27/10/2015

Daily Tips: Assemble’s Granby Workshop

Can socially-oriented design still exist and what is its role in society today? A possible reply – albeit, weirdly balanced between art, architecture and design – comes from the British collective Assemble. Nominated for this year’s Turner Prize, for their architecture work with the community-led rebuilding of a Liverpool neighborhood following years of dereliction, Assemble have opened “Granby Workshop” – a social enterprise making handmade products connected to the refurbishment of the area. From clay handles to printed fabrics, the project has been set up by Assemble as part of their ongoing work, with proceeds raised going towards further redevelopment of the area.

The Blogazine 
27/10/2015

Between Digital and Material: Ai Weiwei in London

Taking into account the sheer size of installations filling the monumental rooms of the Royal Academy in London, it is quite difficult to comprehend how much of Ai Weiwei’s work actually relies on the immateriality of the digital world. And yet, this exhibition cannot but point to the Chinese artist’s dependence on the ‘online’ world – be it as a tool that allows him to maintain a relationship with the outside world in the moment of his reclusion, be it as the central subject of his monumental explorations. The first survey of Ai Weiwei’s work in the UK, the show maintains a dynamic balance between the physicality of the installation and the immaterial, yet closely interwoven, digital world.

Working in a variety of different contexts, Ai Weiwei, in fact, transforms materials to convey his ideas, whether in wood, porcelain, marble or jade, testing the skills of the craftsmen working to his brief in the process. Sculptures such as Surveillance Camera, 2010 and Video Camera, 2010, both masterpieces in craftsmanship, monumentalise the technology used to monitor, simultaneously rendering it useless and absurd. For this exhibition, Ai Weiwei has created new work, including site specific sculptural installation of monumental Tree displayed in the Annenberg Courtyard, consisting of eight individual trees, each measuring around seven metres tall. The installation was funded through a Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign, where £123,577 was raised; the largest amount ever raised for a European art project on Kickstarter.

Citing Duchamp as ‘the most, if not the only, influential figure’ in his art practice, Ai continues to engage with creative tensions between complex art histories, conceiving works with multiple readings in the process – and often building tension between political powers in China. In fact, the opening of the exhibition marked Weiwei’s first trip outside the country in four years. Ai Weiwei’s show will remain on view until 13 December 2015 at Royal Academy in London.

The Blogazine – Images courtesy of the Royal Academy 
26/10/2015

The World of Charles and Ray Eames

“For Charles and Ray Eames, design was not simply a professional skill, it was a life skill—more than that, it was an essential attribute of life itself.” Design as a way of life, a state of mind, a personal philosophy – from the opening words of Eames Demetrios, the director of the Eames Office to Martino Gamper, one of the most important contemporary designers – it seems that design, for both designers and the general public alike, can hardly be separated from life. It is through this lens that visitors to the recently opened exhibition “The World of Charles and Ray Eames”, are introduced to the legacy of, possibly, the most famous design couple. In fact, had it not been for their personal relationship, the exhibition points out, perhaps their world of timeless, essential, fundamental, designs would never had existed.

Held at the Barbican, itself the landmark of positive, utopian, modernist design thinking, the exhibition opens – perhaps a bit too uncritically – with Charles and Ray’s early experimentation with plywood – the material that is central to their careers. From wartime plywood leg splints – a modular, inexpensive, ergonomic, mass-produced object – to post-War focus on domesticity, with plywood chairs, tables, children’s toys and furniture, the exhibition traces the history of design from technological innovation to the comfort of the home – apparently, the ultimate design destination. Yet, while Charles and Ray started their career by designing products, the exhibition surveys the evolution of their work towards creating installations and exhibition designs that pre-date the multimedia environments of today. In fact, the story of the Eames Office is that of the trajectory of visual and material culture in the post-war period of the last century as Charles and Ray Eames moved fluidly between the mass-production of objects for everyday use and the transmission of ideas through exhibition, film or installation, in anticipation of the global ‘information age’.

