Great Designers Symposium at FIT

The designer Jean Patou

Don’t miss the Museum of the Fashion Institute of Technology’s Symposium that will take place Friday March 14 and 15 from 9:30am to 5pm in the Haft Auditorium. Dedicated to the broad concept of “great designers,” it includes an impressive array of speakers including Caroline Evans (who will present her recent research on Patou) and Hamish Bowles (who will speak on Molyneux). On Friday, two of the most interesting New York designers, Marya Cornejo and Isabel Toledo, will also be speaking about their own work. The next day presents an equally interesting roster with Kaat Debo (artistic director of the in Antwerp) speaking about Raf Simons and men’s fashion as well as Jessica Glasscock, who will discuss the work of Stephan Sprouse, on whom she is curating an exhibit for Deitch Projects. Andrew Bolton will be in conversation with Anna Sui, while the design duo Boudicca is also scheduled to speak.

UPDATE: Word is, Hamish Bowles has been moved to Saturday, 2 pm. Assistant Curator of Accessories Clare Sauro will change places, and speak tomorrow instead on shoe designer Christian Louboutin (who has an enjoyable exhibition that just opened at FIT, curated by the FIT graduate students in the Fashion and Textile Studies Program).

Rock Style in the Eighties

Upcoming at Parsons on January 30th is a lecture by Paper editor Steven Blush on 1980s Rock Style. Part of the “Form Follows Fashion” series curated by Jessica Glasscock, the lecture seems to take an American perspective on 1980s rock style, focusing on hardcore and heavy metal as opposed to the more British Glam. The lecture is free and open to public and will take place at Parsons Midtown Auditorium, Parsons Fashion, on 560 Seventh Avenue, from 6 to 8pm. Following is the event’s press release

In the 1980s, the contemporary music genres of hardcore and heavy metal each exerted considerable influence over popular graphic design, product design, and fashion. The varying philosophies of each genre engendered wholly differing aesthetics. Hardcore music was characterized by a DIY style: roughly collaged, hand-lettered posters copied at the local Kinko’s, homemade record packaging glued together in basements, and ripped and distressed t-shirts markered with professions of allegiance to a favorite band. Heavy metal was an unapologetically corporate enterprise and the culmination of two decades of rock-and-roll fantasies transformed into mass-marketed signifiers of rebellion: slickly produced logos created by professional graphic designers, success-minded musicians willingly made over as glam gods by Hollywood make-up artists, and multicolored silk-screened t-shirt available for a considerable price at stadium concerts. Somehow in the early 2000s, both styles have beaten a path to the malls of America.

Guest speaker Steven Blush will examine the creation, distribution and overall influence of hardcore and heavy metal in the 1980s and in the present. Blush has been a participant and historian of punk and rock since the early 1980s, when he promoted hardcore shows in Washington, D,C. He is the author of American Hardcore: A Tribal History and American Hair Metal, a senior editor at Paper magazine, and a rock DJ in New York City.

Another Side of Fashion Lecture Series

Suzanne Lee, Fashioning the Future

The Centre for Fashion, the Body and Material Culture at the London College of Fashion is hosting the first of a series of lectures meant to explore “the different perspectives that design can bring to innovation and collaborative problem solving.” These lectures set out to cover the breadth of fashion and include “speakers covering the cultures, materials, design and technologies which intersect the development of fashion.”This particular event seems to verge on the topic of textiles, fashion and technology and features a range of speakers from the designer and writer Suzanne Lee, whose talk is titled “The Convergence of Collaboration for Future Textiles and Fashion,” to the researcher Lesley Gavin, who will speak on “Technology and Virtual Futures.”The event is talking place on December 12 at the London College of Fashion from 5:30 to 9:00. For more information, youcan visit their site (RSVP is required.)

SVA MFA in Design Criticism Reading Night

In anticipation of the School of Visual Arts new MFA in Design Criticism program, the department will host a series of readings by prominent design scholars, writers and artists. The first reading takes place November 29 (from 7:00-9:00 p.m.) at KGB Bar in the East Village. "Addressing the concept of home from different angles are: Metropolis magazine columnist Karrie Jacobs, design, technology and culture writer David Womack, and conceptual artist Elizabeth Demaray."

The program, which starts the Fall of 2008, promises to be an exciting development within the field of design criticism in the US--particularly as it represents the first one of its kind. One hopes that it will include teachings on fashion design, considering its relevance to a number of other design disciplines, from architecture to interior design.

Francesca

Eco-Fashion at FIT

Osklen in collaboration with Coopa-Roca

The Eco fashion panel at FIT presented a range of views from people discussing a quasi-artisanal approach to fashion such as Susan Cianciolo and Johanna Hofring, who produce small runs alongside one-of-a-kind handcrafted clothes to luxury store buyers like Barneys’s Julie Gilhart. Cianciolo, an unwitting early adapter of the slow fashion movement, lyrically described her production of entirely organic garments which involved going through the woods with her mother to find materials for her non-toxic dyes. She also highlighted the potential longevity of design by discussing how her clients often ask her to re-work her pieces after years of wearing them.

Gilhart came from the other end of the spectrum, working in the luxury corporate industry and its need of maximizing profit. However, she gave a compelling and honest talk on the ways in which the sustainable fashion movement is encroaching in the buying practice of Barneys, where buyers started to ask about sourcing and compliance, while the store produced an eco-fashion line in collaboration with Loomstate. She stressed the importance of good design both in terms of echo-fashion which should stand on its own as a design piece, as well as in terms of fashion more generally, where good design could hopefully supersede a trend-driven consumption.

Another perspective was given by Sass Brown who focused on social ecology and discussed the work of a Brazilian women-run co-op Coopa-Roca which collaborates with fashion designers (i.e. Carlos Miele), product designers (i.e. Tord Boontje) and artists (Ernesto Neto). What went undiscussed was the way FIT addressed sustainability in its teaching and its practice, besides the singular experience of Brown, who is also a professor at FIT.

Attention to sustainable issues, I believe, is sorely missing from the school, where a few years ago, upon asking about the need to use toxic substances (i.e foorwear glues and various dyes) in the classroom, I was told that it was just the reality of the industry. Hopefully that will change—yet for this change to occur, the impulse does need to start within education institutions like FIT.

Francesca