As every January, during last week, Paris came to light with five days totally based around a fashion schedule designed just for men. Behind one of the few business where women have always been above the men, it seems that the fashion machine does not take umbrage with the current economical situation in Europe – or at least that’s what it’s said– while sparing no expense on finding the time to dress men up. It’s all about a timetable riddled with presentations and events where the journalist, buyer or visitor will pass from golden Versailles-style venues to some other minimal catwalks. Definitely, fashion needs publicity and buzzword and for that purpose it’s highly recommended to get good budget.
Wednesday, early in the afternoon, Mugler presented its work under the creative direction of Nicola Formichetti and Romain Kremer. A collection of garments where we could see with no opacity the root of the former Thierry Mugler men, besides the perfectly recognizable Kremer’s taste, who’s known for familiarizing people with unusual fabrics as neoprene and leather in garments that transform the male bust thanks to the volumes. Jacquard technic was also there, present in what it seemed since the beginning a regular print reproduced in suits, pants, tailored jackets and vests. Last but not least, we ought to keep an eye on sartorial asymmetries reproduced in half-capes half-jacket. The key was a classical man with futuristic shapes.
On the opposite hand, far from the aforesaid concept, we found the Alexandre Matiussi work for his brand AMI. A fall winter bucolic collection lying on a pathway between the countryside and the city that took place in an awe-inspiring apartment close to Place de la Republique. From one room to another, the public could feel alpaca, flannel and Prince of Wales as main textures making them dream about a warm wintry paradise. And… without forgetting that after winter comes springtime, the designer didn’t forget the vernal flower print. Eye candy, sure!
Thursday, at 9:30 in the morning, Phillip Lim 3.1 opened the day doing he’s first menswear show ever in Paris. The outcome was better than good despite the footwear where thick soles met derbies, a fad that today seems to be the boys’ favorite. Through the silhouettes and palette, a very remarkable presence of white as conducting thread guiding us on the scrutinization of the looks: high-waisted pants accompanied by oversized rigid belts. A trend completely focused on the overlapping of garments, from trench to knitwear or longish vests.
As last June, the glasshouse of the Citroën’s Park host Kim Jones collection for Louis Vuitton men. Underneath a metallic reproduction of the Earth where some nationalities were engraved on it, the powerful brand proves its robustness by sending out some looks between globetrotters and homme d’affaires. As seen: varsity jackets on the catwalk mixing crocodile textures with cotton sleeves, or a new ethnical print present in maxi scarfs and wool smoking jackets. Jones takes the brand around the world in a man who wears suit pants both pin-striped and classical, always combined with parkas, duffle coats or anoraks.
The psychedelic and pictorial show carried out by Dries Van Noten happened to be in some way a romantic performance where painters, narrators and fashion gathered together in a very good tasting closing day event at the Grand Palais. Some of the silhouettes introduced by the Belgian designer match a colorful print in shirts, pants and trench coats with the hand-made draws recently painted on the walls by the in situ artists. Turtlenecks with a slip-on footwear focused on black and brown hues were undoubtedly the seventies accent overrunning the parlor this time.
The weekend came with five unavoidable stops. From Friday we kept Berluti as one of the most relevant and expected collections this fashion week. The Italian brand acquired by LVMH in 1993 shown for the very first time a developed work far from the frequent unbeatable craft shoes. The brand has been took into consideration by Antoine Arnault who, as a matter of fact, achieves to write another chapter on the history of the brand. Inside the main gallery of the École de Beaux Arts the exhibit took place by displaying the models in what it happens to be living paintings and sculptures. Timelessness was pursued in these designs, wherein cashmere, mohair and an important presence of crafted leather joined together next to the elaborated suit shapes, shorter in the length and a bit bulkier. Needless to say the shoe wear, mainly exposed in the middle of the venue, was catching everybody’s fancy along with the shoetrees of Polanski or Depardieu.