From their modular house, “Case Study House #8”, to their sweet love letters, the exhibition focuses on showing how Charles and Ray moved seamlessly through formats, types of production, events, or even geographies, time and contexts – from their intimate life to the public sphere – by using the tools of design as a media for approaching life. Bringing together over 380 works, the exhibition presents the world of Charles and Ray Eames through objects and projects produced during their lifetime, offering an opportunity to re-examine their work and legacy, and the legacy of post-war modernism. It also features a wealth of documentation and contextual material from the professional archive of the Eames Office as well as artefacts from their personal collections, that highlight their relationship with the leading artistic figures of the 20th century – their immediate circle included Buckminster Fuller, Alexander Girard, Sister Corita Kent, George Nelson, Isamu Noguchi, Eero Saarinen, Saul Steinberg and Billy Wilder – and show the importance of these relationships to the Eameses’ life, philosophy and working processes. In fact, even their friendships cannot but reveal how the imperative of design in their everyday life. “The World of Charles and Ray Eames” runs until 14 February 2016 at the Barbican in London.

The Blogazine – Images courtesy of the Barbican 
23/10/2015

Designing Modern Women: Krasimira Stoyneva

Even though Krasimira Stoyneva is a recently established label, the designer behind it is already prominent and features a signature style. Before founding her own brand in 2014, Stoyneva graduated with a First Class Honours degree from the University of East London and attracted further global attention by wining the High Commend Award by Diversity Now 2014 and the Vogue & Muse Young Vision Award 2014. Her debut collection Future Queens became an international success and it helped to set the tone for her design aesthetic.

One of her many strengths as a designes is the fact that she pushes boundaries and discovers new, bold ways to create pieces. She reinvents new materials in an innovative and curious way, resulting in pieces that are both fresh and cool. The use of synthetic hair has, for example, become one of her trademarks, combined with bold prints and contemporary cuts. The movement plays a central role in her design and the point she tries to send accross is how such garments look when worn by women on the move. Her pieces aren’t for the shy, instead they are made for women who like to stand out among the crowd, women who aren’t afraid to stand up for themselves. The feeling they create is contemporary and liberating.

For the Spring/Summer 2016 season she held on to the original design philosophy, embracing it in a slightly more delicate and feminine way. Silk and its natural movement combined with the texture of hair and delicate embroidering embodies that theme and results in a collection that continues to feel confident, contemporary and most of all, uniquely ’Stoyneva’.

Hanna Cronsjö 
22/10/2015

Designers on Screen

Movies are a very direct and immediate means to tell stories. In a society like ours, where the speed is one of the main features of everyday experience, movies are also used as means to document practices, fix moments and draw the attention of the public to particular issues. Many are the movies dedicated to fashion designers, whose cult seems to have reached its peak now, thanks to the aura of accessibility given by social media. Exploiting the communicative power of fashion, designers, in order to be effective on the market, put so much effort in producing images and build mythologies around their products, that they have ended up belonging to popular culture; and this not through the objects they produce, but through their personality.

When designers decide – or accept – to go on camera, they are putting forward their image, their name, themselves. Authenticity is surely one of the core issues that comes up while watching these kinds of movies; as Worth’s official photographies were designed in every detail – he choses to depict himself as a createur, appropriating of the symbols traditionally belonging to artists, rather than a clothes-maker – so designers today use the means they have to convey their message, and everything has to be camera-ready. Another issue indirectly brought up by these kind of movies is power or, better, powers: what is the story? who decides how to tell it? what is real and what is made up? what kind of public does the film address?

Movies as Giorgio Armani’s Made in Milan directed by Martin Scorsese, and Yohji Yamamoto’s Notebook on Cities and Clothes by Wim Wenders are not just documentaries, but carry the mark of the strong and recognisable hand of famous directors: in these two films the centres of power clearly emerging right from the beginning are two. That of a designer who wants to put himself under the limelight, and that of a well known director with a precise and personal project. Alternatively, Valentino’s ‘The Last Emperor’ is more ‘naive’ in its representation; it seems a straightforward documentation of the conclusion of a process, the last effort of the designer before his retirement. After an event as grand as his exhibition at Ara Pacis in Rome, it is not surprising that he choses a closing line so peremptory as ‘après moi, le deluge’: the end of an era, whose very last minutes are frozen in the film as they were lived, in their greatness and in their reality.

