06/04/2015

Thornhammar – A New Take on Scandinavian Minimalism

The slightly cryptic and vigorously appealing name Thornhammar, reveals the luxury organic sneaker brand, founded by the two friends, Jesse Davison and Hannes Steen Thörnhammar, with a distinctly a “Swenglish” feel to it. Jesse is American, Hannes is Swedish and their brand is the result of a combination between their different design approaches as well as their personal interests. Jesse has a background at Hermès and a freelancing career in material-sourcing for a well established brand. Hannes, on the other hand, is more interested in PR and marketing, which took him to companies such as Design House Stockholm and Stinton Advertising in New York, before founding Thornhammar.

The two friends and founders first met when studying at Parsons School of Design in New York, several years ago. Thornhammar, the brand, was born from a reaction to the market of bad quality shoes, and from an ambition to create something they – and their friends – would love to wear. The result are sneakers that are made of organic leather produced in a small Swedish city. Even though the shoes are put together in Thailand, which might easily be criticized for its inherent contradiction to what appears to be a dedication to local production, Jesse and Hannes are part of the production process from start to finish.

The two founders describe the brand as “Swedish maximalist”, which is an updated version of the classic Scandinavian minimalism, with the name of the brand itself, chosen with the purpose of sounding Swedish, recalling its design background, yet aiming to make it more international. Their aim is not to create another sneaker, but to take subcultural streetwear, where sneakers used to belong to, to another level by adding luxurious, global, local and organic aspects. The products are, thus, not the only interesting aspect of the brand; they are the result of a design process in which questions about national style, subcultural attributes and organic values as luxury high fashion, are drawn to light. In that sense the sneakers are far more than other luxury shoes, they are capturing the time we are living in and the many different sources of inspiration that are typical of the postmodern society. They are also redefining old truths, by awakening questions like, what Swedish or Scandinavian style can really be defined as, or if it can even exist as such? “Swedish maximalism” sounds like a welcoming term: a term which could perhaps include a combination of Swedish and American design perspectives, or even something completely different.

Hanna Cronsjö 
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01/04/2015

Culottes: Love and Hate Between Comfort and Flair

It might seem obvious, but everything that is presented as a trend doesn’t necessarily need to be embraced as a fashion necessity. On the subject of culottes, which have been spotted on the Spring/Summer runways both this season as well as the previous one, we can safely say that it’s one of those trends which are heatedly debated between Cinderella and Emperor’s new clothes camps.

Culottes were initially designed as high-class French leg-wear and their highly iconic status can be reflected in the fact that the revolutionaries who stormed the Bastille were known as sans culottes. Feminine culottes were created as a result of ladies becoming more active in the Victorian era. Even though the legs division was concealed in different ways, the garment provided women with freedom to ride both bikes and horses properly, their practicality mirroring a feminist standpoint. Elsa Schiaparelli was an early adopter of the kind of culottes you’ll find on the streets this season, definitely reminiscent of those from the 1970s.

Despite the comeback of the 1990s and the expectance of the micro-mini revival á la “Clueless”, the length most fashionistas are adopting is the middle ground – midi. As a consequence the culottes’ return to the runway is not a surprise, combining the sporty comfort with feminine grace without a hassle. This season’s interpretations were designed to fit each personality, with structured or loose fit cuts, colorful or somber patterns, with Chanel, Céline, Tibi and Stella McCartney among the fashion houses embracing the piece. Comfort has been increasingly in demand in contemporary fashion. With a growing appropriation of sporty influences, the notion of comfort has become central to design processes, where the desires and needs of individuals are the most significant guidelines of creative production, even when a historical piece like culottes is given new, original life.

Victoria Edman 
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30/03/2015

Style Suggestions: Military

It’s time to step in line as military style hits the runways. With khaki and camouflage prints dominating the trends, hop on it, too, and let this look infiltrate your wardrobe.

