PATTERN, COLOUR AND LIFE A new exhibition explores the family and ideas behind the Missoni fashion house
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Previous page: Tancredi, Untitled (Greenhouses), mixed media on masonite, cm 128 x 158, 1953 Right: Gino Severini, Ballerina, oil on canvas, cm 81 x 59, 1957 ca
“When Michelle Obama wore a Missoni knit dress to the Milan Expo last summer, the photo went round the world because it was the first time the President’s wife had worn something from the company,” Celia Joicey, Director of London’s Fashion and Textile Museum tells me. In May, the Fashion and Textile Museum is staging the first exhibition dedicated to Italian fashion label Missoni, famous for their vivid kaleidoscopic stripes and zigzags. The show is not just a catwalk extravaganza, however; it will also explore the influence of modern art on the fashion and textile designs of Ottavio and Rosita Missoni, the husband and wife team who founded the family-owned house over 60 years ago.
The exhibition includes over 40 paintings by artists, including Gino Severini, Lucio Fontana and Sonia Delaunay, as well as a selection of looks from the Italian fashion house from 1958 to the present day: all alongside previously unseen textile studies and paintings by Ottavio Missoni. Arguably Missoni fabric designs over the years reflect the history of 20th century European art, from the lyrical abstraction of Kandinsky and Klee, via the precise, geometric designs of the Bauhaus to the birth of the Italian Futurist movement.“A lot of people have talked about how the classic zigzag-y geometry of the Missoni knitwear relates to that Italian movement of Futurism,” says Joicey, “and the very celebratory use of colour.”
Later the couple collected art by their contemporaries. “When my parents started working, they became part of the art world of the 1960s and 70s,” says Luca Missoni, artistic director of the Missoni archive. “Today seeing their designs compared with the art 4
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vicarage (which is in essence a company home, whose inhabitants will change with each incumbent vicar) in a better condition than she found it, Kristin has reimagined every corner into something utterly photo-worthy. Ultimately she has nurtured the building to work not only for her, her family and her husband’s parish, but her vocation as well. Professionally her home functions as both an occasional shoot location and a continuous source of inspiration. From her top floor studio Kristin thinks, sketches and paints dream-like coloured backdrops which later go on to function as props in her home and photographs.
Whilst many would shudder at the thought of two people living and working from the same space, Kristin has managed to make an environment that not only caters to Selvedge and Great British Bake-Off photo shoots, but weekly Parish Council meetings. Oh, hang on a minute – incredible cakes and community meetings – maybe these two worlds aren’t that far away after all. Grace Warde-Aldam Kristin is running photography and styling workshops.Visit www.kristinperers.com
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Vogue 100: A Century of Style 11 February – 22 May 2016 National Portrait Gallery, St Martin’s Place, London, WC2H 0HE www.npg.org.uk
Vogue 100: A Century of Style at the National Portrait Gallery looks at photography in the British edition of Vogue magazine, decade by decade from its inception in 1916. The exhibition (tickets £17, when did these things get so expensive?) splits at its beginning: the sexy, current stuff is on the right, the more historical, museum-y stuff on the left. It’s almost like two separate exhibitions: the more recent imagery is given a more ‘art exhibition’ hang, the prints bigger and brighter, in white rooms. The older material is in darker room sets and is treated quite differently visually. Consequently it feels a little under-done compared to the newer material.
The exhibition begins with a centerpiece or introduction in the form of a series of film clips. Running large around three walls is looped footage from photographers like Tim Walker, Tyrone Lebon and Bruce Weber, who was one of the first fashion photographers to move over to film. Fashion films are de rigueur these days. Short sartorial epistles, with models doing something enigmatic – or at least looking enigmatic. This is fashion for the internet, where static imagery is a last thought, rather than a first. The exhibition is clear in the sea change that came in 1996 with the launch of Vogue.co.uk. Although Vogue was a little late in embracing digital, they have since recognized its power and reach.
The first Vogue photographic cover went out in July
1932 but the exhibition reaches back to 1916, when photography was more about event reportage than fashion shoots. Illustration was the Vogue thing then, and there are some great sketches included in here from Eric and Benito, artists at the top of their game in the 1920s and 1930s. Illustration continued to feature large in Vogue up to the mid century and beyond. But increasingly photography became the creative medium of choice, and working with the best fashion photographers the Vogue remit.