The most recent movie that has appeared is Dior and I, which documents quite the opposite of what Valentino did. It reports the very first experience of Raf Simons as designer of Maison Dior. It goes back and forth betweens Simons’ work on his first house couture collection and the thoughts of Christian Dior as written in his autobiography ‘Dior et Moi’. The film is complex above all in what it does not say: it was made after a tumultuous period for the French fashion house, that was in search of a voice that could bring the maison forward, re-establishing a link with its roots. Interestingly, the film doesn’t mention the Galliano scandal.

Even though they seem to enter a process in medias res and freeze a practice that is quite cyclical and repeats itself, with some natural variations, every six months, these films engage with milestones, rather than with the everyday; notwithstanding this, the repetitive patterns are the one on which directors and designers rely to convey authenticity, also in its historicised symbols: the toile, the patterns, the whole atelier as narrative topos. The matter does not end up here, though. These poles of power are just the most accessible and immediate – the designer, the director, the ‘moment’ captured by the camera. And authenticity is not something that can be measured by simply sticking with definitions – movie, reportage, documentary. Since the stories are based in real life, there are many other actors, both on and off the screen, and many implications that contribute to the narrative; there is no key to the ‘right’ reading of these films. It is up to the public to chose how to engage with them. What is sure is that they can be considered as a material to critically engage with design, and complicate the reading of relationships, society and culture.

Marta Franceschini 
21/10/2015

Alec Soth: Gathered Leaves at Science Museum

“One of the joys of being a photographer is the ability to present my work both in the pages of a book and on the walls of a gallery,” said Alec Soth in the occasion of his first major UK exhibition. “Gather Leaves: Photographs by Alec Soth” opened at London’s Science Museum to rooms filled with Soth’s signature projects Sleeping by the Mississippi, Songbook, Niagara and Broken Manual, which explore American everyday life. Alec Soth’s work is characterised by a lyrical approach to documentary photography and a restless experimentation across the many forms that photography can take: from exhibitions and books, to zines and digital media. Soth, who lives and works in Minnesota, also shares the great American fascination with the open road in his projects, bringing a fresh perspective to ideas explored in the twentieth century by artists and writers such as Robert Frank, Stephen Shore and Jack Kerouac.

In Songbook, one of four exhibited projects, Soth elucidates modern American life in stunning and timeless black and white. The project emerged from a series of road trips he embarked on with his friend, the writer Brad Zellar. Posing as local newspaper reporters, over the course of two years they crossed seven states and attended hundreds of meetings, dances, festivals, and communal gatherings. The resulting stories were published by Soth’s own imprint, Little Brown Mushroom, as an ad hoc series of ‘dispatches’ from the different states visited. In the series, Soth isolates his photographs from their original news context, and in doing so, evokes a human desire for interaction in an era increasingly defined by virtual social networks. Funny, fragmentary and sad, Songbook is a lyrical meditation on the tension between American individualism and the urge to be united.

Kate Bush, Head of Photography at the Science Museum, perfectly described Alec Soth: “His work belongs within the canon of great American photography of the past century. He’s an acute observer of contemporary life, always alert to the poetic possibilities of individual triumph and tragedy. He’s an artist who captures a profound sense of what it is to be human, in all its surprising dimensions.”

The Blogazine – Images courtesy of Science Museum 
19/10/2015

Art for Everyone: From William Morris To Bob and Roberta Smith

A Georgian building in Walthamstow – an east London borough – dating from about 1744, the “Water House” was once the home of William Morris, artist, writer, designer, socialist, and one of the most influential figures of 19th century arts culture in Britain. The Water House is now better known as William Morris Gallery, a space dedicated to preserving and disseminating Morris’ legacy – both by looking at his own life and work, as well as by offering a compelling context for contemporary artists to show their work. Knowing even fairly little about Morris’ ethos, it doesn’t come as a surprise, thus, to see Bob and Roberta Smith’s show open at the Gallery.