Dress: Marc by Marc Jacobs, Jacket: Saint Laurent, Boots: Rick Owens, Backpack: Mulberry, Sunglasses: Prada, Jewelry: Atelier VM

Styling by Vanessa Cocchiaro 

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27/03/2015

The Fusion of Fashion and Architecture

The phenomenon of the fashion show has come a long way since it first was introduced as a tool for buyers to see the clothes on living mannequins. The shows then were low-key and intimate, the public a small crowd sitting close to the runway, far removed from the giant and global shows we see today. With the evolution of media and ever faster rhythms of our society, the importance of fashion shows has grown dramatically. The runway shows are no longer just tools for showing the latest collections, but have instead become a platform for designers to build broader concepts completing the theme of their collections, experiment with ideas as well as establish their brand through visual representation of a specific kind of lifestyle‪,‬ rather than relying just on plain clothes‪.‬

Kenzo and Prada are two examples of brands who used that tool with the aim of merge fashion, architecture and design‪,‬ in a union of creative disciplines and contemporary ways of life. Fashion has for a long period of time been seeking legitimacy through different art collaborations, with the purpose of being categorised as an art form and taken more seriously. However, fashion has also taken inspiration from architecture, a world of references which has grown more important especially since the set designs become a crucial part of the show. Prada has for example teamed up with highly established architect Rem Koolhas to create its set design, which had a clear architectural approach. Kenzo‪’‬s latest collection had its set design built around an architectural and design perspective and kicked off their show with six holographic pillars that moved forward forming a wall, and then rotated again to create a divider in the center of the catwalk.

But are there any deeper reasons for this monumental, architectural approach than just a search for legitimacy and growing spectacularisation of the fashion world? If big brands continue proposing such masterpieces, fusions of creative disciplines that famish after the spotlight is turned off, does that say more about how fashion world is changing? Are clothes in themselves not enough? And what about smaller brands that cannot by any means produce such scenographic effects? Can fashion ever return to itself and be just that, an art form of thoughtful expression through the apparently most transient means, clothes? Only future will tell.

Hanna Cronsjö 
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26/03/2015

YSL’s Liberation Collection, or the Current Value of Revival

The relationship fashion has with its past is quite complex. There are, indeed, many ways of using the past: it can either be a prison to flee away from or a temple to plunder for atmospheres, shapes, vibes. We are taught that, when past is the declared source of inspiration, we are talking about a ‘revival’. The dynamics of revival seem plain: revival means taking a period and rethinking it, reconsidering it with a different awareness, that of the present, and actually remaking its objects with the memory of the mould. Revival has to do with the strength of references, and a good dose of nostalgia. Right? Wrong. It is history of fashion that nostalgia has small to nothing to do with fashion’s fascination with the past. The first ‘revival’ collection was actually thought for people who ‘did not have memories’, and was developed by one of the designers whose name is related with avant-garde: Yves Saint Laurent.

In 1971, Yves Saint Laurent presented his ‘Liberation’ collection, also called ‘Forties’, for the evident reprise of themes and variations of the war years. The collection was defined ‘hideous’ by the press, because it was a ‘sad reminder’ of a period of restriction. France felt betrayed by the elected heir of the grand couturiers. Saint Laurent himself compared the clash he provoked with the ‘scandal’ of Manet’s ‘Olympia’, finding himself both ‘sad’ and ‘delighted’ by the results of what he considered a rebellion to the static nature of Haute Couture. ‘L’important, c’est que les filles jeunes qui, elles, n’ont jamais connu cette mode, aient envie de la porter,’ he declared.

Maybe pushed both by the ‘revival craze’ fashion is experiencing in these days and the general lack of novelty in fashion, the Fondation Yves Saint Laurent Pierre Bergé and curator Olivier Saillard decided to put on stage the infamous ‘Liberation’ collection. The set, designed by Nathalie Crinière brings us inside the laboratory of the ‘enlightened’ couturier, with clothes, sketches, fabric choices and the whole line up of the eighty-pieces collection, printed human-scale on the walls, and then moves through the many pages of newspapers which strongly criticised the collection. The exhibition comes in a moment when scandal is no longer a scandalous word. It seems difficult to pinpoint a notable peak in the flat electrocardiogram of contemporary fashion, in which revival is widely used – if not abused – but with a slightly different meaning. For Saint Laurent, revival meant provocation, a ‘historical exercise’, useful to convey a brand-new message. Nowadays we seem to be as far as possible from this idea. Revival in fashion is didactic, not to say paternalistic, and dictated more by trend and market analysis than moved cultural reasons.