Saturday’s first stop was Couvent des Cordeliers where Maison Martin Margiela was hosting its menswear collection. By getting inside the two centuries old building, the visitor could experience a black-carpeted room disposing two unconnected catwalks on the sides. In the middle amid the columns, an arrangement of methacrylate panels kept behind them some of the pieces that bestowed sense and meaning to the rest of the looks afterward eyed on models. Reworked garments and replica pieces gave virtually the real Martin Margiela soul. Camel coats, biker pants, and plastic bin liner bags as shocking fabric and fresh concept of reusing and recycling. That’s what Margiela is made of next winter.
Wooyoungmi considers its man a real gentleman. Through the show, under the zigzag disposed streetlamps, close to a dark palette a classy gentleman parades showing the severe designs of the South Korean duo. Despite the scent of a 1950’s style or a postwar-into-modern homme some clues were given to the audience for the next season as the loose-fitting pants or the wide leather flap covering the instep of the shoes. A very remarkable presence of belted gabardine coats, even in its sleeveless version, came also as trend.
From a barren hangar to a dim garage the last day of presentations took off in an already customary expectancy to see what Lucas Ossendrijver in collabo with Alber Elbaz had prepared for the fashion crowd that Sunday morning. The answer, close to Lanvin aesthetics, was the very unique sense that the brand confers to suits in a yet again unconventionally way of understanding the shapes in shoulders that were subtly pushed out, the waist forms focused on man’s hip, and those large pleated suit pants later redone in shiny materials. Jonny Johansson delighted us finally with a perfect know-how mix of fabrics in a very rich palette far form darkness or grey scale conceptual visions. Acne’s man wants hunting quilted jackets and wool coats all-in-one and he’s not afraid of combining different lengths, perfectly identifiable in sleeves for instance or in the superposition of shorts and pants.
It’s already vox populi next season will be saturated of first class extra-expensive fabrics furthermore an outstanding new way of understanding the gentleman style. Brands unaware of what it will be our time to come, either the everlasting stock market crisis or the fatal world prophecies, gave it all to ensure and assume their corresponding role: think out of the blue when dressing an every time more demanding man.
Pau Avia
The MOMA in New York opens its doors to the works of Sanja Ivekovic. The United States welcomes for the first time a retrospective of the 40 years of production by the recognized Croatian artist, which can be visited until the 26th of March in New York.
Born in Zagreb in 1949, Iveković grew up and developed her artistic career in the most turbulent years of the old Yugoslavia. She lived directly under the dictatorship of Mariscal Tito, the fall of the communism, the disintegration of the country and the violence of the civil war. Affined with the New Art Practice, she formed part of the generation of artists of the early 70´s of formed the official art. However, she remained also outside the commercial circuit, unlike other artists like Marina Abramovic.
Iveković developed what she herself called “public artworks”, in the form of “photocollages”, videos and pionering performances in her time, that where inserted into magazines or became the word on the street. In the eyes of the curator of the exhibition, Roxana Marconi, she could be considered as the first female artist from Yugoslavia.
Her sharp and clear reflections about the structure of power, genre, voilence, the intervention of the state into personal privacy, the collective memory or the influence of the mass media, are built through a powerful visual and graphic language, mkaing social activism and aesthetic exercise.
The exposion, Sweet Violence, takes its name from one of the earliest and most famous videos of Sanja Iveković, in 1974, which also includes the sample with the audiovisual work like Personal Cuts (1982) or Rohrbach Living Memorial (2005) and a hundred photocollages as the series Double Life (1975-76), in which the artist herself constrasted images of herself from her personal album with other photographs taken from other women’s magazines.
In addition, reviews of more recent projects like Women´s House (sunglasses), a multimedia initative launched in 2022 with the object to denounce violence against women.
Incisive and a committed feminist, Sanja Iveković wrote on the most raw and refined texts about Power of our time.
www.moma.org
Bárbara Muriel
In the aftermath of the Japanese tsunami of 2011, Kengo Kuma and Associates, one of the world’s most exciting and revered architecture and design firms, launched the East Japan Project. The project aims to revive the traditional crafts and support the traditional craftspeople of the East Japan Area, especially the Tohuko region, which was particularly affected by tsunami.