“Art is Your Human Right” – an unambiguous and appropriately compelling exhibition title – is a show that follows Bob and Roberta Smith’s campaigns against the British government’s downgrading of art education. In a visually rich and engaging installation, the artists – whose real name is Patrick Brill – asks questions and offers statements on the value of art in everyday life for the widest strata of society. From work directed specifically at the former secretary for education Michael Gove that asks “where are our future designers architects craftsmen/women engineers technicians software designers and mathematicians going to come from if no one can draw?” to genuinely convincing statements such as “Art Makes People Powerful”, Bob and Roberta Smith engages in a direct and playful dialogue between life and art.

Combining film, placards, sculpture, banners and even his slogan-covered campaigning van (Brill launched the Art Party for the latest parliamentary elections), this exhibition makes the case for creativity: all schools should be art schools; music makes children powerful; art is your human right. “Art is Your Human Right” runs until 31 January 2016 at William Morris Gallery.

The Blogazine – Images courtesy of William Morris Gallery 
16/10/2015

Harbison – From Research to Fashion

The fashion world has always been looking for new talents, but the desire for the new seems to be even more urgent today. While this offers numerous opportunities for upcoming designers – be it through awards, apprenticeships, or endorsements – it also gives them less time to build their own voice before being pulled into complex dynamics of commercial viability and production. It is obvious, thus, that this results in a frenzied fashion climate which, in the long run, risks of harming the creative aspects of design process. Shouldn’t spending time working independently be preserved and regarded as the true moment of development in fashion? For young talents, figuring who they want to be as designers, is central to how the fashion world will be shaped in the coming decades.

One brand that has embraced its research process successfully and found its own expression is the Brooklyn based label, Harbison. In just a few years Charles Elliott Harbison, the founder and Creative Director of the brand has created a design aesthetic that feels at the forefront of all that is interesting and cool. After studying fine arts, painting, and textiles at North Carolina State University, fashion at Parsons School of Design and holding internships at Michael Kors and Jack Spade, he started his own brand in 2013. During his studies, Harbison become particularly interested in the modern movement, a frame of reference that still holds a great impact on his design. In his A/W 2015 collection, colour contrasts have played an important role, both in more graphic patterns and in combinations of materials. Perhaps mindful of the Modernist maxim ”form follows function”, his silhouettes are clean, feminine and with a strong urban feeling. Taking time to understand who he is as a designer, has resulted in work that is clear in its conception and true in its references – as should any design product be before it reaches the final fashion judges – the consumers.

Hanna Cronsjö 
15/10/2015

From runway to stage: How fashion shows itself today

There are many words that define the moment in which fashion is publicly presented: fashion show, catwalk, runway. Between all the semantic possibilities, which involve nuances and references both to history, to the kind of movement performed – it is difficult to chose the one which is able to define what actually goes on, every six months – or, I rather say, more and more often – on the stages that fashion colonises. To pin down the term that can actually gather all the different expressions, I’d go for fashion show, which holds together the idea of an exposition, be it still or in movement, of clothes which represent a flair, a style.

Fashion shows were actually not as ‘narrative’ as we consider them today. They were born to gather buyers and journalists and inform them of what a fashion house was producing. They are the tri-dimensional evolution of the circulation of plates and aimed mostly at enlarging the area of commercial influence. Fashion shows, for some countries – as Italy in 1951 – came up as a moment to showcase national identity; and that’s how they are seen today by the so-called upcoming fashion cities. The story behind fashion shows is complex and layered, but just stopping at the surface – that is, at their appearance as spectacle – is interesting to get some clues about the directions of design today.