There surely have been other who treated the past in the way paved by YSL in 1971; Tom Ford is at the head of the legacy. The way Tom Ford reprised the Seventies in his years at Gucci – as he does today in his eponymous collection – choosing to push on its strongest and most striding feature, sex, electing it as the leading force not only of his designs, but of all the communication shaped around them. He chose a subject, a vibe, and used the forms in which this vibe came to propose it to his contemporary audience. YSL’s collection – and the exhibition that celebrates it – shows that the real feature of revival is its relevance in relation to what happens in the present. George Orwell said that ‘those who control the present, control the past and those who control the past control the future’. Hence, to really hold – and mould – the past, we first must live and understand the present. The forward nature of fashion excludes it can be based just on nostalgia; nothing new can be done, but the ways to re-cross the past and redesign what has already been done are infinite.

Marta Franceschini – Images courtesy of Fondation Yves Saint Laurent Pierre Bergé 
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23/03/2015

Style Suggestions: Denim

Denim will never go out of style, but this season on the runways it was reinvented in various cuts, treatments and forms. You can go classic or modern but what ever you decided denim will always be a safe bet for the wardrobe.

Jeans: Acne Studios, Shirt: Roy Roger’s, Jacket: Carven, Shoes: Pierre Hardy, Sunglasses: Saint Laurent, Backpack: A.P.C.

Styling by Vanessa Cocchiaro 

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19/03/2015

Daily Tips: LVMH Predicts the Future of Fashion

What is the future of fashion? Ho can it survive in such an aggressive, commercially-driven contemporary world if it is still to retain its position as an art form? For LVMH, the most significant fashion colossus today, the secret apparently lies in supporting and nurturing young talent, giving them the financial and conceptual framework to develop their individual paths presumably without restrictions. Launched in 2013, the second edition of LVMH Prize for Young Fashion Designers has announced its eight finalists who will follow last year’s winner, Thomas Tait. The designers are Arthur Arbesser, Coperni, Craig Green, Faustine Steinmetz, Jacquemus, Marques’ Almeida, Off-White c/o Virgil Abloh and Vetements, names who are already fairly well known in the fashion world (one of the conditions in the application process is that candidates must have presented at least two collections and are under 40). Are these the names that will shape the future of fashion? The one who wins will undoubtedly be on good track to get there.

The Blogazine 
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19/03/2015

Object/Process: Gianfranco Ferré at Palazzo Reale

Design is a scientific discipline. In many cases, it stands nearer to mathematics than to art, due to all the weighting variables that have to be taken into account in the creative process. Despite the name, fashion design has historically been considered as an applied art; just recently this idea has begun to take another shape, hybrid between the immediacy of the creative impulse and the measured structure of the project.

Gianfranco Ferré is one of the designers who better embody this duality; an architect by formation, he devoted his life to conciliating artistic flair with a proved practice within the field of fashion design. Ferré elected one piece of the wardrobe to be his exquisite object of research: the white shirt. The white shirt represented for him both a fixed rule and a tabula rasa, being a basic piece with few distinctive details, so prone to modifications and ideally liable to any variation. The most notable excercices de style Ferré took on, are now showcased in the exhibition “La Camicia Bianca Secondo Me (The White Shirt According to Me)” held at Palazzo Reale in Milan.