But the project’s aim is not simply a short-term focus on recovering ‘traditional craft’ industries and producers affected by the tsunami. Locally made products were in decline in the region, as they are across Japan and the world. Rather than rebuild the ‘traditional handicrafts” industry to which traditional skills had been relegated, the East Japan Project aims for far more. The tsunami and it’s consequent nuclear disaster gave the East Japan Project founders cause to reflect, and resulted in a vision of a sustainable new lifestyle in which local culture, climate, industry and people are embraced by communities. Supported by interior design heavyweights including The Conran Shop, BALS, Muji and Cibone, the East Japan project embodies a philosophy of life in which we embrace the place in which we live, and a mission to value sustainability and quality over cheap, disposable and damaging mass-produced goods.
The project’s aim is to create new products for every day use that help realize an ecological and sustainable new lifestyle. By bringing iconic designers, retailers and manufacturers together with East Japan’s highly skilled craftspeople, these everyday objects are also functional, innovative and beautiful.
Designed by Japanese interiors retailer FrancFranc, these Kokeshi dolls from Miyagi Prefecture, Daruma papier-mache dolls from Fukushima Prefecture, or Nanbu ironware from Iwate Prefecture are updated with a modern touch to be adopted into daily home utensils.
Kengo Kuma itself designed the Chidori furniture below – a flexible furniture system that can adapt to different uses and life styles. Each modular unit can be connected to from all 6 sides, allowing numerous configurations. One unit consists of 12 timber sticks with special junctions that require highly skilled carpenters in the Tohoku region to produce.
Photo’s courtesy of East Japan Project
Jacqui Loadman
In a time where not even Alice would dare to look through the mirror, the Tate Liverpool offers us a kaleidoscopic look of the interpretations and history in the World of art over the last 150 years.
Since Lewis Carroll published Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland in 1865, it’s references and stories have not stopped growing: Films, paintings, sculptures, illustrations, contemporary installations…. All conversations set our hearts ablaze leaving us intrigued and forcing us to look deeper.
Individuality, introspection, the limits between reality and fiction, language, time and space, are questions specific to contemporary culture, which Carroll anticipated in his stories about Alice and her friends. The Cheshire Cat, the White Rabbit, the Mad Hatter, Humpty Dumpty, amongst others, have become to inhabit the western culture and remain as iconic figures in our memories.
Until the 29th January, the Tate Liverpool offers a tour around the creative Heritage of those magically stories. From the first illustrations of Carroll, elaborated by the artist himself, to the latest contemporary referentes, the exhibition will travel the paths of Alice in four different times. The first will demonstrate the oldest illustrations, photographs taken by Carroll of the Liddell family, a reconstruction of the childrens culture of the nineteenth Century, including even some original cartoons of Walt Disney himself. The second part will explore the universe of Surrealism and it’s ties with the fantasies of Alice, from the work of Max Ernt or Magritte. The final part of the exhibition runs from the 60’s the Pop culture until today, displaying illustrations of Blake and Dalí, the work of Anna Gaskell, Paula Rego, Sigmar Polke, Kiki Smith or Diana Thater.
Art still follows the White Rabbit.
Bárbara Muriel
During Copenhagen’s upcoming Fashion Week 1st -5th February, 2012 SPON DIOGO has been given the honor to present their AW 12 collection in a showcase event sponsored by Max Factor.
Mia Lisa Spon and Rui Andersen Diogo Rodrigues, the dynamic design duo behind SPON DIOGO, launched their namesake label in 2008 and have since quickly gained both local and international acclaim with their signature style of sleek, architectural, graphic designs that are instantly recognisable with urban yet organic forms.
Anne Christine Persson, Copenhagen Fashion Week CTO and jury member selected SPON DIOGO stating: “With their sharp minimalist style SPON DIOGO show an enormous potential as their collections become stronger every season. SPON DIOGO’s silhouettes are sensual and seductive with a distinct visual language and international appeal.”
Globally renowned for its tradition in design, Denmark is now becoming Scandinavia’s fashion industry leader with SPON DIOGO helping to pathe the way to this notoriety. The spotlight will undoubtedly be on the SPON DIOGO AW 12 fashion show generating even more international media coverage for Denmark’s growing fashion scene.
