Hacked Design at laRinascente, Milan

By Simona Segre Reinach

During the Salone del Mobile 2012 (Milan Design Week 16-22 April) la Rinascente, Milan’s most fashionable department store, is hosting ‘Hacked - Rebellious Imagination’(16-21 April). For those who don’t know already, hacking is a growing global movement, predicated on modification and customization. It’s about taking what exists and altering it in ways that create unexpected, dramatic or playful narratives. Hacking history draws on elements of Bauhaus, DIY, Arte Povera and Punk, combining it all with the excitement of new technology.

Over the course of 100 hours laRinascente has been radically altered inside and out to become an interactive expermental lab space. Following a contemporary concept of appropriation, alteration and transformation which pervades art, design, web and technology, Hacked is an experimental programme curated by Beatrice Galilee which includes live activities and events, installations, performances and workshops. Temporary, site-specific works by artists, architects and designers include a monumental hack of t laRinascente colonnaded façade by CarmodyGroarke; a flexible, movable ‘HackedLab’ stage by EXYZT; and – very briefly – a scale model of Large Hadron Collider.

The hacked lab programme is intended to provide a platform for young designers whose work exists outside of the parameters of conventional exhibition-objects and across various disciplines. One of the most interesting installation staged by EXYZT is TAP TAP, an installation inspired by the ‘Taxi Bush’ – the Haitian taxi, famed for their beautifully decorated exteriors, set up by Alexander Romer, a berlinese architect based in Paris. TAP TAP is a van organized into a modular system that, after its first stop at laRinascente will travel around Italy, promoting performance and participation from the public. The first opening event of Hacked on Monday, Botanica, the workshop from Studioformafantasma has taken place into this TAP TAP van and is a homage to plastic and its future.

laRinascente has long been known for promoting new designers in Milan. Promoting new designers has long been one of laRinascente’s main aims. Hacked celebrates brilliantly the store's 150 years of activities and its strategy for the future. Tiziana Cardini fashion director, commented that laRinascente wants to give to young designers the possibility to experiment with new ways of conceiving a product – no only for its functionality only, but also for its quality of participation, expression and performance. As Beatrice Galilee stressed, Hacking is about building bridges between different industries: design, architecture, fashion, art and performance. It also raises questions about creativity, independent design and the relations with mainstream consumer culture.

I have interviewed for Fashion Projects both Beatrice Galilee, the curator of the event and Tiziana Cardini, laRinascente fashion director.

Simona Segre Reinach is Contract Professor at Bologna University, Italy. She also teaches at Domus Academy and MFI (Milan Fashion Institute). She is in the advisory board of Fashion Theory and of Dress Cultures Series by I. B.Tauris and a member of MIC (Moda Immagine Consumi) a center for Fashion Studies at Università Statale of Milan. Her latest book, Un mondo di mode. Il vestire globalizzato, is published by Laterza (2011).

Interview with curator Beatrice Gailee

by Simona Segre Reinach

SSR In which ways did Milan Design Week and la Rinascente inspire your project Hacked?

BG This is my first time working in a shopping mall, and I found a lot of enthusiasm from the people here in Milan. The shopping mall is an exciting place to involve people in the events, which is exactly what ‘hacking’ is about. For me, having to organize so many events, three times a day for the duration of the Milan Design Week is, of course, both challenging and inspiring.

I particularly liked the idea of working during the Salone del Mobile (Design Week) because people come in person to the Salone. They want to be present. People make reservations, buy train and air tickets, they like to really participate in the event. I like the idea of people wanting to be there and to do things. We devote one of the days of the Design Week to laRinascente customers and to the people who will call, everybody is invited to participate. Performances such as ‘make your own thirsty plant detector’ and ‘build your own musical instrument’ are examples of design participation and creative experiments.

SSR What’s the relation beteween art, design and fashion nowadays?

BG They are all cultural fields although they involve different roles. But they have a lot of things in common too, interesting forms of collaborations between art, design and fashion are emerging – nowadays it is really about exploring boundaries among different fields. Artists, architects, fashion designers and designers are influenced by each other more and more.

