Riotous Colour, Daring Patterns: Fashions + Textiles 18th to 21st centuries

TimeMagazine dress. Printed paper designed by Walter Lefmann and Ron de Vito, 1967, ROM967.77 Gift of TIME International of Canada Ltd. Image Courtesy of the Royal Ontario Museum

A new exhibition recently opened at the Patricia Harris Gallery of Textiles & Costume at the Royal Ontario Museum. Titled "Riotous Colour, Daring Patterns: Fashions + Textiles 18th to 21st centuries," the exhibition, which is curated by Dr. Alexandra Palmer, Nora E. Vaughan Fashion Costume Curator, features 120 textiles and costumes from the ROM’s extensive textile and costume collection.

Among the exhibition's higlights is the display titled "Clothing as Canvas," which presents "paper fashions that emulate textiles, and fashion and textiles that copy printed paper from the 1940s to the present. Included in this section are the first paper dresses made in 1966 by Scott Paper Limited, Bandana and Op Art, and MPH Design’s digitally printed World Trade Center Tyvek dress, as well as a silk dress imprinted with newspaper headlines, designed by John Galliano for Christian Dior."

Other sections include "Pattern-Dyed Textiles of Asia and Africa" and "Fashion and Interiors: Late 18th – 21st Centuries." For more information please visit the ROM website .

Judith Clark's Lecture at Parsons

Plain from the Concise Dictionary of Dress Exhibition, Artangel .

Judith Clark--One of our favourite fashion curators will be speaking at Parsons' ADHT Department. The lecture is free and open to the public

"The School of Art and Design History and Theory is pleased to present a lecture by fashion curator and academic Judith Clark, whose Judith Clark Gallery, in London was ground breaking in new fashion curation from 1998 through 2002. She has curated major exhibitions at the Victoria & Albert Museum, London, ModeMuseum, Antwerp, Palazzo Pitti, Florence, and Boijmans van Beuningen, Rotterdam. Forthcoming exhibitions include The Eye Has to Travel, at the Museo Fortuny in Venice. She is Reader in the Field of Fashion and Museology and Co-Director of MA Fashion Curation at the University of the Arts, London."

The Dictionary and the Gallery: On Exhibition-Making February 23, 2011, 6:00pm Theresa Lang Student Center 55 W 13th St, Room 202 New York NY 10011

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