Here’s a glimpse of the collection from SS12.
The Fábrica Gallery holds the latest exhibition dedicated to the American photographer Francesca Woodman. Upon the 30th Anniversary of her death, the hall displays the work of the Artist with a selections of 20 photographs, half of which are unedited. Until the 21st January, Madrid host a mixture of key works which outline the path of Woodman, from her first photographer, “Autorretrato a los 13”, taken in 1972 to her last work in New York.
Too young, the hasty disappearance of Woodman, over time has converted her into ambivalent reference, with a young start who rose to the top. Born in Denver in 1958, her artist skills were developed under the influence of a family dedicated to Art in plastic. She lived and studied between America and Italy. Following a grant in Rome and two collective expositions, in 1979, she finally settled in New York , where she remained until the end of her life in 1981. Her prolific work has had a extraordinary influence, being displayed in collections at the Metropolitan Museum, MOMA and the Foundation Cartier.
The work of Francesca Woodman can be tied to artists like Hannah Wilke, Ana Mendieta or Cindy Sherman, in their approach to self-portraits and the reflections around the identity. As with all the images of Woodman there is an unanticipated eco, unsettling, elusive. From a very personal language, introspection leads to self-recognition, in explorations and discoveries that mark with astonishment and vertigo.
As small pieces of surreal dreams and memories about to be lost, in her photos, the body shape merges into poetic evocations and the interactions between architecture and objects. The fear of dissolution, the risk of losing oneself, encourage the need to redraw the contours of the body, to find yourself at risk of loneliness and isolation. Overwhelming and intimate, with a violent delicacy, Woodman pictures capture the most exquisite form of survival.
Bárbara Muriel
The Costume Institute of The Metropolitan Museum of Art (www.metmuseum.org) will dedicate the sprinig to two important fashion icons. From the 10th of May until the 19th August, Elsa Schiaparelli and Miuccia Prada cross the XX Century from one point to another, to meet in New York and explore the sinergies, finities and specificities of their relationship with fashion and art.
The conversations of both Italian creators move between the impossible and fiction, the string between the objects, designs and videos, which delve into their careers and offer us new views on politics, women, creativity and art.
United by the dominance of small subversions and surrealistic winks, both designers have been stamped in the way they have introduced playful and unconventional elements into their creations as well as thinking that fashion is a permananetne interaction with culture.
The halls of MET thereby evoke the experiences in the world of fashion and artistic creation, Dali and Schiaparelli with Surrealist movement, and Prada, in charge of the Fondazione Prada, linked to the eclectic sense of Postmodernism.
Bárbara Muriel
Since showing at Central Saint Martin’s graduate fashion show in 2010, Yusuke Maegawa has been widely considered in fashion circles as one-to-watch. The designer’s graduate collection used pleats, bows and ruffles to create bold shapes and dramatic silhouettes. Long in need of an overhaul, Maegawa has given bows and ruffles a new level of cool. Using fabrics almost entirely in black the designer created contrast with striking combinations of textures and fabrics – the roughness of towel, cotton and boiled wool were used against the shiny smoothness of synthetic fabrics.
Maegawa admires and is inspired by the innovation of Japanese textile makers, which allow him to work with pleats and other design aspects that would not be possible with non-synthetic fabrics. He’s also influenced by 80s Japanese street style, which is evident in his following collections.
His AW2011 designs aimed to bring many of the same silhouettes and shapes to women as those offered in his AW 2010 graduate collection, but in more wearable forms and using more practical and sophisticated fabrics. Still, the collection has it’s own distinct identity. There is a kimono-esque look to many of the pieces where rough-edged, juxtaposed fabrics, such as bleached denim and Neoprene-bonded fabric wrap around the chest where a Kimono’s Obi would naturally sit. Splashes of colour are introduced and, more notably and to greater effect; asymmetric patchwork, exposed seams and frayed edges which we again see in his most recent collection.
