Designing Sustainability as the New Cultural Paradigm

The Fashion Institute of Technology is making further leeways into exploring sustainable solutions to the fashion and design industries--at least at an educational level. A group of professors, students and alumni have started a sustainability group with the aim "to inculcate the concepts of sustainability into all aspects of what we do at FIT. Among other projects they have organized the conference "Designing Sustainability as the New Cultural Paradigm," to take place this Thursday the 17th from 8:00 AM-5:30 PM in The John Reeves Great Hall. For a list of speakers and other events organized concomitantly with the conference, you can visit the sustainability group at FIT site.

Yeti on Leigh Bowery

Leigh Bowery outside his flat, 1993

Yeti—the Portland based journal—just published an interview I conducted with Nicola Bowery.

I had visited Nicola Bowery—wife of the late Leigh Bowery—in her Brighton, England home last summer, to interview her for my PhD thesis, a chunk of which revolves around Bowery’s extravagant costumes and performances from the ’80s and ’90s. My interest in Leigh Bowery had been spurred by Hilton Als’ New Yorker profile, which discussed Bowery’s varied “career” from fledging fashion designer to notorious club figure to performance artist—three strands of his practice which remain inextricably intertwined.

Nicola was extremely kind in taking the time to show me a number of her husband’s elaborate costumes which, having been painstakingly made to measure to Bowery’s large girt, appeared eerily empty—particularly as a complex systems of understructures kept them in shape, further highlighting Bowery’s absent body. Nicola also took the time to discuss her role as the slime-covered baby in the humorous, unsettling “birth scenes” which Bowery staged as part of his performances with his band Minty, from the early ’90s until his untimely death in 1995.

Francesca

Leigh Bowery, Ruined Clothes Exhibition, 1988

Lowbrow Reader no. 6

We interrupt our usual announcements to inform you that the sixth issue of the Lowbrow Reader is just out. Albeit dealing with comedy rather than fashion, with contributions from John Waters and Justin Bond of Kiki and Herb, as well as longer articles from Neil Hagerty and our own contributor (as well as editor of the Lowbrow) Jay Ruttenberg, this issue is not to be missed. The heavily illustrated journal can be found in larger stands and independent book and music stores across the United States and in London, as well as directly on their site, www.lowbrowreader.com

Upcoming Fashion Lectures

1920s New Yorker cover from "What a Dame! Tracking the Origins of the New York Woman in 1920s Media and 1930s Film" by Lisa Santandrea

April seems to be introducing a slew of fashion lectures. This Friday April 4, the NYU costume studies MA is hosting its yearly symposium, "The Seventh Richard Martin Visual Culture Symposium." The keynote speaker is Jan Glier Reeder, curator of the Brooklyn Museum Costume Documentation Project. Other lectures' topics include a talk on guerrilla stores (by Emily Marshall Orr) and a lecture by Lisa Santandrea, which tracks the origin of the New York Woman in 1920s Media and 1930s Film.

The symposium is taking place 6:00pm to 8:00pm in the Einstein Auditorium, 34 Stuyvesant Street, New York, tel. (212) 998-5700.

Coming up next week at the Fashion Institute of Technology is a talk by Christian Louboutin, which has been organized concomitantly with the Louboutin’s exhibition curated by the graduate students at FIT. (The talk is to take place on April 9 from 5:30pm to 7:30pm at FIT’s Katie Murphy Amphitheatre.)

The next day (from 6pm to 8pm) a panel titled “Women Rule Fashion”—moderated by FIT curators Molly Sorkin and Colleen Hill—will engage in a discussion on the way the fashion industry has historically and at times uncharacteristically allowed women to gain leadership positions. Joining in the discussion are designer Catherine Malandrino, Vogue editor Sally Singer, photographer Maria Chandoha Valentino and Susan Sokol, president of Vera Wang.

Panel on Fashion Blogging at the Met

Diane Pernet, Drawing by Siggi Oddsson

This Sunday, Harold Koda, chief curator of the Metropolitan Museum’s Costume Institute, will host a panel on fashion and blogging, to which Cathy Horyn (the New York Times senior fashion critic) will participate together with Scott Schuman of the Sartorialist and Diane Pernet, editor of A Shaded View on Fashion.

It will be interesting to see whether they will address the different kinds of blogs: i.e. personal blogs (in the case of Diane Pernet) versus a blog hosted by an established editorial entity (as is the case of Horyn’s and to some extent the Sartorialist). And to what extent ethical questions (particularly when it comes to the Times) inform the various types of blogs and potentially clash with the conversational, un-fact-checked and, as a result, often un-journalistic nature of the media.

It is great that the Met is becoming interested in the phenomenon, however, I also hope that future blog panels will include younger fashion bloggers—i.e. Susie of Style Bubble and Almost Girl. The latter has in fact also started Coutorture—an umbrella fashion blog—which serves as a service to the fashion blog community.

The event is taking place Sunday March 30, 2008 at 3:00 p.m. in The Grace Rainey Rogers Auditorium and it's free with museum admission.

Francesca