what is fashion art culture

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.

Under the theme of love, a group of fourteen emerging artists will present and perform their varied works at Dacia Gallery on the Lower East Side this Saturday, December 11th. The presentation will traverse across diverse media such as video, performance, fashion, books, dolls, zines and illustration.
As students in the Body Garment Track in the Integrated Design Curriculum at Parsons New School for Design, they take inspiration for the exhibition’s theme from their core studio titled Love. They describe Love as a “Collaborative collision collage of mammoth love-orgy proportions between 14 creative beings – alive, afoot, and well prepared to be inspired” under the direction of artists and fashion designers Susan Cianciolo and Gabriel Asfour.
The event is from 6:00 PM to 10:00 PM at Dacia Gallery on 53 Stanton Street between Eldridge and Forsyth.

t is quite sad to report that Julie Gilhart will no longer be Fashion Director and Senior Vice President at Barneys. Together with Judy Collinson, who will also be leaving Barneys, she championed emerging, often experimental designers in an otherwise often mind-numbing department-store horizon.

What’s more, Gilhart was an early and outspoken supporter of sustainable designers, such as John Patrick Organic and Loomstate, and also, more generally, of sustainable consumption/production practices of good design which followed a realistic tempo for fashion. She often brought Dries Van Noten, an independently owned company and designer, who produces two well-made collections yearly as an example of integrity in design. Gilhart has spoken on the topic of sustainability in design quite extensively, including at the panel Sarah Scaturro and I moderated at Pratt in conjunction with the“Ethics+Aesthetics” exhibition, as well as contributing to our exhibition catalogue. She also spoke at the 2009 Copenhagen Climate Change Conference.
Partially the victim of an incredibly ill-timed over-expansion, Barneys seems to be destined to go down-market or, perhaps more simply in a generic direction. This decision seems an ill-advised attempt at temporarily saving their bottom line while in the long run diluting their brand identity and potentially damaging their bottom line more permanently. (Brands like the Gap and/or American Apparel, albeit completely different in scope, are clear examples of such a downward spiral.)
If that’s the case—and taking away the unique and quirky aesthetic of Gilhart and Collinson from the mix seems to suggest it is—one will be hard-pressed to see why the so-called luxury consumer would shop at Barneys over Net-a-Porter, or, if outside New York, at a department store such as Neiman Marcu

Coming up Tuesday December 7th is the last installment of the Melodrama: Fashion in Film Series curated by Jeffrey Lieber, Assistant Professor of Visual Culture Studies at Parsons the New School for Design.
The series explores “fashion as a key to the melodramatic imagination,” and has so far included Imitation of Life by Douglas Sirk (1959) and Lili Marleen by Fassbinder (1981), introduced by John Epperson and Tom Kalin, respectively. The last film—perhaps the least known of the three—is the 1965 sci-fi The 10th Victim (orginally La Decima Vittima), directed by Elio Petri. The film, which will be introduced by Evan Calder Williams, stars Marcello Mastroianni and Courrèges-clad Ursula Andress and Elsa Martinelli.

The series is presented by the School of Art and Design History and Theory at Parsons, in conjunction with the MA in Fashion Studies.

We all know that fashion is an expression of the zeitgeist – a style or trend can explode out of seemingly nowhere, with disparate tribes and geographies adopting it simultaneously. Fashion exhibitions are no different. The past few years have seen many exhibitions mounted on similar topics (colors, sustainability, glamour, etc). Currently there are two very different exhibitions on display about Japanese fashion. The first is “Japan Fashion Now” at the Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology (MFIT) in New York City, and the second is “Future Beauty: 30 Years of Japanese Fashion” at the Barbican Art Gallery in London.
There are some obvious similarities between these exhibitions – both are curated by top curators in the field (Valerie Steele at MFIT and the Kyoto Costume Institute’s Akiko Fukai at the Barbican). Both focus on Japanese fashion designers and celebrate their contributions to the Western fashion system. Both show looks dating back to 30 years ago and pay attention to contemporary Japanese sub-cultures. But that’s it. Their interpretations, exhibition design and overall approaches are radically different.

This post is long in the making. I have been meaning to review the exhibition Body Unbound: Contemporary Couture from the IMA’s Collection at the Indianapolis Museum of Art, as it ties in with themes explored in my Ph.D. on the grotesque in fashion at the turn of the twenty-first century, which I recently completed at Central Saint Martins
However, having not yet been able to visit the exhibition in person combined with the fact that it closes January, I figured for the moment, to at least mention its central theme and participating designers as sketched out in the museum’s accompanying literature:
“Body Unbound: Contemporary Couture from the IMA’s Collection, examines the many ways designers have manipulated, transformed and liberated the female figure. The exhibition will feature ground breaking designs by Rudi Gernreich, Issey Miyake, Junya Watanabe, Thierry Mugler, Jean-Paul Gaultier, Gianni Versace and other avant-garde fashion designers. Body Unbound will explore how these designers used modern construction and unexpected materials to contort, conceal, reveal or mock their wearers.
My interest was recently piqued when I began hearing about a new book called Minimalism and Fashion: Reduction in the Postmodern Era. Having admired the recent minimal designs of people like Raf Simons (for Jil Sander), Jil Sander (for Uniqlo) and Francisco Costa (for Calvin Klein), I was even more intrigued when I realized that the author was none other than Elyssa Dimant, a fellow alumna of FIT’s MA program in Fashion and Textile Studies. After seeing some of the beautiful photographs and reading the glowing reviews in places like NY Magazine and the New York Times, I knew that I had to talk to her. While her research into minimalism and fashion is mandatory for any fashion scholar, it’s her unique approach to the field of fashion studies that I find inspirational. Dimant graciously took a few moments out of her busy schedule to answer the following: Read the rest of this entry 

It’s exciting to report on the great number of conferences happening in the field of fashion studies, which helps one grasps the cross-cultural and geographically diverse scope of the phenomenon.
Alessandra Vaccari, an Italian scholar based at the University of Bologna, is organizing a conference in Buenos Aires in conjunction with the new masters launched by theUniversity of Bologna, Buenos Aires. The conference, which is taking place November 11, is organized in collaboration with the Centro Metropolitano de Diseño.

The Textile Arts Center, the founders of which were recently interviewed by Sarah Scaturro in Fashion Projects, is hosting a collaborative exhibition by Kimberly Ellen Halltitled “Virgin Knitters.”
The exhibition is the documentation of a project started in 2007 for which Hall taught a number of people how to knit in exchange for their first project, a scarf. The project was inspired by the Buddhist notion of Wabi-Sabi, which can be partially understood as the appreciation of something specifically because of its imperfections.
That is how Hall explains the project:
“The virgin-knit scarves have both an emotional and aesthetic appeal. A virgin-knit scarf draws in the wearer through the knowledge that the knitter worked hard making it, while the aesthetic appeal stems from the ideas embodied in Wabi-Sabi, a Japanese concept of beauty. The idea that there is beauty and power in an object that is not precision made or the result of years of experience seems an important one today. It’s easy to agree that everything is mass-produced, cheaply/quickly made these days, etc.—an antidote to that can be found in craft. But we often find at the other end of the spectrum is artisanal and
labored handwork that can be a put-off when deciding to learn to make something for the first time.”
Kimberly Ellen Hall is an artist and designer with an interest in the intangible qualities of textiles. She holds an MA in textiles from Central Saint Martins in London, and has designed on both sides of the Atlantic from Hussein Chalayan to Coach

instead taking place on Novmber 12 and 13 at Parsons in conjunction with the newly launched MA in Fashion Studies and is organized by its director Heike Jenss in collaboration with dean Hazel Clark. In their own words:
“This symposium marks the launch of the new MA Fashion Studies program in the School of Art and Design History and Theory at Parsons. Placing an emphasis on fashion as material culture, scholars whose work spans multiple disciplines discuss their work in the diverse field of fashion studies. Topics range from collecting and exhibiting in the museum and in multiple sites in the global fashion industry; global denim; the fashioning of masculinities; and image production in New York modeling agencies.
Speakers include Christopher Breward, Cheryl Buckley, Otto vonBusch, Joanne Eicher, Francesca Granata, Susan B. Kaiser, Alexandra Palmer, Stephanie Sadre-Orafai, Valerie Steele, Sophie Woodward, and members of Parsons’ faculty.