Fashion+Film The 1960s Revisited

Still from Michelangelo Antonioni Blow Up.

Opening this Friday at the James Gallery of the CUNY Graduate Center is an exhibition on Film and Fashion, which celebrates the symbiotic relation the two enjoyed in the 1960s. Titled "Fashion+Film The 1960s Revisited," the exhibition, which is curated by CUNY's Professor Eugenia Paulicelli, is comprised of dress, photographs, and costume designers’ sketches, as well as screenings of film and TV commercials from the decade.

In concert with the exhibition, is a symposium taking place this Friday the 12th. The symposium, which brings together fashion and film academics with costume designers, will explore the impact these two culture industries had on the construction of individual and collective identities, with a particular focus on fashion and film of the 1960s.

Below is the symposium's full schedule

Welcome & Opening remarks

• CUNY, Center for the Humanities • Louise Wallenberg, University of Stockholm • Eugenia Paulicelli, CUNY, The Graduate Center

10.10-10:40

• Adriana Berselli, “Working with Antonioni in L’Avventura and Costume Designing for Film” Q/A, Moderated by Eugenia Paulicelli

10:40- 12:25

Session 1/The Fabric of Film, Fashion and Design

• Sam Rohdie, University of Central Florida, “Hitchcock’s Fabric” • Marcia Landy, University of Pittsburgh, “Consuming Fashion: Revisioning the 1960s’ Economic Miracle in 1960s Italian Cinema” • Emily Braun, Hunter College and The Graduate Center, CUNY, “Making Waves: Balla, Pucci and Marine Fantasy in the 1960s” • Q/A, Moderated by Pat Kirkham, Bard Graduate Center

12:25-1:25/Lunch Break

1:30-3:15

Session 2/Fashioning Urban Space, Cities and Modernity

• Astrid Söderbergh Widding, University of Stockholm, “Fashion Apart: Godard and Fageol in 1960s Paris” • Vincenzo Maggitti, University of Stockholm, “Blow up: Looking beyond Visibility in the Cult Decade of the 1960s” • Eugenia Paulicelli, Queens College and The Graduate Center, “Rome: City of Film, City of Fashion” • Q/A, Moderated by Stella Bruzzi, University of Warwick

3.15-3:30

Coffee Break

3:30-5:15

Session 3/Dress and Masculinity in Film

• Stella Bruzzi, University of Warwick, “Seduced by Beige Slacks: The Fashionable Perversities of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Teorema” • Paola Colaiacomo, IUAV, University of Venice, “Poets and Clerks: Male Physicality from Accattone to La prima linea” • Louise Wallenberg, University of Stockholm, “MAGO’s Magic: Fashioning Sexual (In)difference in the Swedish Cinema of the 1960s” • Q/A, Moderated by Marcia Landy, University of Pittsburgh

5:15- 6:30

Session 4/Rethinking the 1960s: Stars, Design and Fashion Nostalgia • Pat Kirkham and Marilyn Cohen, Bard Graduate Center and Cooper Hewitt, “Breakfast at Tiffany's: Fashion, France, Costume and Class” • Sonya Topolnisky, Bard Graduate Center, “The Mad Men Look: How Mad Men defines 1960s Style” • Q /A, Moderated by Louise Wallenberg, University of Stockholm

Co-sponsors: The Center for Fashion Studies, University of Stockholm; The Center for the Humanities, Concentration in Fashion Studies, Women’s Studies Certificate Program, Film Studies, CLAGS, The Italian Specialization at The CUNY Graduate Center.

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.

Towards Sustainable Fashion

Camilla Norrback, Autumn/Winter 2009-2010

A number of sustainable fashion panels and symposiums are taking place. In Antwerp, the ModeMuseum is hosting a sustainable fashion panel on September 29th. Titled "Towards Sustainable Fashion," the panel features the Swedish designer Camilla Norrback, as well as Mathilda Tham, who teaches design and sustainability both in Sweden and at London's Goldsmiths, alongside Margues Bergamn—lecturer at the Swedish School of Textiles.

Meanwhile, Fashioning an Ethical Industry will be hosting a seminar on Education for Sustainable Fashion at the Ethical Fashion Show in Paris on Sunday October 4th.

Also, I will be co-curating with Sarah Scaturro an exhibition on sustainable fashion: titled Ethics+Aesthetics = Sustainable Fashion, which will open at Pratt Manhattan Gallery on November 20th. More information on the exhibition will soon follow!

Francesca

Fashions: Business Practices in Historical Perspective

A Lucien Lelong coat on the cover of the August 1925 issue of Tres Parisian, located in the Special Collections department of the Gladys Marcus Library at FIT. Photo by Sarah Scaturro.