We go through the war and images by war photographer Lee Miller to the intriguing portraiture of Irving Penn and John Deakin in the 1950s. From the classic fashion images of Norman Parkinson, to the sharp tight black and white David Baileys in the 1960s. Past Guy Bourdin and Helmut Newton in the 1970s to the rise of the fashion stars in the 1990s – the supermodels and the super designers, Naomi, Cindy, Galliano and McQueen. This is a big exhibition, with nearly 300 photographs. At which point one becomes grateful for the mercifully short labels. Still, this is fascinating material from the top of the fashion publishing pile. Vogue has prided itself on being the crème de la crème since it began. Over the decades different editors brought with them different photographers. The notoriously territorial fashion world means editors and their photographers are more closely joined at the hip than might at first appear.
Seeing original prints out of context of the magazine is one of the most interesting elements of this exhibition. And then the cases of Vogue magazines, one from each year, show the photography back in its original context of the printed page.The
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curator of the exhibition is Robin Muir, who works himself as a contributing editor at Vogue. But he is also an experienced curator of provenance and it shows here.This exhibition is about fashion imagery but about the imagery more than the fashion. The photographs on show haven’t been selected for the frocks in the pictures, so much as the people in the pictures. Muir’s choices sit well in an exhibition in the home of portraiture – even if Kate Moss still seems to be everywhere you turn.
Be warned though; the people-watching at the National Portrait Gallery somewhat distracts one from the photographs themselves. There were some very smartly dressed people there when I visited. There is something innately charming when people dress up to visit a fashion exhibition, almost as if they feel the material itself deserves a sartorial effort.
There is, not surprisingly, a ‘no photographs’ rule in the exhibition. But the good Instagrammer will not be denied and people were sneaking selfies each time the guards turned their back. But the NPG can hardly complain as in amongst the film clips at the beginning of the exhibition there is a snippet from Brooklyn Beckham's guide to Instagram. Social media is arguably changing the way we view fashion and the internet is certainly challenging the seasonal fashion shows and collections around which magazines like Vogue have planned themselves for years. The ‘blink and you miss it’ snap is all. How interesting, with that in mind, it would be to see the Vogue 200 exhibition in 100 years time. Jane Audas Anne Gunning in Jaipur by Norman Parkinson Kirsi Pyrhönen by Tim Walker for Vogue 2011
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TSUNAMI ZAIKU°
Mariko Kusumoto's interpritation of an ancient Japanese craft
It takes supreme confidence for an artist to drop a highly successful line of work and switch both medium and aesthetic approach, but that's exactly what Mariko Kusumoto has done. “I had been working in metal for 18 years,” says Kusumoto, whose collages of carved, etched, lithographed, and painted metal imagery had captured the attention of collectors. “The last piece I made was very complicated and after over a year working on it, I was ready for a change – something completely opposite.”
That was 2013, and that ‘something’ was fabric. Her fresh approach to art in fibre has exploded as a dazzling world of new shapes and forms. While visiting her native Japan from her home near Boston in the U.S.A., she purchased an instruction book on the tsumami zaiku technique of folding and pinching fabric to create flowers, a centuries-old craft that is enjoying a revival. Although the traditional technique has only two folds, Kusumoto found that she could manipulate the folds, combine single flowers into complex shapes, and hand-dye the silk fabric in her microwave to put her own creative stamp on the flowers. The experience was enough to excite her about the possibilities of working with fabric. Within a few months, she had “moved on to polyester” because fabric made from that fibre was available in many colours and she could manipulate it to hold pleats and forms. “It's magic!” she says of the heat-setting technique she had first encountered in an Issey Miyake scarf with expandable pleats. Although Kusumoto was interested in more complicated forms than a simple pleat, she reasoned that heat-treated polyester should hold whatever shape it was forced into.
“With the internet, you can learn anything,” she says, so she set about teaching herself how to manipulate the fabric with heat. She relished the idea of working with new material and felt free to find out what does and does not work. After experimenting with a toaster oven, she now uses a digital oven set at 204°C or 400°F for better temperature control. “The shape is permanent,” she says, “even if you step on it.”
Kusumoto gravitates to unusual fabrics. Some shimmer under the right illumination, refracting a shifting play of colours like anodized titanium. Many are gossamer light. “I like things that seem fragile, soft, and light as air,” she says. She is also taken with the translucency of some polyester fabrics because she can exploit the semi-transparency to place one object within another, much as her signature metal collages frequently hide one surprise after another behind sliding panels or hinged doors. “With translucent fabric you see every layer at once,” she says. “That is something I could not do in metal.” Most of the fabric forms that Kusumoto makes are small, ranging from the size of a berry to a large dahlia bloom. Some are beautiful objects on their own – a translucent bird with coloured fabric eggs inside, globe-like capsules containing small toys. Sometimes she will mount a single small object on a ring as if it were a gemstone, or place a somewhat larger object on a pin back to make a brooch.
Now three years into the process, Kusumoto still delights in new discoveries. “There comes this breathtaking moment when you're creating that you see how a beautiful form can be so much more powerful when multiplied,” she says.The ‘Blue Bubbles’
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necklace, for example, combines more than 100 fabric ‘beads’
most with smaller objects nested inside. But Kusumoto also makes good use of varied shapes and sizes to compose a whole world on a necklace or large brooch. These compositions often evoke the natural world – a tropical reef with waving sea cucumbers, branching coral, and pulsing anemones, for example. Kusumoto admits to being inspired by nature, but insists that pieces that resemble plant forms, sea life, or even fungi and bacteria under a microscope are essentially happy accidents. Nature tends to be symmetrical, and so do forms that Kusumoto makes.
She stretches polyester cloth over a wooden or metal object that she has found or carves.“I can use anything that can stand 400° without melting or cracking,” she explains, pointing to a bronze bird and a wooden top. The immediacy of the medium stimulates her creativity. “Fabric is so much faster than metal,” she says. While she is working on one piece, she often gets ideas for a different one and will turn to it immediately. “I do draw, but sometimes it's just easier to make what I'm imagining. I end up with so many pieces!” She looks forward to expanding the scale of her work in fabric, which has been limited so far to components not much larger than her hand. She would like to make larger elements – which would require a bigger oven – as well as more complex compositions that incorporate many individual pieces.
“Doing this takes me to a totally different world,” Kusumoto says. “I don't know where I am going, I just go by instinct, really, and I feel like I'm playing all day long.” Patricia Harris & David Lyon
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COHABIT stunning interiors beautifully photographed 76 MAKING A SCENE A city vicarage is a backdrop to life and work By Grace Warde-Aldam
EVENTS dates for your diary BEHIND THE CUPBOARD DOOR 18 June 10-12.30pm or 2-4.30pm Look inside the archives of The Royal School of Needlework, with our host Dr Susan Kay-Williams INDIGO BLUES in Colaboration with London Craft week, at Chelsea Physic Garden, London 5 May 104.30pm with Jenny Balfour Paul, Jane Callender and Yves Venot
WIN gifts and offers for our readers 83 PRIZES THIS ISSUE A chance to win a year’s subscription to Not-Another-Bill, worth £229 www.notanotherbill.com A copy of Fairy Tale Fashion by Coleen Hill and published by Yale University Press, the book accompanies an exhibition currenctly at the Fashion Institute of Technology, New York, worth $50 www.fitnyc.com A denim apron from The Uniform Studio, worth £38 www.theunifromstudio.com
INFORM the latest news, reviews and exhibition listings
03 BIAS /CONTRIBUTORS A letter from the founder, Polly Leonard and comments from our contributors 07 NEWS Crafted Crockery, Textiles at the Tate, Do-Ho Su in Cincinnati, Kaarina Kaikkonen in Finland, The Jameel Prize at the V&A 09 HOUSE OF CLOTH Broderie Anglaise 80 SUBSCRIPTION OFFERS This issue every three year subscriber will recieve a Liberty print cosmetic bag and mirror by
Alice Caroline 82 BACK ISSUES Complete your collection while you still can! Many issues are now sold out or have limited stock. All issues available for digital download. 84 READ The House of Worth by Amy de la Haye and Valerie D Mendes, reviewed by Amy de la Haye, Kimono Meisen: The Karun Thaker Collection, reviewed by Tim Parry-Williams 86 VIEW Fairy Tale Fashion at The Museum at FIT, New York,
US, reviewed by Joanne Dolan Ingersoll, John Piper: The Fabric of Modernism, Pallant House, Chichester, UK reviewed by Amy de la Haye, Vogue 100: A century of Style at the National Portrait Gallery, London, reviewed by Jane Audas, Asafo Flags from Ghana at The Mingei International Museum, San Diego, US, reviewed by Kraig Cavanaugh 95 COMING NEXT The Southern Issue: Cool textiles for when it gets hot.
SELVEDGE ('selnid3 ) n. 1. finished differently 2. the non-fraying edge of a length of woven fabric. [: from SELF + EDGE]
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