Blobimagerie (sewing, stitching, polishing texts)

Gianluca Marziani

Glossy pages, catalogues, reviews, shows, the internet, publicity, cibachrome, billboards, film, television the imagination which is not just imagined becomes intrusive, commonplace and increasingly influential and catalysing. And Fashion falls in with all the rest, impressing itself upon creative life in order to shape the shifting surface of the everyday. Our cities dress themselves in the prevailing colours of single collections, individuals fill the landscape with clothes and habits and inter-relations influence each other reciprocally through fetishes and accessories. One need only look around to understand the impact that dressing has on the structure of desire. What is less clear, because changeable and complex, is the exchange between fashion and the visual arts, between pure clothing and its sculptural possibilities, between a world of ‘use then change’ and the specific weight of the contents behind the form.

IMAGERIE cuts across the interchangeable relations among clothing, its excrescences and the cultural system. It does so via an itinerary which is dis-homogenous and international, broad and narrow, experimental and classical, high and low, maximalist and rigorous, bloated and thin. Like this text branching out in every direction: freely, emotionally, aesthetically, geographically, culturally (and yet never losing sight of the quality of the options).

GETULIO ALVIANI and GERMANA MARUCELLI provide us with one of the most remarkable alliances between the universal vision of the artist and the potentially universal practicality of clothing. Alviani represents an effective tension of the optical work, a concentration of luminous energy which mixes science and constructivism in the cold poetry of kinetic synthesis. His works are characterised by modularity and chromatic rigor, optical effects and interaction with the user, together with the superseding of the informal and the sensibility of a progress which is proper, correct. These are the elements which produced the extraordinary collaboration with Marucelli in 1963, into which Alviani poured wisdom, talent and a linguistic rigor for the creation of fabrics. This alliance produced garments the wearability of which emphasised the formal reduction and technological invisibility of the vibratory texture surfaces. Marucelli’s studio, which was structured by Paolo Scheggi and furnished with additions by Alviani, became a cultural meeting-point, a unique location for unique objects which we can rediscover through paintings, clothing and the photographic documentation by Mulas, Barbieri, Sottsass jr.

Alviani also collaborated with the American Rudi Gernreich, the inventor of the topless but, more importantly, of clothes that possessed a synthetic artistic beauty. Gernreich understood that the joyousness of pop and kinetic geometries could be fused into a single artefact through the use of transparencies, new materials and reduced forms. High-tech that became invisible, functional and immediately ‘classic’, and which established an ineluctable point of reference in the linguistic mix of the most creative fashion.

Clothing sculptors have a dual function: they construct beauty meant to be worn and wear clothes in order to create something of beauty. Roberto Capucci continues to exemplify this idea, in terms of a creative isolation where the logic of industrial production is eschewed and a lengthy process is required in order to create unique pieces. As a dressmaker, he creates sculptures that cite Renaissance and Baroque iconography; from the colours to specific evolutions of the fabrics, from the folds to the chromatic relationships, from excess to touches of the austere, Cupicci’s contrasts take painting as their sister art. He continues to represent an indispensable archetype when we analyse clothing and its plausible artistic nature.

Let us continue to dwell in the past, in that period when Lucio Fontana created the profound bases for a modern interchange of languages. His universal syntheses transferred ‘spatial concepts’ (cuts and holes in surfaces) to clothes of a rarefied simplification. The three masterpieces for the Milan atelier of Bruna Bini and Giuseppe Telese date from 1961 (to which should be added the artist’s experience with Mila Schön). We rediscover them in order to admire the epoch-making value of the cut of the yellow fabric, the six cuts on black and the holes in a sheath-dress with a metallic effect. And while Fontana’s Spatialism gained an effective media wearability, Ellsworth Kelly worked along equally potent lines. The American painter is characterised by the study of primary geometries with flat colours, rigorous lines and essential relations. His two-dimensional surfaces recreated a radical spatial harmony on fabrics.

C. P. COMPANY seems to preserve the year 1961 in its industrial Genome. Carlo Rivetti’s group expresses a concern for functional synthesis and the technology of materials. Behind its history we can discern the evolution of a practical attention to the ‘development of functionality’, and the search for essential lines that mix the synthesis of the project with the technological efficacy of its use. The photographic exhibition (previously at the Milan show-room, in via Savona) is a curious excursus ‘backstage’ by four photo-journalists: Gianni Berengo Gardin, Martin Parr, Gueorgui Pinkhassov and Sandro Sodano. Berengo Gardin’s b/w mixes the interiors and exteriors of the Milan showroom; Pinkhassov has combed the C:P: Company site in Ravarino; Parr documents the company President, Rivetti, lecturing to IED students; and finally we have the imagination of Sodano who has collaborated with the brand in advertising since 1998.

