K8 Hardy's Fashion Week performance at JF & Son.

K8 Hardy's various guises for her Fashion Week performance at JF & Son. All Photos: Eliza Douglas

Travis Boyer started a series titled MFT for My Favorite Things in which an artist collaborates to create “textile-based artist multiples that explore material and materiality using the innumerable resources of JF & Son.” K8 Hardy, with her longstanding engagement with fashion and performance, was an obvious match for the project—as was the store JF & Son, which, as the Timesrecently pointed out, is one of the most interesting new stores to open in the last year. Known for their unique textiles, the company—comprised of Jesse Finkelstein, "Katie" B. King, and Travis Boyer—partners with artisans and artists from New York and India to create “forward-thinking clothing through socially conscious strategies.”

K8 Hardy celebrated “the launch” of her collection, ironically titled J’APPROVE, with an irreverent performance in which she wore the various pieces from her collection in a day-long event, creating a new persona with each changing outfit. I only caught the tail-end of the performance, in which Hardy wore a bustier reminiscent of 1980s Gaultier. Perhaps surprisingly, the collection is eminently wearable and at times quite pretty, veering as Hardy’s various personas seeemed to do from a tough 1980s inspired body-con look to a slightly off-kilter pretty look, which featured whimisicallly printed dresses and shirts. Hardy's "styling" was also reminiscent of early Ann-Sofie Back. The collection will become available on line at the J & F Son today.

Francesca

The Sustainability Equation: Ethics and Aesthetics in Contemporary Fashion

Slow and Steady Wins the Race at Ethics + Aesthetics

Coming up Tuesday January 26th is a panel in conjunction with the exhibition Ethics + Aesthetics, which I co-curated at the Pratt Institute Manhattan Gallery. The panelists include Julie Gilhart, senior vice president, fashion director of Barneys New York; Mary Ping, designer and founder of Slow and Steady Wins the Race; Caroline Priebe, designer and founder of Uluru and it will be moderated by Sarah Scaturro and I

The Sustainability Equation: Ethics and Aesthetics,” will examine what constitutes sustainability within the American fashion system and will explore the sustainable fashion practices of American fashion designers including “Ethics + Aesthetics” designers Ping and Priebe.

“Ethics + Aesthetics = Sustainable Fashion” is on view now through February 20, 2010 and features work by artists and designers including Alabama Chanin, Bodkin, Loomstate, SANS, Slow and Steady Wins the Race, SUNO, and ULURU, Susan Cianciolo, Kelly Cobb, Zoë Sheehan Saldaña, and Andrea Zittel and Tiprin Follet.

A full color catalog of the exhibition will be available at a discounted price made possible by a generous grant from the Coby Foundation, Ltd. To order the catalog click here. The catalogue would include a smock pattern from Andrea Zittel's smockshop project.

Uluru at Ethics + Aesthetics

Francesca Granata

Below are the participants' bios:

Julie Gilhart is senior vice president, fashion director of Barneys New York, a high-end luxury specialty store based in the United States. In spring 2007, she spearheaded the development of an all-organic collection of casual, sexy clothes that are available in every Barneys New York store in the country. She has inspired many designers to develop “sustainable” products and was instrumental in the creation of Barneys’ 2007 holiday campaign titled “Have a Green Holiday,” which focused on environmentally-conscious fashion products. Gilhart believes there is an essential need to increase awareness of the development of sustainable products and how the customer makes buying decisions. She works to instill changes in the fashion business that leave a lighter footprint on the earth and promote more conscious consumerism.

Mary Ping’s Slow and Steady Wins the Race is an experimental “laboratory” line that stemmed from a desire to dissect the fashion vocabulary and led to an exploration of patterns of consumption and brand identities. The label’s mission is to “promote and produce interesting and significant pieces from the simplest fabrics and materials.” Following a product design model, the company is intent on slowing down the fashion cycle by creating non-seasonal pieces focused on specific and fundamental characteristics of clothing design. In addition, the designs are produced in limited numbers and sold at a contained price.

The garments of Uluru’s Caroline Priebe are tightly focused for maximum ecological impact and emphasize a “less is more” philosophy. For example, Priebe’s Westlake dress has only two seams, creating a sophisticated, simple look that is reversible and has pockets. The Kathleen coat, a classic design based on her grandmother’s coat, highlights the longevity of design and its relation to personal and historical memories. The recycled cashmere sweater, adorned with appliqués hand-sewn by the workshop of Alabama Chanin, underscores the collaborative nature common to sustainable fashion.