The recent Business History Conference in Milan, Italy had a robust program featuring a large number of important fashion scholars. Thematically, the conference centered around the role of business in fashion, as well as the "fashions" that occur in business practices. At first it seemed a somewhat disjointed group of participants (it was easy to distinguish the fashion historians from the business historians due to their, er, more fashionable dress), but soon after the conference began, everyone could sense a unique cross-pollination beginning.

The Fashion Institute of Technology had a strong contingent present, as they were also sponsoring some of the conference events. Significantly, Karen Cannell, the new Head of Special Collections at FIT's library, was actively encouraging scholars to use this amazing resource, which contains not only historical fashion periodicals and sketches, but also important documentation regarding the business end of the garment industry. Operating at minimal capacity with restricted access over the past few years, many fashion scholars are relieved that this important asset is once again accepting research appointments.

One session with a strong New York and FIT affiliation was titled "Innovation in the Business of Fashion, 1900-1940". FIT Professor Lourdes Font started off the thematically unified session by tracing the beginnings of a globalized fashion industry with a paper titled "International Couture: Expansion and Promotion in the Early Twentieth Century." Lewis Orchard and FIT alum Rebecca Jumper Matheson followed up with papers on the topics of merchandising and the self-promotion of female designers, respectively. Associate Curator at the Museum at FIT, Molly Sorkin ended the session with her paper titled "The Limits of Expansion: Contraction and Collapse in the Haute Couture, 1920-1940," which effectively placed the end of the first real "globalization" period of fashion at the beginning of World War II.

Another extremely strong session was "From Vionnet to Dior: Strategies of Exclusivity and Dissemination of Paris Haute Couture." Featuring influential fashion historians and scholars such as Caroline Evans, Alexandra Palmer, and Dilys Blum, this session also had a thematic undercurrent about the rise of a globalized fashion industry. Véronique Pouillard started off the session with an interesting paper tracing the problems of copyrighting French fashion designs in the USA, an issue which is still very much a problem today. Alexandra Palmer, Senior Curator at the Royal Ontario Museum, followed up with her paper on the importance of Christian Dior's global reach, which was a tantalizing peek at just one aspect of her forthcoming book, Dior. The session ended with Caroline Evans' research on Jean Patou's "Américainisme," which was an entertaining view of how Patou embraced American rationalization and the American "look" to market his designs and grow his business. The influence of emerging American fashion business practices on the French couture industry was also explored in my paper on the French couturier Lucien Lelong that I presented during the "Entrepreneurs and Fashion" session.

Other engaging papers included Rebecca Arnold's on The Fashion Group in 1930s New York City and Phyllis Dillon's thorough explanation of the influence of German Jews on the American apparel industry. Naturally, there was a session on the ethics of fashion, which was to include papers on the toxicity of beauty products and the sustainably-minded brand Comme-il-Faut. Unfortunately, neither of these presenters showed up. However, Efrat Tseëlon's paper "In Search of the "Ethics" of Ethical Fashion" provocatively challenged the current notion of what constitutes sustainable and ethical fashion. She contends that today's version of ecofashion effectively fetishes and oversimplifies certain issues (such as the use of organic cotton), thus merely reinforcing the current fashion paradigm. She suggests holistic and inclusive investigations into the meaning of what constitutes ethical (such as issues of toxicity in products and the skinniness of models), as well as actively searching for a new fashion paradigm that could challenge the current one based on consumption.

This engaging conference demonstrated that fashion studies could definitely use more of business history thinking - one of the leading scholars out there combining these two areas is Regina Blaszczyk, who just happened to be the co-chair of the conference. I hope that more professional history associations begin to seriously consider fashion as an important theme, as the interdisciplinary nature of fashion studies lends itself to many fruitful collaborations.

Sarah Scaturro

Centre for Fashion, the Body and Material Cultures

From poster for Caroline Evans' talk at FBMC

I recently attended a lecture presented by the Research Centre for Fashion, the Body and Material Cultures, in London . Unique in its kind, the center opened in 2005 as a joint project between Central Saint Martins and the London College of Fashion (both members of the University of the Arts London). It covers under its umbrella theorists, historians and practioners which, as the title suggests, are interested in a broader view of fashion, clothes and their interactions with the body. Among its members are dance historians (director Helen Thomas), curators (Amy de La Hay and Judith Clark), as well as a number of practioners, including fashion designer Shelley Fox and artist Lucy Orta. (Full disclosure: I am currently a member as well, as I am completing my PhD at Central Saint Martins.)

Caroline Evans kicked off the summer lecture series—organized by one of the center’s directors, Alistair O’Neil—with a talk on her current research on the early history of the fashion show and the way it related to other quintessential modern cultural forms like early cinema and highly choreographed revues such as the Ziegfeld Follies. Her talk was titled “Mirrors, Magic and Multiplication: Early Twentieth Century Fashion Shows.” To follow will be Pamela Church-Gibson’s talk on “Fashion and Celebrity.” The center also organizes a yearly symposium, which this year revolved around the topic of “Magic and Fashion.”

Francesca