With respect to the connections between clothing and progress, Paco Rabanne was the greatest sculptor of technological fashion. He created clothes with the repetition of geometric forms in aluminium; used pleated paper, Plexiglas, jersey and metallic taffeta and was the first to use black women as runway models (1964). His clothes blended minimalism, optical art and pop styles. In 1966, he presented ‘Twelve importable dresses in contemporary materials’, an event which still endures in cultural mythology. The garments were made of rhodoud (a rigid plastic material) rectangles and disks in various colours, and were assembled by means of metal rings. And still today, tireless but apocalyptic, Paco Rabanne has chosen new elements, such as frames for slides or optic fibres.

SILVIA LEVENSON has found the right space with a cold and disturbing ‘fashion glass’. With glass she constructs clothes and accessories which reverse the limits of portability, practical function and floating softness. Razor blades, and rigid and bruising materials are elements which have little of the feminine and follow in the wake of Paco Rabanne, recalling the great archetypes, in a hybrid territory where the artist overturns old commonplaces and diverse elements come together to form a new aesthetic.

André Courrèges, another major figure in French experimentation, understood Le Corbusier’s message concerning the moral value of reduction. He was the spokesman for a functional minimalism with touches of science fiction. He professed black and white in contrast, and trapezoidal clothes. With the collection ‘Space age’, he presented materials which were pure, visionary science fiction, and has influenced contemporary dress as few other artists have.

Pierre Cardin, the most imitated of fashion’s visionary radicals, made an optimum use of the new plastic- and vinyl-type materials. He conceived of plastic jewellery and extremely tight, slitted skirts. And in 1968, he created ‘Cardine’, a pre-formed, moulded dress, without stitching and with permanent elements in relief. He anticipated by thirty years the cult of essential and geometrically elegant sportswear, part fantastic and part social uniform.

DieselStyleLab borrowed various formal values from Pierre Cardin. DANIELE CONTROVERSIO is one of its creators, and his experimental endeavours push the user’s mental buttons, stimulating a less obvious awareness of casualwear. The body’s ‘habitation’ is impinged upon by myriad contaminations, moves between cinema and music, citation and literature, confirming that cultural references identify the roots of planning and conception.

DAVID LACHAPELLE is the most talented, transversal and contaminated of the artists who ‘invade’ fashion with the coherent integrity of their own imagination, which in his case is a digital baroque that augments its effects in portraits that are fantastic, excessive and unabashed. Celebrities are transformed into pure sculptural icons, with the features of plastic icons that feed the expressive maximalism of pop. Any discussion of the relations between Art and Fashion should include the Florence Biennial of 1996. On this occasion, the two languages met on an officially sanctioned common ground. The curator, Germano Celant, resolved the entrepreneurial gap and drew up the ‘contract’ for this ‘union’. The entire project was synthesised in the seven pavilions designed and arranged in the Forte Belvedere garden by Arata Isozaki. In a real dialogue with the Renaissance forms and colours, the Japanese architect projected simple wooden cabins, within which artists and stylists with reciprocal expressive systems cohabited: Tony Cragg with Karl Lagerfeld, Oliver Herring with Rei Kawakubo, Damien Hirst with Muccia Prada, Jenny Holzer with Helmut Lang, Roy Lichtenstein with Gianni Versace, Mario Merz with Jil Sander and Julian Schnabel with Azzedine Alaïa. And while only a few stylists facilitated the exchange with art in the city’s historical locations, near the Leopolda Station ideas abounded, with a number of stylists moving in experimental directions and alternating with artists of various extractions. The Florence Biennial created a real relationship between the speed of fashion and artistic slowness. In this thin diaphragm one encountered degradability and duration, in accordance with a node of images which inverted the rules of the game, enhancing the more accelerated aspects of artistic work while emphasising the sculptural permanence of clothing.

DRESS AS DOMUS, i.e...