What emerged as an economic tool has rapidly become advertorial, and then opened up to the myriad of possibilities that the stage offers; and what kind of ‘animal’ are fashion shows becoming now? The question arises after the latest fashion month – and, most of all, the Parisian spot – which has pushed the boundaries between fashion show and performance art, blurring the lines more and more. While most of the shows followed the ‘regular’ format of the catwalk, just reflecting upon the space in which models had to move, some designers have exploited the potential of the fashion show as a moment highly regarded by the press and the public. Rick Owens sent out couples of models-performers bounded up, one actually ‘wearing’ the other; they were not professional models though, and their bodies were informed of their profession, and far from the typical fashion silhouette. What Hussein Chalayan did was not even a catwalk: two models standing still in the middle of a crowded room were literally showered with water, which acted like a solvent on the clothes they were wearing, revealing other clothes underneath the first layer. I don’t know if the world ‘performance’ suits these kind of events, though. It is not just a matter of ‘like or hate’ anymore: fashion shows seem to be trying to become a meta-narrative operation, which waits for the reception and above all for the participation of the public to be complete. Nevertheless, they still portray something that is neither replicable nor empathic, and they present a reality that is true just within the border of fashion experimentalism. The participation of the public is surely central, above all considering the impact of social media not only on fashion as a show, but also on fashion as a product, but the positions and hierarchies are still very defined.

What is negated by these very actions that fashion practitioners are staging is indeed the materiality of fashion; it is not an economic matter anymore: fashion is a pretext to produce actions that surely do not want to be a mere showcase, nor they are meant to be just for a public of professionals; but also, they are not just highly ‘instagrammable’ moments, which get their value by the number of thumbs-up they receive on social networks. Even if, in the Chalayan show, clothes are actually the centre, we are not looking at them as a product, but as part of a process, a metaphor for the intricate relationship between instability, change and authenticity. The core problem is, then, what role do clothes have in this evolution of the runway? Does their design match with the shape of their presentation? Does it come before or after the idea of the show? What is clear is that these operations are re-defining the meaning of fashion itself as a wide platform in which clothes are just one of the elements that define design as a practice, and design as a spectacle.

Marta Franceschini 
14/10/2015

A Change at the Top: Demna Gvasalia for Balenciaga

Even though we’ve left Paris Fashion Week behind us a couple of weeks ago, there are still some lingering news to address. About a week ago it was unexpectedly proclaimed that the co-founder of urban Parisian label Vetements, Demna Gvasalia, would replace Alexander Wang as artistic director of Balenciaga. But what could this mean for the future of Balenciaga fashion? As Wang concluded his reign over the French brand with an underwhelming final collection, it opened space for Gvasalia to bring forth a new side to Balenciaga. If we look at Gvasalia’s background, it does seem that he might have the knowledge needed to continue this great house’s legacy.

Georgian designer Demna Gvasalia is a graduate of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp. After leaving the prestigious design school, he led design teams at both Maison Martin Margiela as well as Louis Vuitton. Subsequently, he launched the Vetements label in 2014, basing it on the concept of urbanity, everyday street-life and a season-less modern wardrobe – all notions that gave the brand a sought after coolness factor. Vetements quickly became a favorite among fashionistas and qualified for a nomination for this year’s LVMH Prize.

When reviewing the past work of Gvasalia, the first thing that comes to mind is an effortless edge to each look. It is a unique quality that brings streetwear to a more elevated spectrum. In Vetements’, collections there have always been looks with differing elements on the front and back, bright colours and unexpected references. Thigh high leather boots in vivid colours gave a minimalistic pencil skirt a coquettish wink. Such playful vibes can help Balenciaga attract a new clientele without alienating the old. Even though Gvasalia has yet to prove himself in the haute couture there is a clear point of view to this designer that can marry well with the Balenciaga label. Gvasalia has expressed his thoughts in not always pushing the limits of fashion by creating something crazy, but instead, creating something we could believe in. This is a clear philosophy that echoes through Cristóbal Balenciaga’s heritage. Balenciaga was famous for adding precious elements to simplicity, making it deliciously grand – an approach that Demna Gvasalia has made his own.

Victoria Edman 
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