The exhibition is hosted in the Caryatid Room, whose monumentality confronts with the plasticity of twenty-seven shirts. Each of them is treated as a sculpture, nearly denying any relation with the body and enhancing the characteristics of the fabric, the proportions, the cut, the pattern, the construction. Every shirt has a name, recalling at times the inspiration, historical or emotive (Dumas, Napoleon, Soffio d’Aria, Rivelazione Romantica), at times the mental process (Sineddoche, Contrappunto, Canone Inverso), at times materiality (Calice, Cravat, Plastron, Origami). The grandeur of the room – filled with ancient and modern sculptures – is challenged other parts of the exhibition itself. Right in the centre of the ceiling, a projection with x-rays of the shirts created by Leonardo Salvini opens it as a window on an undefined space, underlying the technical construction of the pieces and transfiguring altogether the shirts into some sort of ghosts; fluctuating empty shells which do not seem to need to be filled with something – less than ever a body – to make sense of it.

The object is the core of the exhibition, which opens with huge prints of original sketches on white flowing curtains in flowing fabric. These serve as an instrument given to the public to better read the creative process, challenging the original nature of the sketch: being at the beginning of the project, right after the idea. Here the sketches seem to be unreadable signs, hieroglyphs to be understood if matched with their tri-dimensional results and their ‘postproduction’, the editorials and shootings displayed in cases alongside original sketches. Loyal to Ferré’s ideal, the exhibition is a well-balanced architecture, linear in its path, but with slight shifts to render the complexity of the process in an inductive way. Daniela Degli Innocenzi, curator of the exhibition, says that the outfitting was designed precisely to both underline the ‘poesis’ of Ferré and propose new readings of the ‘method’. Design is a scientific discipline. So is curating.

Marta Franceschini – Images courtesy of Gianfranco Ferré and Palazzo Reale 
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16/03/2015

Style Suggestions: 70s Revival

Every season, a decade rules the runway and this year the 70s have taken over with a vengeance. Though, don’t stress out, there will be no need to pull out the extreme bell bottoms: this time it’s all about the subtle touches.

Coat: Miu Miu, Shirt: Chloé, Skirt: A.P.C., Boots: Saint Laurent, Purse: Marni, Hat: Rag&Bone

Styling by Vanessa Cocchiaro 

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13/03/2015

Changing the Face of French Fashion

Paris Fashion Week – the city of haute couture, where fashion is taken incredibly seriously – has, for a long time detained the status of the capital of fashion. Nevertheless, despite its impressive fashion past, Paris was recently met with some tough competition from other fashion metropoles. In fact, the geography of fashion has changed, and it would be inaccurate to speak of only one, key fashion capital today. However, Paris is still one of the most influential cities in the industry, which is more obvious than ever during every fashion week. But if we put the established brands aside, what is the temperature for upcoming designers in Paris? Here is a brief list of names which have set themselves to be the next fashion wonders.

Aganovich is the new avant-garde fashion brand, whose two designers, Nana Aganovich and Brooke Taylor, have built their design philosophy around a mix of influences which take form in an abstract and conceptual way. This design approach is seen in their latest Fall 2015 collection, where mixes of patterns and volumes form key features of each look. Aganovich might not be easily approached by everyone, but that is also one of the most interesting things about the brand: they have stayed true to their vision and fulfilled it without trying to make it mainstream, establishing an initiative and approach that is refreshing in times when many brands are trying their best to be liked by everyone.

Yang Li is known for his “grunge romantic” aesthetic and has in just a couple of years made a name for himself due to his particular approach which combines of rough and soft attributes. For the next Fall, Li has taken inspiration from the look, definition and feeling of the word ‘tension’. The whole collection embodied the theme, from the metallic color scheme to the fabrics which were crumpled like a plastic bag. The balance and tension between the perfect and imperfect was always present in the pieces – a message that feels very current in a world of Instagram filters and airbrushing: sometimes the imperfections are what makes everything more interesting, a saying that Li successfully expressed.

Masha Ma is a young emerging Chinese designer with one foot in Shanghai and one in Paris. The Central Saint Martins graduate and Alexander McQueen intern, is known for her feminine and yet futuristic approach to fashion, and for this Fall strong women were her main focus. With that said, it was not the look of one woman sent down the runway, instead a lot of various looks and styles were showed. From 70s inspired pieces to more clean silhouettes with items in black and white, the collection embodied many different types of women, with one thing in common – they dresses for themselves.

Hanna Cronsjö 
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