Maegawa’s SS 2012 collection is a refinement of the previous collection’s best features combined with no shortage of fresh ideas and designs. While the trademark contrast of textures and shapes is again a highlight of the designs, the forms have a softer edge. There is a complete change in direction to a light colour palette with ethereal tones – whites and neutral colours with silver detailing, shades of blue and barely-there pink pastels. Maegawa continues to be inspired by his love of innovative Japanese fabrics. Ruffles, pleats and bows still feature but this time beautifully tailored jackets, delightfully feminine details, such as silk prints, delicate embroidery and other embellishments take centre stage. Surprising and fun accessories of clear plastic such as the bracelets with metal spikes and 5-inch waist belts give a nod to the Japanese street fashion that serves as much of Maegawa’s inspiration. I love the white bandage-like arm pieces, which finish in a cuff with bows, reminiscent of a long glove with a wrist corsage.
The beautifully tailored jackets and dresses, and the fabrics and colours ideal for summer make the SS 2012 collection far more wearable than the designer’s previous collections which will perhaps bring him commercial success. It is however a no less interesting collection and his work continues to showcase his ingenuity and creativity. It is sure to capture a new level of interest in the emerging designer.
By Jacqui Loadman
Credits:Autumn Winter 2010 St Martin’s College Graduate Collection, Yusuke Maegawa Autumn Winter 2011, Yusuke Maegawa Spring Summer 2012
A Forerunner in contemporary performance, Cahun uses her own body as the centre of her reflections as her identity. Through the camera, the artist draws frames with auto reflexive and destabilizing vocation. Like the frame of a mirror, a theatre scene or the limits a pupil, the images -poetic, dramatic, ironic and disturbing- return a infinity of possible to be forms, more or less distorted, ambivalent, comic or subversive, and always irrevocably, denatured.
With the naked skull, sharp profile and a severe look, the writer, photographer and performer, challenges from her inner depth the truth and conventions that could dress her in a an homonymic and constant form. Her work, as reflected in the exhibition, intimidates through its frankness regarding empty answers and questioning who we are.
Unique and numerous, whole and fragmented, with an infinity of ways in which you can interpret it, and in which ways it can be viewed. Claude Cahun always consulted Suzanne Malherbe - known as Marcel Moore-, her intimate partner, artist collaborator and life long representative. Besides self-portraits, Cahun portrayed small household objects, trinkets as well as photomontages, in an innovative form through her work. Linked to Surrealism, in Paris, between the wars she maintained close friendships with intellectuals and avant-garde artists as well as holding an important role in the resistance against the Nazi occupation, in which enhances the political dimension of her work. Anti-conventionalist, sensitive to the extreme, her production continues to offer a strong potential interpretive with a disquieting aesthetic impact.
Bárbara Muriel
Masai beads in swimming suits, horns and African jewels in Kaftans, the stripy huts of Norfolk beach in mini skirts or the lovely ukelele detail in shirts neck collected from picture postcards from around the world inspire the prints in the Swash Spring Summer collection 2012.
The London based creative designers Sarah Swash and Toshio Yamanaka are the brand´s Alma Mater. Both Central Saint Martins graduates invite you on a dream world tour with their dog, Candy -the brand´s primma donna- present in most of the prints, as your friendly companion.
“Across the Seven Seas” is the name of a collection where some fantastical series of artworks emerge, graced with the names “Honolulu”, “Côte d’Azur”, or “Orient Express”. Luxury scarves in crepe de chine or double chiffon, high quality beach towels, bags in printed leather or canvas and even amazing iPhone cases providing a taste of the summer, lying down on a sun lounger on a Hawaiian paradise beach, a relaxed peek inside the Polynesia.
The Swash studio is located in east London. There, the Swash staff looks after every production detail, always choosing the best materials for each garments. Every step is important in order to achieve the best high quality results the brand is known for.
Reknown fashion stylist Sebastian Kaufmann and photographer Billy Ballard work together in the photobook to create a personal and unique universe which will catch you faster than a summer love.
If you want to know more about Swash London visit the website for the latest news on their website.
Patricia Sáinz Martín
