal focusing on fashion, art and visual culture.
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