Coming up Tuesday January 26th is a panel in conjunction with the exhibition, which I co-curated at the Pratt Institute Manhattan Gallery. The panelists include Julie Gilhart, senior vice president, fashion director of Barneys New York; Mary Ping, designer and founder of Slow and Steady Wins the Race; Caroline Priebe, designer and founder of and will be moderated by Sarah Scaturro and Francesca Granata.

Bernhard Willhelm and Jutta Kraus at the Groninger Museum

Bernhard Willhelm and Jutta Kraus, Autumn/Winter 2009/2010, (Perhaps a witty comment on the housing crisis?), Photo: Shoji Fuji

A retrospective of Bernhard Willhelm and his business and creative partner Jutta Kraus just opened at the Groninger Museum. Curated by Sue-an van der Zijpp and Mark Wilson, known for having curated the first retrospective of Hussein Chalayan, the exhibition is an exhausting chronicle of the idiosyncratic fashion that Willhelm and Kraus produced over the last 10 years. The exhibition design, which Willhelm and Kraus developed in collaboration with the Groninger Museum, started with the use of mannequins based on classical statuary—an interesting choice for the decidedly non-classical silhouette embodied in their designs.

The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue, published by NAi Publishers. It is abundantly illustrated with photos of every collections that Willhelm and Kraus have thus far produced. The catalogue also includes an essay by the German-based journalist Ingeborg Harms on their backgrounds, an interview with the designers by Sue-an Van der Zijpp, as well as an essay I wrote on their work’s relation to the grotesque and carnival themes.

The book is available through NAi Publishers, while the exhibition remains open through April 11, 2010.

Francesca Granata

Click below for installation shots of the exhibition Bernhard Willhelm & Jutta Kraus Womens Collection 2007/2008 Photo: Marten de Leeuw

Bernhard Willhelm & Jutta Kraus Mens Fall/Winter 2008/2009 Photo: Marten de Leeuw

Bernhard Willhelm & Jutta Kraus Womens Spring/Summer 2008 Photo: Marten de Leeuw

All Photos Courtesy of the Groninger Museum

Collecting Fashion

Valierie Steele and Antonio Marras

We are pleased to announce a new regular contributor to Fashion Projects: Marco Pecori, a PhD Candidate at the Centre for Fashion Studies at Stockholm University, who has written extensively for a range of publications in Italy and abroad. Marco will contribute a series of round table discussions that bring together academics, designers and curators in order to ignite a conversation between theory and practice and to explore issues salient to contemporary fashion. The first one, on the topic of fashion museums, was originally published in Italian in Wit Magazine.

Collecting Fashion By Marco Pecorari

Fashion as ephemeral artwork is daily narrated in temporary exhibitions. As hosting institutions, museums have started questioning the way they react to this new dimension within the museum. Collecting dress is already a duty of ethnographic and decorative arts museums. But at the same time, these institutions are conceiving dress as social testimony, or serial object. In these museological contexts, the dress is hardly ever contextualized in its visual process of creation that coincides with a representation of contemporary fashion. In order to explore this topic more in depth, we talked to the curator Amy de la Haye, the Director of the Museum at FIT Valerie Steele, the director of the Galleria del Costume, Caterina Chiarelli and with fashion designers, Agatha Ruiz de la Prada and Antonio Marras.

Marco Pecorari: First of all, thanks for participating. Let’s start with an ‘easy’ issue: what’s the difference between fashion and costume? fashion museum and costume museum?

Agatha Ruiz de la Prada: We had to face this issue with Madrid’s costume museum when we propose to call it ‘Costume Museum’ but I guess, a fashion museum should cover more than mechanics and elements of fashion, such as representing fashion’s relation to society. Antonio Marras: In my opinion, the gap is huge. Costume is identified as obsolete, retro and not contemporary. Fashion is escaping from this. Wrongly. Personally I love visiting costume museums. Caterina Chiarelli: I love costume museums, too. But I think we should delimit costume museum to an ethnographic field, based more on the study of dress as a tradition than on its changing nature. Amy de la Haye: Traditionally collections of dress and fashion were generically described as ‘costume’, a term that could embrace different kind of dress. It was inclusive. Fashion and the museum were not paired explicitly until the early 1970s when the V&A (London) and the Costume Institute at the Met (New York) started to actively embrace contemporary fashion. However, the terminology of museum collections and institutions has only started to change very recently to more accurately reflect the type of garments housed/exhibited and, where appropriate, to reflect growing interests in fashion and attract wider audiences.

Agatha Ruiz de la Prada and Amy de la Hay

MP: so that’s also a commercial side… Valerie Steele: Yes. But I use the word “fashion” rather than “costume” because I want to emphasize that even in the past, people wore fashion – not fancy-dress costumes. The word “costume” should be restricted to theatrical/film costume or folk costume. The Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT) is a fashion museum – meaning that we look at fashion, not as “art” (like in an art museum, where they tend to focus just on haute couture) or “history” (like a history museum, where clothing is used to document or illustrate other aspects of the past) but as a legitimate type of design that has both artistic and historical elements – and that has its own history. CC: Very true. In my opinion, a fashion museum should exhibit the changing of this type of design, with more freedom.

MP: What kind of restrictions could a fashion museum have? VS: There are restrictions on conservation and exposition of dress, and also from fashion designers and the fashion system in general….

MP: What kind of links should we have between fashion museums and the fashion system? ARP: A museum is a place for exhibiting art, creativity, whereas the fashion commercial machine has to deal with money and productions… VS: I don’t agree… I think that a fashion museum is a part of the fashion system. Fashion designers know that the museum is a medium (like runway, the fashion magazine and the department store) that presents fashion to the public. Therefore, designers seek to control exhibitions of their work: here’s one restriction which doesn’t have to be accepted by curators.

MP: An example is the one with Lagerfeld and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in which case Lagerfeld’s interference caused the exhibition to be cancelled

AM: I’m a fashion designer and I would never dare to interfere in the interpretation of my work. I would put my self in the curator’s hands. I would consider it an honour. dlH: It’s understandable. Designers in turn recognize that having their work represented in a museum collection provides cultural cachet today and will ensure their place in history in the future. But it’s not only that. Sometimes there are amazing connections made. When he had just launched his own label in London, John Galliano studied an 18th century man’s coat in the collection and presented his interpretation to the Collection as a gift. When fashion looks to history, the Museum can become especially relevant. AM: Definitely. “fashion people” have very little memory and they don’t look at the past as much as they should, and museums could help close this gap, if they could provide an easy access…

MP: Many museums are starting to catalogue on line their collections, which would make for a lot easier access and would also be helpful in terms of conservation. AM: Great. I think it would also be important to create a close relation between fashion designers factories and museums, in order to catalogue the most significant clothes, which are being produced. Just think about what we could have done in Italy: from Albino or Capucci to the first Max Mara and Romeo Gigli… CC: Sure, we should promote this collaboration but we need also to be careful to not get too involved. The museum could end up becoming a company’s archive.

MP: Could fashion museums represent the new step in museology or influence it? A new form of museum? dlH: We have to say two things about this. First, as we have trends in fashion there are also trends in fashion curation and in curation in general. Fashion curation has to be analyzed because it can be seen as an important step for the role of curators in museum. Second, we have to underline that fashion is one of the most immediately accessible of all museum collections. When I worked at the V&A I used to say that you could find your way to the Dress Gallery (which at the time showed a chronology of western fashion) blindfolded as it was the noisiest – everyone, all ages and both genders, had something to say and felt confident to express an opinion. Clothing of all types is inextricably entwined with our biographies and we leave imprints on the clothes we wear. VS: It’s true, but I also think that it’s too soon to know what fashion museums will ultimately contribute to museology as a whole. But we must strive to move beyond designer hagiography and crowd-pleasing displays of “pretty” dresses worn by celebrities. CC: I do believe that a fashion museum is inherently different and has great potentials for the future of museums. It is a dynamic museum.

Amy de la Haye is reader in Fashion Curation and Material Culture London College of Fashion.Joint Course Director (with Judith Clark) M.A. Fashion Curation, London College of Fashion. Formerly Curator of 20th Century Dress at the Victoria & Albert Museum (1991-1999). She will publish a book (co-curated with Judith Clark) on Curating Fashion for Yale University Press.

Valerie Steele Ph.D., (Yale University) is Director and Chief Curator of The Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT)

Caterina Chiarelli is Director of the Galleria del Costume – Palazzo Pitti di Firenze.

Antonio Marras is the designer of his own brand Antonio Marras and Artistic Director of Maison Kenzo

Agatha Ruiz de la Prada is a Madrid-base fashion designer

Marco Pecorari is completing his Phd in Contemporary Fashion Theory at the Centre for Fashion Studies - Stockholm University - with a thesis entitled "The Show is not Enough: new trajectories for reading contemporary fashion". He writes for several fashion, arts and cultural independent magazines.

Ethics + Aesthetics = Sustainable Fashion

Zoë Sheehan Saldaña, Jordache Sheer Camp Shirt (Lucky Lime)

Opening this Friday November 20th at the Pratt Institute Manhattan Gallery is an exhibition I co-curated with Sarah Scaturro on the topic of sustainability and fashion. Titled "Ethics + Aesthetics," the exhibition had a rather long gestation, as Sarah and I began to discuss working on such a project together in 2005. Initially thinking of it as part of Fashion Projects, we eventually decided to develop the idea as a separate project. It was important to us to highlight American and in particular New York–based designers, as we both felt that US-based designers are often short-changed by simplistic understandings of what constitutes American fashion, which is often equated with commercial mass-market fashion. We also wanted to underline the importance of the local to discussions of sustainability.

Equally important to the project was to higlight new ways of conceptualizing fashion and its consumption and production models. The last section of the exhibition seeks to directly question the fashion cycle and its dependence on fast and constant change by suggesting a paradigm shift in how we think about fashion. Among the practioners included in this section are artists such as Andrea Zittel and Tiprin Follett of the smockshop, Kelly Cobb and Zoë Sheehan Saldaña, as well as the design company Slow and Steady Wins the Race, who promote a slower fashion tempo by suggesting novel ways to produce and consume fashion. Their practices foster the creation of meaningful networks and relations through clothing as well as challenging the seasonality of the fashion trade.

The smockshop offers a unique model for a clothing workshop that encourages the adaptation of a basic “uniform” to be worn for long stretches of time, while Slow and Steady Wins the Race makes non-seasonal quality designs that are available year-round. Kelly Cobb’s collaborative project underscores the labor-intensive nature of clothes-making by producing a suit with material and craftspeople located within 100 miles of her home. Zoë Sheehan Saldaña also emphasizes the labor involved in producing a garment by recreating Wal-Mart garments by hand. She later returns her handmade version to the store for resale in lieu of the ones she originally purchased.

We are obviously not in a position to review the exhibition, but below is a brief summery of the main concepts behind it. If you can visit the gallery, which is located on West 14th Street between 6th and 7th Avenue, we would love to hear your feedback, so please do leave us your comments.

Suno's Workshop near Nairobi

"Ethics + Aesthetics is the first American exhibition to investigate the work of artists and designers exploring practical and symbolic solutions to the question of integrating sustainable practices into the fashion system. Focusing primarily on New York-based practioners, the exhibition highlights the way designers address the interactions between the local and the global within an inherently interdependent system.

The exhibition deepens our understanding of what constitutes sustainability within the fashion system by building on the already established practices of using recycled, renewable and organic fibers and the employment of fair labor. Organized around three main themes, “Reduce, Revalue and Rethink,” it expands on the traditional ecological mantra «Reduce, Reuse, Recycle» by acknowledging the importance of aesthetics within fashion design.

Reduce focuses on minimalist clothing design, as well as innovative materials and pattern-making that promote versatility and longevity. This section includes work by Bodkin, Loomstate, SANS and Uluru. Revalue underlines the importance of creating an emotional engagement with the wearer by focusing on the materiality of clothes and their ability to retain memory and history. Included in this section are pieces by Susan Cianciolo, Alabama Chanin and Suno. Rethink advocates a paradigm shift in the way we think about fashion by directly questioning the fashion cycle’s dependence on fast and constant change. It features work by Kelly Cobb, Zoë Sheehan Saldaña, Andrea Zittel and Tiprin Follett and Slow and Steady Wins the Race.

Rather than one single solution to the issue of sustainability in fashion, the designers and artists included in the exhibition provide a variety of approaches to the paradox of aligning fashion—a discipline based on constant change—with the precepts of sustainability. In line with “slow fashion”—a concept modeled after the Slow Food Movement—they advocate for a slower fashion tempo, which fosters richer interaction through design."

A Catalogue of the exhibition is forthcoming--thanks to a generous grant from the Coby Foundation.

Francesca Granata