...the plastic fantasy and conceptual sense behind each single wearable creation. Real objects with an ambiguous cognition divided among talent, a limited market and the exclusiveness of the fetish. A work where the sculpture shows its stylistic logic and form experiments with courageous solutions. Occasionally, an artist will reflect in a profound way on the concept dress/domus, avoiding the mercantile imperative in order to let their fantasy and conceptuality flow. Someone will create sculpture by means of unique pieces made of fabrics in wearable forms. With respect to the craftsmen of High Fashion, they adopt the mental and organisational norms of the artistic system and their pieces can adapt to the body or create constructive contrasts with wearability. They study the corporeal as a field of complex meanings while their garments relate with the outside world, with local and global culture and with different psyches, emotions and  sensorial experiences. Elisa Jemenez creates functional forms that navigate between sculptural immobility and practical use. Her sculptures in Lycra, velvet, cotton and nylon thread take on volume in a formal play with no apparent equilibrium. Her imagination works on holes, rips, edges and hems ‘finished’ with candle flames, burnt fabrics washed in tea or spices. Her exhibition, ‘Hunger World’, at the Holly Solomon Gallery in New York, which was inspired by the colours and forces of nature, confirms how far fantasy can go when talent encounters the mechanisms of sculpture. Jessica Odgen shifts design onto the weight of the sculptural dimension. Sensitive to contemporary visual research, Ogden, who is Jamaican, breaks up the idea of the showroom in order to make space into a gallery of transversal art. Between craftsmanship, exhibition and selling, her clothes establish the installation-like ambiguity of dressing the mind and the vision of the body. Susan Cianciolo instead sells wearable clothes which highlight details, the hand-sewn, citation and pictorial colours. In certain cases she creates kits with which to complete the model according to one’s own tastes. Some years ago, Helen Storey depicted the first thousand hours of an embryo. Using minute technologies and current fabrics (glass fibres, polymers and composite materials), she emphasises the possible links between clothing, art and science.

CAROLINE BROADHEAD adopts solid mechanisms of craftsmanship, and chooses artistic settings in which to present her conceptual clothes. ‘Wobbly Dress II’ (1992), for example, was a white puzzle made of pieces of nylon in anomalous forms: a form which becomes transparent skin and a living excrescence when worn by the body. ‘Seams’ (1989) went even further, consisting simply of soft fillets which determined the object by circumscribing it, while emptiness filled the clothes on the walls. More recent works include ‘Tunnel Dress’ (1999), which expands the silk dress in a flying sequence of spatial multiplication, and ‘The Waiting Game’ (1997), with a white linen train that opens in space like a new geography beyond the body. For Broadhead, each garment is an analysis of mental limits, of the boundaries between the visible and invisible and of consistency as a spiritual principle. MIMI FARINA also expands some of her creations in the physical space of the landscape, opening the train to an invasion of place. ‘Growing Dress’, for example, selected by Maria Campitelli for ‘Garden Fashion’ (2001), presented a train which camouflaged itself with the woodland greenery of its setting.

Adrian Bannon, also from London, produces clothes which are evanescent and cerebral. Through manual techniques he seeks to attain the maximum possible lightness, to the point that wearability exists at the limits of pure thought. Andreas Exner chooses old items of clothing such as skirts, trousers and jackets, showing a preference for pastel monochromes. He then attaches them to the wall, arranging them like sinuous sculptures of coloured fabric. Alessia Parenti embodies the private side of a regard which consists of clothing, household intimacy and hybrid painting. Her world gathers itself in her own room, amid coloured fabrics and threads, ribbons and buttons, canvases and colours. Here, the wearable pages of a diary across which the days flow are reborn: slowly across the minute stitching, on the epidermal layers of clothes, in the contents each garment pursues along poetic cuts and designs. As in any diary where indecision and fear swell the emotion of the ink, Parenti’s wardrobe invades the canvas plastically, creating scattered fragments that speak, cry, observe, enjoy, reflect... Alda D’Urbano has created a dress with the two-dimensional print of her own body. What is worn is the artist’s own form, who thereby discovers her intimacy while covering a skin which is real. And thus, a refined joining of stories and semantic levels, between an intimacy made public and a ‘false’ vision over the body.

JAP STYLE...