SSR Is hacked somehow questioning also the concept of copyright? Is there any difference between design and fashion concerning copyright (as in fashion you can protect a logo/brand but you cannot protect a style)?

BG This is an interesting question. I think that copyright is becoming less and less important. The whole idea of Author with a capital A is undergoing severe change, challenged by the very act of the creative process. Products are becoming a completely open source. In a way this is liberatory, but, of course, it entails a lot of changes in the way we think about design. The relation between author, producer and buyer (consumer) is no longer a neatly separate one, but there is continuous interchange between these three elements of the process. Traditional authorship of course still exists, I would say it runs in parallel with these new forms of creativity in which the roles are constantly redefined, to set a new form of commerce and patronage. Take for example kickstarter.com – it is an interesting platform devoted to all new ways of funding and following creativity. You can design a dress and then find somebody there who can create it according to your and his or her ideas about making and distributing. You customize the ways in which you can put that dress on the market. For a new generation of designers, the idea of a ‘product’ to be manufactured, distributed and sold in the traditional way is no longer interesting. Using hacking, strategy, fiction, technology, science, performance, play and collaboration as tools of their trade, collections of emerging agents of design have demonstrated a different way to exhibit and experience contemporary design.

Interview with Tiziana Cardini-LaRinascente Fashion Director

by Simona Segre Reinach

SSR La Rinascente has often hosted events during the Salone del Mobile of Milan. This year it looks as if you want to be more involved in the actual co-production of an event. How did this develop ?

TC: This is the first time laRinascente is totally in charge of a big event. Before we just had partnerships with the likes of Interni.This time we thought that the time was right, we were ready to be part of the excitement of the city during the Salone. We have a strong heritage of relationships with the Milanese designers starting with the 50s and 60s Compassodoro and we have worked in the past with big talents like Bruno Munari, Gio Ponti etc.

SSR: Why hack?

TC: We wanted to choose a concept which crosses art, design and technology and is part of the language of design today and could be understood by today’s design community. It is also a concept that is very of the moment for the artistic community in general. Transforming a reality into something else. It’s a tool. A way of being in a relationship with the creative process.

SSR: Why Beatrice Galilee?

TC: Because she is one of the coolest and most relevant young curators today. She has a great knowledge about today’s trends and design, not to mention she’s very well connected within the design community.

SSR It is a shared idea that the Salone del Mobile (and more generally design) is an open system, which endorses participation from the public – whereas the fashion weeks are the very opposite: elitarian and selfcontained. Is the Hacked event meant to bridge/connect the two worlds – fashion and design –both very well represented at la Rinascente?

TC: No, not really. We wanted to do something really specific about the process of creating design. And we wanted to do something where people can really participate. We weren’t really thinking about working on a different scale, or creating a new relationship with fashion. That wasn’t the aim.

SSR: What does such an event mean for la Rinascente?

TC: We would like to become a place where these kinds of events, which are interesting on many different levels, take place. We want to be a platform for new designers and and to become an important place for the city where people can experiment and be creative. Milano doesn’t have this at the moment.

SSR As I read in the programme, Hacked is stressing the interaction with the public during the event. Is this just ‘one shot’ or la Rinascente strategy is looking for more interaction and connectivity with its customers? If this is the case could you tell us how you plan to develop more interactions with your customeres?

TC: Of course, we would love to do something like this again, because in the end we want to open the creative process to the public, so they can understand better and understand the exciting things that young designers are doing. We don’t know how exactly yet, but we’ll definitely continue to host these kinds of events and become more and more relevant during the Salone for the interational community.

SSR How has the Milanese fashion system changed since you became fashion director and what in your view should be the role of la Rinascente in the new scenario?

