ecopolis

Madam Butterfly – Malcolm Maclaren 1984

Photo : REUTERS/Jumana El Heloueh

A model applauds as she displays an outfit by emerging Saudi designer Sulafa Filfilan (L) as part of her Spring-Summer 2008 collection during Dubai International Fashion Week (DIFW) Dubai, United Arab Emirates, October 24, 2007.

The leading fashion trade event held bi-annually under the patronage of the Dubai Chamber of Commerce & Industry, has announced the signing of their partnership with The Dubai Mall as Principal Partner. This partnership grants The Dubai Mall exclusivity over the next three DIFW events spanning 2007 and 2008, and will further position The Dubai Mall as a global fashion destination. The Dubai Mall, one of the world’s largest shopping and entertainment destinations and the flagship project of Emaar Malls Group, is located in the heart of the prestigious Downtown Burj Dubai.

The Dubai Mall, to open late 2008, will have over 1,200 speciality stores spread over 3.77 million square feet of gross lettable area. It is being billed as a shopping, lifestyle and entertainment destination and features a fashion precinct dedicated to haute couture by showcasing the world’s most luxurious brands.

(We’re off on the) Road to Morocco, performed by Bing Crosby and Bob Hope. Road to Morocco is a 1942 comedy film which tells the story of two fast-talking guys who find themselves tossed up on a desert shore and sold into slavery to a beautiful princess. It is the third of the “Road to…” movies and stars Bing Crosby, Bob Hope, Dorothy Lamour, Anthony Quinn and Dona Drake.

The movie was written by Frank Butler and Don Hartman and directed by David Butler for Paramount Pictures.

It received Academy Award nomimations for Best Sound, Recording and Best Writing, Original Screenplay. The film has been deemed “culturally significant” by the United States Library of Congress and was selected for preservation in the National Film Registry.

What is an arcade? In its classic sense, the term denotes a pedestrian passage or gallery. Benjamin quotes a passage from the Illustrated Guide to Paris of 1852:

“These arcades, a recent invention of industrial luxury, are glass-roofed, marble-panelled corridors extending through whole blocks of buildings, whose owners have joined together for such enterprises. Lining both sides of the corridors, which get their light from above, are the most elegant shops, so that the arcade is a city, a world in miniature, in which customers will find everything they need”. (Arcades Project, 31)

The arcades are, certainly, a “primordial landscape of consumption”. Their shop-windows with agglomerations of discrete objects seductively displayed, also represented the apotheosis of the commodity as fetish, temples built for the apotheosis of the commodity, yet at the same time offered the passer-by images of a dream-world beyond the confines of the existing society: the “desire for pleasure” becomes a “form of resistance”. And social vision.

To celebrate the opening of new Hermès Boutique within Selfridges‘ new Wonder Room at Oxford Street, artist Beth Derbyshire created an object of wonder.

The installation consists in two large magic lanterns, installed into the Hermès‘ window until the end of October. These lanterns, one moving clock-wise and the other anti-clock-wise contain hidden message, emitted through light projections :

The following are the quotations as they appear clockwise:
- TO WONDER IS TO BEGIN TO UNDERSTAND (José Ortega y Gasset)
- MAN HAS TO AWAKEN TO WONDER (Ludwig Wittgenstein)

and anti-clock-wise:
- TO UNDERSTAND IS TO BEGIN TO WONDER
- TO WONDER MAN HAS TO AWAKEN

As the lanterns revolve like a Thaumatrope , the sentences keep running back again, and reappearing with a distinct grammatical break, while the persistence of vision and the broadcasted soundscape unfold a fluid space in time to discover further narrative interaction. New language-games, as we may say, come into existence.

Plato calls “wonder” (thaumazein) the origin of philosophy. Aristotle speaks of aporia at Metaphysics: He regards Aporia not only as the beginning of philosophical inquiry, but, as importantly, also as the method by which the inquiry proceeds.

Beth Derbyshire aporetic installation expands beyond the viewing or auditory space : It explores public/personal desire placing individual expression/messages in the urban/outside space of a World of passers-by. The vision becomes an impasse experience: A “Social Event”, that happens in between.

The Chicago retailer Gordon Selfridge opened his English store in 1909 and extended it westwards in the 1920s, doubling its size. The Americanised classical style denoted commercial confidence, permanence and grandeur. London had seen nothing like it before.

ALYCE SANTORO Sonic Fabricis durable and strikingly beautiful looking as well being audible. The fabric contains magnetic tape woven in the weaving process, when a tape head (the little thingy inside the a tape deck that touches the fabric) is ran over it, sounds are generated this is because the tape retains its magnetic quality through the weaving process. The Sonic Fabric was inspired by Tibetan prayer flags inscribed with wind-activated blessings and cassette tape used as tell-tails on sailing boats. Sonic Fabric has been sewn into handbags and used in silkscreen flags that generate ambient sounds and other music.

Prayer flags are colorful panels or rectangular cloths often found strung along mountain ridges and peaks in the Himalayas to bless the surrounding countryside. Unknown in other branches of Buddhism, prayer flags are believed to have originated with Bön, which predated Buddhism in Tibet. Traditionally they are woodblock-printed with texts and images. By hanging flags in high places the “Wind Horse” will carry the blessings depicted on the flags to all beings. As wind passes over the surface of the flags which are sensitive to the slightest movement of the wind, the air is purified and sanctified by the Mantras.

Festival In Rome

Vivienne Isabel Swire born in Glossopdale, Derbyshire, on 8 April 1941, always enjoyed cutting a dash. As a teenager in the 1950s, she customised her school uniform to emulate the fashionable pencil skirt and made many of her own clothes, including a long, fitted ‘New Look’ dress made of sleeveless shifts, with a single seam and darts, from exactly one yard of fabric. Ecology and independence remain central to Westwood’s character. She has lived in south London for many years, cycles everywhere.

Using culture as a way of making trouble

Vivienne Westwood met Malcolm McLaren in 1965, and their son Joseph Ferdinand Corré was born in 1966. Their working relationship, which lasted from 1970 until 1983, launched Punk. Vivienne recalled : I felt there were so many doors to open, and he had the key to all of them. Plus, he had a political attitude and I needed to align myself.

McLaren was infact obsessed with fashion and music and saw them as inseparable parts of a Rock ‘n’ Roll outlaw spirit. Rejecting the dominant hippie look, in 1971, McLaren opened a shop called Let It Rock, and shifted to another fashion minority.

McLaren renamed it Sex and he scrawled above the door ‘Craft must have clothes but Truth loves to go naked’. The interior was sprayed with pornographic graffiti, hung with rubber curtains and stocked with sex and fetish wear.

Sex was intimidating and it attracted an extraordinary clientele, with voyeurs and prostitutes mixing with proto-Punk King’s Road shoppers. Jordan, the shop assistant, wore rubber clothes, a beehive hairstyle and theatrical make-up.

The Punkature Era

Soon Westwood’s horizons opened and expanded. As McLaren put it: We want to get out of this island mentality, and relate ourselves to those taboos and magical things we believe we have lost.They designed new collections based on ethnic and primitive looks culled from National Geographic magazine while their second collection Savage (S/S 1982) combined Native American patterns with leather frock coats. Third came Nostalgia of Mud (A/W 1982), with its huge tattered skirts and sheepskin jackets in muddy colours. In March 1982, McLaren and Westwood opened a second shop. It was called Nostalgia of Mud . The interior was styled like an archaeological dig. McLaren and Westwood began to conjure up darker spirits and found a magical, esoteric sign language in the work of the New York graffiti artist Keith Haring.

Punkature (S/S 1983) still had a raw feeling and an emphasis on pre-washed and over-printed natural fabrics. It played on the words ‘punk’ and ‘couture’, and carried images from Ridley Scott’s film Blade Runner.

The Witches collection was the final collaboration between McLaren and Westwood:

By 1984 Westwood had moved to Italy with her new business partner, Carlo d’Amario. The Hypnos collection featured sleek garments made out of synthetic sports fabric in fluorescent pinks and greens. They were fastened with rubber phallus buttons. This was followed by Clint Eastwood, a collection that hankered after the wide open spaces seen in Western films: It included garments smothered in Italian company logos and Day-Glo patches inspired by Tokyo’s neon signs.

The Harris Tweed collection celebrated Westwood’s love affair with traditional English clothing and also her growing obsession with royalty. It was named after the woollen fabric hand-woven in the Western Isles of Scotland. The word clann in Gaelic means children of the family. A Clan Tartan is the regular sett (pattern) of the clan or family. The identification of clans with tartan patterns became a dogma of great success: all the recognised clans had their tartans, be they Highland or Lowland. Using a mix of different tartans, Westwood ensembles exploits the rich depth, colour and diversity of the traditional checked pattern. Let’s camouflage.

Many of the garments – the twinsets made by the long-established firm of Smedley, the ‘Stature of Liberty’ corsets, the tailored ‘Savile’ jackets – became Westwood classics and her most recognisable trademarks. Romantic and historically accurate, the corsets are also surprisingly practical. Stretch fabrics allow ease of movement, and removable sleeves convert a daytime garment to evening wear. Once a symbol of constraint, corsets are now an expression of female sexuality and empowerment.

Frans Hals corset, 1992-3, “Vivienne Westwood”, Victoria and Albert Museum

With Britain Must Go Pagan, Westwood combined traditional British themes with classical and pagan elements. Classical drapery was paired with tweed, Smedley underwear was overprinted with pornographic images from ancient Greece. This strange mix reflected the inherent camouflage in her work, its respect for tradition and culture alongside a love of parody and sexual liberty. With the Mini-Crini collection she has devised a ‘mini-crini’ that combined the tutu with an abbreviated form of the Victorian crinoline. References to literature and high art pervaded Westwood’s work. She spent many hours in the Wallace Collection in London studying the 18th-century French art collected by Lord Hertford. In shows she began to use statuesque models dressed in sumptuous costumes and poised on 10-inch platform shoes, as if on a pedestal. The idea was that they had just stepped out of a portrait. Fashion is Camouflaging Environment.

Harlequin from Vivienne Westwood’s “Voyage to Cythera Autumn / Winter 1989-90″ collection “Vivienne Westwood”, Victoria and Albert Museum

VIVIENNE WESTWOOD – V&A Retrospective, Palazzo Reale, Milan.

Launched in the 2004 at the London Victoria & Albert Museum, the exhibition is the largest display the museum ever dedicated to a British designer. The Retrospective features designs selected from both the V&A’s collections and Vivienne Westwood’s personal archive.