For Rei Kawakubo, aka Comme des Garçons, fashion is a body that has numerous bio-dynamic functions. Since 1981, each new collection has presented a vision which reshuffles the world in order to recompose it with distortions that disorient. The brand’s style springs from an attitude which is both curious and changeable, a sort of organised transit through cultural stimuli. Issey Miyake confirms himself as the exemplary name in the research on wearable sculptures. His attributes include an extreme rigour, an experimental eclecticism in his use of line, openness to an extraordinary chromatic range and the invention of a number of ‘tricks’ which shape the garment as a 3-D work. His profile also includes the collaboration with the artists Yasumasa Morimura, Nobuyoshi Araki, Tim Hawkinson and Cai Guo-Qiang (1996-1998), which produced the incredible sculptures on a matter-like body of the ‘Pleats Please’ line. The garment is thus perfected in the figurative imagination of its creators, endowing their relationship with the healthy synergy of an exchange of autonomous languages.

ENRICA BORGHI continues to demonstrate a remarkable creative sense with multiform and ‘mutoidal’ clothing. Her works remain based on the recycling of poor materials: pieces of tetrapak, paper and other fragments which compose volumetric patterns with unsuspected chromatic harmonies. For this artist, fashion is a mental mechanism of clothes, jewellery and accessories, a system for the analysis of luxury with its moral limits, beauty with its ambiguous power and context as an added value for a sculpture. Even the catalogue-artefact simulates a real art journal, with articles, advertising and a cover in the scintillating style of ‘Vogue’.

When reviewing younger artists, one still feels the vital energy of Franco Moschino and of that world where inventions combined fashion and the visual arts in an unsurpassed way. Together with Andy Warhol, Moschino remains the greatest communicator of the relations that exist among clothing, the social community and mass communications. After Elio Fiorucci’s amazing revolutions in the ‘80’s, he realised that every new trend would come from the street and from the new generations, and that logos and brands would come to dominate the culture of media fetishism. The symbols (heart, smiley face, question mark, peace symbol), modified words (Moschifo) and phrases of the popular imagination (De gustibus non est disputandum) maintain their effectiveness, leaping from the pages of newspapers and magazines and entering into clothing, imprinting themselves upon jackets, sweaters and t-shirts. Moschino used fashion in an artistic project with an industrial distribution. He became a neodadaist who ‘robbed’ in the street in order to sublimate the complexity of communicative codes. Takashi Murakami is the best proof that a great artist can interact with fashion in an integral and regenerative way. For Louis Vuitton he created a collection of handbags in which the ‘monogram’ finds its finest graphic re-invention. For the knit-wear of Lucien Pellat-Finet, leader of outrageously ‘pop’ cashmere, the Japanese artist created mushrooms and other post-manga icons for printing on sweaters.

Dolls that become fetishes, fetishes that become sculptures, sculptures that become inhabitable forms: ANNA PONTEL’s Barbie dolls become larger in space, disappearing as recognisable bodies to remain as coloured, abstract, almost robotic entities. Hence, clothing as the maniacal projection of fetishism, a sculptural object which acts upon the inventive malleability of large-format volumes.

DANIELE BUETTI incises the logos of international brands on the female body, invading the skin with tattoos that exalt the obsession, the material fetishism for the media tag. Her women synthesise the excess of contemporary cults with grace and potency, and certify the mental abstraction behind the tangible logos.

For LUISA RAFFAELLI, it is the body which must narrate itself as matter that can be shaped and formed. The sensual woman reduces the world to scenic essentiality, creating emotional suspensions that disturb and unsettle. Garments and shoes are what develop erotic contrasts and tensions, reminding us how art can purge fashion of its high-society tones and make it psychologically complex.

Exchanges take place everywhere and involve design itself in advanced fashions. While working for the French catalogue ‘Good Goods’, Philippe Starck created t-shirts with phrases such as ‘God is Dangerous’ and ‘Le Civisme est D’Avant Garde’. These denote a communicative impact and were included in a catalogue with intelligent products for ‘non-banal’ consumers. In other collaborations, Starck also created a man’s jacket of impermeable fabric, while with Wolford he conceived of a stocking with various uses. Maurizio Vetrugno traverses languages with styles that enter into a pre-determined context and stimulate it, moving within the nervous and muscular apparatus of that system. For Vetrugno, fashion is a form of mental adrenaline which reverses the concept of the fetish. His linguistic rainbow stretches from sculpture to readymades, installations to photography, writing to painting, from graphics to a diary-like sense of his own being. In a period when too many artists use fashion without any conceptual coherence, Vetrugno demonstrates that clothing can re-appropriate ‘plots’ which are amusing, useful and profound. Iggy Pop’s text over a piece by Martin Margiela (adhesive tape and packing PVC, i.e., clothes packaging which itself becomes clothing) tells us much about an exemplary sensibility. The emphatic recovery of certain shoes, which touches upon a perfectly appropriate Duchampism, adds the quality of the sign of the times. And then there are the projects involving stylists directly: a fashion show for Anna Molinari remains a splendid event thanks to its poetry, form and content, while the campaign (created with Edo Bertoglio and Franca Soncini) for Gentryportofino, with knitwear in the houses of famous people who remain unseen (Gilbert & George, Mary Quant, Richard Rogers, Susannah York) proposes a high-quality artistic advertising concept.