TC: There’s definitely a different customer for fashion, because the markets are enormously open now. We have a world wide audience for fashion, which wasn’t the case even 5 years ago. So, the new markets have a great influence in how fashion is thought of and designed by designers themselves and so the language of fashion has changed, for sure. Chinese, Russians, people from the Middle East and Brazilians consume fashion in a different way. The fashion industry has, naturally, adjusted to their needs.

This change has been felt by laRinascente especially. Today 50% of our customers are tourists, many of whom are used to shopping in department stores, unlike the Milanese who are used to shopping in a much more inimate way, in small boutiques and with personal relationship with the owner and a very personalised service. For tourists, laRinascente is easy and familiiar.

Fashion Photography on View

duffy_aladdin sane_1973

By Laura McLaws HelmsBrian Duffy's "Aladdin Sane," 1973

Exhibiting fashion photographs in museum and gallery settings has become increasingly common in recent years. Combining two fields that have had difficulty being accepted as ‘fine arts’, fashion photography only moved off the page and onto the wall within the last 15 years — the 2004 Museum of Modern Art show “Fashioning Fiction in Photography since 1990” was their first exhibition of fashion photography. As iconic fashion photographs have become part of the museum cannon, auction prices for such works have soared with Irving Penn’s Woman in Moroccan Palace (Lisa Fonssagrives-Penn), Marrakech (1951) selling for a record-breaking $409,740 at Christie’s last December. It can be of little surprise that museums all over the world are exhuming the archives of a variety of fashion photographers for retrospective shows.

Jean-Paul Goude's "Animatronic Grace"

Goude’s photographs of Grace Jones

The multi-talented Jean-Paul Goude, whose accomplishments in photography, film and video, art direction, illustration and brand development over his 40 year career have made him an icon of consummate creativity, is the focus of a retrospective exhibition at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris. The first such show of his work, “Goudemalion,” covers many aspects of his multi-faceted career. Opening with elements from his most ostentatious creation, the Bicentennial parade in Paris commemorating the 200th anniversary of the French Revolution on July 14, 1989, the visitor is first greeted by a life-size spinning doll and then, in the main hall, a giant locomotive that journeyed down the Champs-Elysées. While the side galleries start with his early fashion illustrations in the 1960s, it is with his increasing interest in photography in the 1970s, when he was working as the art director at Esquire, that his inimitable style becomes solidified. Known primarily for his work with muse and former girlfriend, the Jamaican-American singer Grace Jones, his pre-Photoshop cut-and-paste images of her, which distort her body into impossible, intimidating forms, are shown in both the original (spliced and refigured) and the final (airbrushed into unknown perfection). His fashion photographs are crammed onto the black walls of four smaller rooms — simply mounted and unframed, they range from the overtly sexy images of the ‘70s to the more obviously stylized and surreal photographs of later decades. One wall is given over to the fun series he has been taking since the 1980s of fashion designers — including Azzedine Alaïa, Valentino and Jean Paul Gaultier. Bright and colorful, the images pop against the black walls and low lighting. As this retrospective includes sculpture, performance art, animatronics and television adverts for clients such as Chanel, it goes far beyond just fashion photography – but by incorporating all of these different media, this retrospective helps to show how one singular vision can be adapted and translated across many fields, and also marks his influence in defining the brash, surrealistic photographic style of post-modernism in the 1980s. Goude's photographs of Grace Jones

On a much smaller scale is the first show of Paolo Roversi’s work at the Wapping Project Bankside in London. The Italian-born, Paris-based Roversi has been shooting fashion since 1973, when Peter Knapp, the Art Director of Elle, brought him to Paris. Roversi is particularly known for his use since the early 1980s of large-format Polaroid film for most of his photographs. The works on view were all taken between 1988 and 2004, and were primarily shot in front of a rough burlap backdrop in his studio. A small gallery, the Wapping Project Bankside has been divided into three spaces, with twelve black and white images hanging in the first — his soft focus aesthetic brings a certain tenderness to the various images, an ethereality, regardless of whether they are a group portrait of a shoot crew, a topless male model or his camera. Most of the images in the other two rooms are of his muse, Guinevere van Seenus, including a series of six 13” x 9.5” nudes that are so lightly printed that they almost appear to be drawn with soft pencil. In an interview he gave with Dazed Digital at the opening, Roversi said of his portrait taking process: “You live a special moment together, an emotion together. Without this, the picture is boring. If you don’t live that moment together, the picture will never be strong.” [1] Diametrically opposed to the colorful exuberance of Goude’s photographs, Roversi’s images are more in keeping with the quietness of an Old Master still life and are well suited to the clean, openness of the modern gallery.

