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

I Hurt I Am in Fashion

Screen Short from "I Hurt I Am in Fashion"

A five-month old website "I Hurt I Am in Fashion" manages, through a witty juxtaposition of text and image, to parody the fashion industry (with a particular focus on the modelling industry)—one which is often so over the top to be notoriously difficult to parody. Yet through its dry wit and paucity of words "I Hurt I Am in Fashion" succeeds where many (including Robert Altman) have failed!

Cosa Vostra: Contemporary Art in Italy

Michelangelo Pistoletto

It's sad to report that drastic budget cuts to be enacted in 2011 threaten the health of contemporary art museums in Italy—an area which is already underfunded vis-a-vis the rest of Europe.

AMACI, the association of Contemporary Art Museums in Italy, is launching a campaign "Cosa Vostra" to publicize the imminent cuts and to raise awareness of the importance of contemporary art to Italy's past, present and future.

Among the artists who contributed by allowing their work to be used in promotion of the campaign are Carla Accardi, Stefano Arienti, Maurizio Cattelan, Enzo Cucchi, Marisa Merz, Luigi Ontani, Giulio Paolini, Mimmo Paladino, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Paola Pivi and Francesco Vezzoli.

"COSA VOSTRA. The art of the present is the soul of the future: let's nourish it."

"The title chosen for the campaign promoted by AMACI, through which member museums want to underscore to the general public the community nature of Italy's heritage and artistic production, emphasises a key concept, as "Cosa Vostra" means "your thing." Contemporary art is the soul of the future because, with its ability to offer new scenarios and perspectives, it is a constant stimulus to the creativity of Italians and to social and economic innovation. It is a means through which, thanks also to relations established with leading international museums, Italy offers the world an image that is not built on stereotypes, but is composed of creative and dynamic intelligences.

The decrease in public funding is part of a general policy of cutbacks that have been made over the past few years, in a scenario of public allocations to culture that are far lower than those of other European countries. Consequently, AMACI wants to make people aware of the key role of contemporary art in Italy's cultural, social and economic development."

AMACI, Bergamo, December 31, 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.