A superb transversal creativity also comes from Anvers or, more specifically, from the fashion course of the Royal Academy, the same talent-factory which produced Martin Margiela, Dries Van Noten, Anne Demeulemeester, Walter Van Beirendonck, Dirk Bikkembergs, Raf Simons, Angelo Figus, Bernhard Willhelm All of whom, with their readily identifiable styles, represent international fashion at its most inventive, but also perfectly calibrated in all the right places, excessive only when excess becomes necessary, and conceptual without becoming ridiculous by taking itself too seriously. Their shops, advertising campaigns, labels and styles down to the most minor details demonstrate that for these creative personalities (and, in particular, for Margiela, Van Beirendonck and Simons) fashion and thought go hand in hand.

For CLARA LONGOBARDO, clothes are created with the most uncommon materials: mussel shells, peach pits, mosquito netting, leaves of polystyrene, jute, straw these are just some of the materials with which she has invented new forms of elegance, sumptuous details and styles which rehabilitate living nature on the plasmatic model of the body.

SANDRA TOMBOLONI, instead, has added play-clay to the anomalous materials used in reconstructing portions of reality.

SANDY SKOGLUND has made materials into a complex installationary motor. In fact, her photographic works originate with sculptural displays where each element belongs to meticulously hand-made objects. Skoglund creates alienating, surreal places without digital manipulation. Everything is real, fragile, tangible: demonstrating once again that art is still the most incredible and cathartic of corporeal motors. In her works, fashion does not appear explicitly, and yet we perceive the sensuality of the body, dressing as mental space and interactions as a privileged place for obsessive reflection which are ever more extreme and internal.

CONCEPT IN THE CONCEPT

Bless is the brand created in 1997 by the German Ines Kaag and the Austrian Désirée Heiss. Together they are designing clothes which identify the interface between the body and the external environment. Their nylon door-covers create nomad closets. The various types of ‘Chairwear’ cover any kind of chair, personalising it. Sacks transform themselves into trousers, handbags into belts, multi-brand patchwork into shoes, ear-covers into wallets. Some accessories signal the body’s fragile zones. And there is even ‘Customizable Footwear’, or shoes that can be assembled with a kit that exalts interpretative freedom. Final Home frames the most radical wing of a Japanese design beyond pure dressing. The living units by Kosuke Tsumura are inspired by the problem of the urban homeless. Some items, which appear as a cross between a sporting adventure and post-atomic salvation, include multiple functions. A raincoat is composed of 44 compartments for different uses: to protect oneself from the cold by filling the pockets with newspapers, for biological support by loading the structure with food and medicine, and for sleeping by making the object into a refuge for the metropolitan nomad. T-shirts are sold as a confection sealed with post-its. Even the logos, phrases and chromatic inserts go beyond the purely aesthetic solution, becoming the legible brand of an individual identification. Lucy Orta creates wearable sculptural architecture. Her ‘Refuge Wear’ converts the technical garment into a system for nomadic habitation. Made with synthetic fabrics and an armature in carbon fibres, they are assembled and dismantled with velcro, pockets and zippers. Created for urban emergencies of various kinds, they are ethically perfect objects, capable of combining the best constructive technology within the functional reduction of space.

Other things are happening, every day brings something new, and there is also the past from which to salvage useful and functional elements. But we can conclude our own peregrinations here: blobimagerie could move on to other destinations, but prefers to say ‘halt’, in analysing the exchanges arising out of this exhibition in Trieste. Enjoy the show, as one would say at the cinema. And enjoy the invasions, as we should say in the midst of fabrics, photos, lapels, glossy pages, catalogues, anomalous materials, journals, hems, internet, publicity, cibachrome, stitching...