Roversi's photograph of Natalia Vodionova, via British Vogue

Goude and Roversi both first began shooting in the late 1960s, a decade that is commonly seen as the period when fashion photography went from being rather staid and inhabited by intensely elegant swans, to being more youthful and documentary-like in style. In London three photographers were felt to be the lead galvanizers of this trend — David Bailey, Terrence Donovan and Brian Duffy. Bailey and Donovan continued to lead successful careers long after that decade and have become (especially in Bailey’s case) icons of the era, while Duffy faded from memory. Rather unusually, this was a personal choice of his — a successful advertising photographer in the 1970s, he burned out and set fire to most of his negatives in his back garden in 1978. After his son rediscovered the remnants 25 years later, Duffy became the focus of a BBC documentary in 2010, The Man Who Shot the 60s (which can be viewed here), which followed the makings of the first ever gallery show of his work in 2009 as he was dying of a degenerative lung disease. A same-titled retrospective exhibition of his work is touring museums worldwide at the moment, having started at the Idea Generation Gallery in London before moving to the Museo Nazionale Alinari della Fotografia in Florence and now to the Monash Gallery of Art in Australia. Trained as a fashion designer, he had an inherent understanding of clothes and his graphic, loose black and white images of miniskirts and vinyl boots are era defining, as are his portraits of ‘60s celebrities, like Michael Caine and Christine Keeler. Moving into color in the ‘70s, he continued to shoot fashion, especially for Elle in France, yet his most well known photograph is the album artwork for David Bowie’s Aladdin Sane album (1973). His images became increasingly glossy and slick from the 60s to the 70s; less documentary in approach and more stylized. Especially when seen in conjunction with the BBC film, this exhibition is intriguing on multiple levels — as a comprehensive and engaging group of photographs, as a social document, and as a personal memoir.

Duffy's photograph of Barbara Miller and Jean Shrimpton, 1973

As a counterpoint to these rather large retrospectives was another fashion photography exhibition, also titled “The Man Who Shot the 60s”, which was on view at the Pushkin Society in London for three days in March. Showcasing the work of Ron Falloon, who had a studio in London from 1962 to the end of that decade, this small exhibition included just a dozen images. Several photos show Twiggy mugging for the camera in her Pop Art decorated flat, while Jean Shrimpton poses more traditionally in a gown. Enjoyable primarily for their subject matter, his images lack the consistent eye and sense of balance of Duffy’s — it is unlikely Falloon’s work, which he had stuffed under his bed for thirty years, would garner much attention were it not for the seemingly insatiable interest by the public in the now mythic 1960s.

Falloon's photograph of Jean Shrimpton

The vast differences in style, technique and quality between these four photographers illustrate how wide a field fashion photography has been and continues to be. Though fashion exhibitions are now beginning to be seen as easy blockbusters for museums, it is unlikely that many photographers’ work could translate into major shows — “Goudemalion” successfully uses the main galleries of the museum because his oeuvre includes so many different disciplines, creating a sense of dynamism and filling the space. Fashion photography’s key place within the cultural history of the West in the last sixty years, with its often provocative subject matter, makes it an ideal choice for exhibition, and with the internet bringing to light the work of many forgotten photographers, it seems inevitable that there will continue to be many exhibitions focusing on this field.

[1] http://www.dazeddigital.com/photography/article/12546/1/paolo-roversi-the-wapping-project

Indisciplined Curation-Recording

by Francesca Granata For those who missed the panel, you can view a recording of it here or below: