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.

Fashion and the Humanities: Exploring New Angles

by Rizvana Bradley

I am currently completing my sixth year of Ph.D. work in the Literature Program at Duke University, and am working to develop a variety of critical approaches to theorizing fashion and the body. I have taught courses at Duke that are intended to enable students to recognize how various literary, filmic and artistic texts continue to richly shape fashion culture, and highlight the complex theoretical and social issues contemporary fashion thematizes.

Having greatly admired the academic work coming out of Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, I was excited to introduce students at Duke to the field now referred to as critical fashion studies. Initially I was at a loss as to how to design such a course, as some four years ago there was nothing like the CSM model being taught in US universities. Typically courses would mention fashion incidentally, or as an object of inquiry. With respect to the latter approach, fashion is constructed either purely as an anthropological object, proposing an analysis of historical dress, or as a sociological phenomenon, providing a detailed account of subcultural styles, for example. I knew that content-wise, the course I wanted to develop would incorporate the best of these strategies, but be less a fashion history course. I was most interested in concentrating on aesthetics, and spotlighting the visionary photography and runway productions happening in fashion since the late 1980s.

From the start it was evident that students had little exposure to an international fashion culture, the richness and eclecticism of various fashion figures, image-makers, entrepreneurs and designers. The courses challenged them to think about designers’ creative efforts in refreshing new ways. The first course, “Contemporary Fashion: Image, Object, Idea,” I taught once. I then taught a course entitled, “Fashion, Literature and the Avant-Garde,” twice. The final course, “Art, Media and the Body,” placed fashion in dialogue with the contemporary arts more broadly. All of these courses include fashion in the context of discussions about contemporary artistic practices that are currently provoking key concerns in the humanities, specifically questions of discourse, identity, representation and subjectivity, as well as certain questions about aesthetics, materiality and difference. Students learn that some of the most innovative fashion designers explore these themes in complex, beautiful and challenging ways. For this reason, the readings for the courses draw from different disciplines, among them, philosophy, critical theory, science studies, and feminist theory.

Hussein Chalayan, Vogue, December 2008

Fashion does not exist in a vacuum, but is an art form that reflects socio-cultural mores, fears, anxieties and desires. Students are incredibly responsive to the visual material, and are required to analyze various collections by looking at detailed shots of garments, videos of runway shows, and interviews with designers. Key contemporary designers are examined against a backdrop of critical theory, feminist thought, history and philosophy. Students learn to approach fashion design with a critical (sometimes skeptical) eye and interpret the spectacle of a runway show or photographic image by relating the garments on models to such themes as trauma, modernity, gender, death and technology.

Collectively as a class, we explore the idea that the spirit of the avant-garde in fashion, runs parallel to the spirit of the artistic avant-garde in many ways, chief among them a resistance to representation, evident in a general turn toward abstraction. Increasingly fashion is partially turning away from the literal, from the tangible, and towards the ephemeral, the emotive and the affective. Students are encouraged to use a range of philosophical and critical themes to question the normative body, the virtual and figural construction of the body in time and space, and the bodily production of affect and sensation.

Studying designers as theatrical as John Galliano and Alexander McQueen, with the minimalist sensibilities of Yohji Yamamoto and Rick Owens, the different body experiments of Gareth Pugh and Walter van Beirendonck, and technological innovations of Hussein Chalayan, students were able to draw their own conclusions about today’s design practitioners, who seem to not only be working and making, but also thinking at the fringes of disciplines and design philosophies in order to expand the cultural scope of fashion today.

Source4Style: The New Sustainable Fabric Marketplace

by Kimberly Burgas

Summer Rayne Oakes at a recent event for Source4Style.

Source4Style is the new venture of eco-friendly model and sustainability strategist Summer Rayne Oakes. An online marketplace for sustainable fabric to be launched in September, it will surely make significant waves in the sea of fabric sourcing. Filling the dearth of online eco-friendly sourcing options available to fashion designers, Source4Style allows both the seasoned eco-designer and those merely looking to dabble the ability to make socially and environmentally conscious decisions without the blink of an eye.

Oakes took the time to explain us how Source4Style works:

Once launched (anticipated for this September), designers or buyers will need to register to use the site, free of charge. There will be a small fee for suppliers. As a designer or buyer you are presented with several options when you log on to the site. The browse feature allows you to do just that: browse through the current and expanding collection of over 1,000 fabrics from over 25 suppliers; the best option if you have not yet honed exactly what you are looking to purchase. If you are entering the site with a particular fabric in mind, say an organic cotton from Turkey, Source4Style allows you to perform an advanced search specific to your needs. Queries can be narrowed based on fiber, country of origin, price, and weight. The Source4Style team is looking at expanding its query options to include certifications as well.

Each fabric, presented in both drape and flat formats, includes a detailed 300 dpi image, recreating the trade show experience online by allowing the buyer to “feel” the fabric’s texture through macro magnification. The “Swatchbook” feature is incredibly useful, similar in affect to Amazon’s “wish list” or for the library nerds out there, EndNote, creating a record of fabric of interest to the buyer. Within the Swatchbook you can add notes to fabrics for your future reference, purchase yardage, and purchase a swatch. This option provides a seamless browsing experience to the user and as Oakes describes it, encourages “a sense of discovery” that is often lost in the sourcing process.

The company refrains from making overall claims as to how eco-friendly a fabric is - a largely subject and personal decision - and instead champions company transparency. As Oakes notes, “it is less about creating a scorecard,” but noted that the company may take on the evaluative role in the future. Presently, sellers on Source4Style must first complete an in-depth questionnaire on topics of business and production practices, environmental processes, and for those handicraft sellers, cultural preservation.

Stay tuned for more updates on the September launch of Source4Style.

Hacking Sustainable Fashion

Photos by Megan MacMurray

Fashion Projects readers might be familiar with Giana Gonzalez, an interaction designer and artist who seeks to hack into the fashion system. I had interviewed her back in 2006 about her Hacking Couture workshops. Results from her workshops given in New York, Chicago, California and Istanbul are on view now at Eyebeam as part of the exhibition Re:Group: Beyond Models of Consensus.

Giana and I will be giving a FREE workshop this coming Wednesday, July 14th, at Eyebeam using the hacking methodology Giana has created. Only this time, instead of trying to hack the code of fashion brands, we are setting our sights a bit higher - we aim to hack into the sustainable fashion movement. In fact, we know that ultimately, a hack into sustainable fashion is really about hacking the entire fashion system...something we are very excited to try. Please do attend if you can, as we cannot do this alone.

Of course, we will be posting the code we develop on the Fashion Code Wiki.

More images from the Re:Group: Beyond Models of Consensus exhibition after the jump.

Sarah Scaturro

Panel on Fashion Blogging at the Met

Diane Pernet, Drawing by Siggi Oddsson

This Sunday, Harold Koda, chief curator of the Metropolitan Museum’s Costume Institute, will host a panel on fashion and blogging, to which Cathy Horyn (the New York Times senior fashion critic) will participate together with Scott Schuman of the Sartorialist and Diane Pernet, editor of A Shaded View on Fashion.

It will be interesting to see whether they will address the different kinds of blogs: i.e. personal blogs (in the case of Diane Pernet) versus a blog hosted by an established editorial entity (as is the case of Horyn’s and to some extent the Sartorialist). And to what extent ethical questions (particularly when it comes to the Times) inform the various types of blogs and potentially clash with the conversational, un-fact-checked and, as a result, often un-journalistic nature of the media.

It is great that the Met is becoming interested in the phenomenon, however, I also hope that future blog panels will include younger fashion bloggers—i.e. Susie of Style Bubble and Almost Girl. The latter has in fact also started Coutorture—an umbrella fashion blog—which serves as a service to the fashion blog community.

The event is taking place Sunday March 30, 2008 at 3:00 p.m. in The Grace Rainey Rogers Auditorium and it's free with museum admission.

Francesca