Fashioning self and the environment goes to wild fiber extremes.

It has been a wild and woolly spring for me. Despite the endless rain in NYC, there has fortunately been non-stop sunshine in the form of inspiring collaborations with fiber artist and designer friends. This past Earth Day I organized an art/fashion open house called, ‘Fashioning Self and the Environment’ at the Textile Arts Center in Brooklyn, New York. Earlier this week, I also had the opportunity to discuss these ideas in a talk for the Fashion Institute of Technology’s Face and Places in Fashion lecture series. Both occasions brought together the design work and images of some of my favorite fiber artists and accessories designers. Here is a sampling of what the wilder side of fashioning self and the environment looks like.

CECA GEORGIEVA

Handcrafted necklace from gathered native lichen, dried pods, and recycled wire

I was excited that there was such a fantastic response at both of my events to the work of Bulgarian textile artist, Ceca Georgieva. As an artist who has been using green materials and textiles in her sculpture and environmental installation work for decades, Ceca’s more recent experiments with vegetation in  jewelry has received impressive global coverage on reputable art, fashion, and design sites.

Inspirational images from Ceca Georgieva’s blog

A resident of Bulgaria’s capital city of Sofia, Ceca maintains a rustic art studio at the base of Mount Vitosha, and it is here that she spends her days en plein air crafting with natural materials, pruning trees in the family orchard, and gardening galore. For the event at the Textile Arts Center in April, I created a textile installation of Ceca’s new fiber cord cuffs in conjunction with my recycled fiber forms and examples of traditional Bulgarian embroidery from my personal collection. It was our intention to show how traditional fiber and exquisite handwork techniques can be adapted for contemporary styling and chic fashion accessorizing.

Recycled cotton cord cuff embroidered with cotton thread / wood toggle

Ceca’s new handmade cotton cuffs are recycled from military parachute cord and reference the traditional detailing of Bulgarian costuming. She has also been experimenting with pods and lichen for one-of-a-kind collars and necklaces that serve as reminders of sylvan outings and hikes in the mountains.

WIETEKE OPMEER

Vegetation and seeds suggest ethereal and dreamy possibilities for the fashioning of harvested natural materials in the designs of Wieteke Opmeer. I first learned about this celebrated Dutch product designer from sustainable design trend forecaster, Annouk Post at Hiphonest. As described on Annouk’s must-follow blog, “Her work has more to do with positive thinking than with ethics. People like Wieteke play with our conscience. And if you do that, as she does, with so much passion, feeling for form and love of life, it gives you the happy feeling that everything will be okay.” Wieteke’s accessories are temporary in nature and delicately crafted out of wildflower seeds that are meant to slowly dissolve over time or disperse with movement or the wind.

The artist/designer recently exhibited in the exhibition, “The Future That Never Was Alter Nature,” at the Museum of Hasselt in Belgium.

LITEN BLOMMA by Jessica Lennertz

Handcrafted resin rye flower bangle by Liten Blomma

The preservation of natural materials is a primary focal point in the jewelry designs of Jessica Lennertz at Liten Blomma. Her  handmade resin bangles are a new favorite of mine. I asked the designer a bit about her process and her dedication to work with “liten blomma” or “tiny flowers” in Swedish, and the small steps that she has taken to green her latest collection.

“The flowers that I feature in the resin are grown in the US on organic farms and are dried naturally. I also dry my own flowers from local gardens. I have been using rye, flax, lavender, larkspur, pansies, and English daisies, to name a few. I am in the process of looking for an eco friendly resin; it is a challenge to find.

I use metal filigree beads and recycled glass pieces made by the Ashanti and Krobo Tribe of Ghana. Many of my spherical paper beads are from OutreachUganda.org, which supports women bead makers from several parts of Uganda. I also use pebbles, moss, mulberry paper, raw gems (some I mined myself in North Carolina), and as well as vintage treasures collected from around the world.

I am always looking for more ways to be green.” – Jessica Lennertz of Liten Blomma

I learned of Liten Blomma’s floral-inspired wearables via the Afia collection‘s recent photo shoot for their Summer 2011 collection.

VILTE  by Vilte Kazlauskaite

On the next frontier of wild fibers and fashioning self, Vilte Kazlauskaite is a total art fashion pioneer in applying the ancient and eco-friendly crafting technique of Nuno felting to couture collaborations for fashion week collections and the runway. Vilte’s handmade felted pieces combine raw wool and natural fabrics to create a primordial and highly feminine expression of sending fleecy tendrils deep into the soil.

Vilte’s February 2011 collaboration with designer Josephus Thimester for his AW2011 collection during Paris Fashion Week  put a new spin on wilder interpretations of couture and the possibilities for sustainably farmed wool for the latest new wave of felting chic.

As I shared with the FIT community at my talk this past Monday, I feel that it is important to highlight the innovative work of fiber and textile artists when discussing the history and future of sustainable fashion, as many of these individuals have been asking important questions about self in relation to the environment before terms like eco-art, eco-fashion, or green fashion came into vogue. Fiber and textile artists also create a direct life line to the soil, as the materials that they use often mirror the methods and intense labor that goes into the cultivation, farming, harvesting, and processing of our textiles and garments. Crafting the future is in our hands and embracing style begins with a celebration of self as the best model and script for positive change. Time to roll up our sleeves and dig in.

image(s): Style.com, all others courtesy of the designers and their respective blogs

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Why polarized opposites in fashion might be just the thing we desire.

The recently opened Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute is a darkly romantic celebration of an increasingly taxidermied world and the subversive tailoring of our lives, showcased in a manner that is unsettling but wondrous to behold. How do we process the current excitement circulating around Savage Beauty’s display of sadomasochistically-corseted mannequins, Swarovski feathered creations, or sculpted shoes in the shape of mutated spines or iridescent armadillos? Does the brilliance of this deceased designer and the assembling of close to one hundred of his looks, and seventy of his accessories illustrate a vast wilderness mired in outlandish fantasy, or do we dare to look at and maybe even adopt them as personal costume? “Savage Beauty” lures us into this paradoxical lair, and pillages our politically correct assumptions about what might be “sustainable,” and essentially rule breaking in contemporary fashion.

‘Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty’ on view in the Met’s Cantor Galleries

Whether or not you are an ardent fan of the late Alexander McQueen’s designs is really not the issue up for debate, as this exhibition is such a marvel of art, fashion, and design innovation that it is a mind-blowing success simply as a museum installation feat. Like the designer’s runway shows or multi-media presentations, the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute team really went the distance to create a visual feast of romanticism on overdrive, and in such a short period after McQueen’s death. The extremes of modern nature and the depths of the designer’s savage styling techniques are brought to life using digital technology, a fashion hologram, dramatically lit mannequins, and dioramas of the imagination that seem otherworldly but anchored in tactile materials.

Ivory silk “Oyster” Dress from Irere, Spring/Summer 2003

Andrew Bolton,  the curator of the exhibit, describes in a video transcript how “Savage Beauty very much epitomizes the contrasting opposites in McQueen’s work. As you enter the exhibition, you’re faced with two mannequins—the two mannequins that I think represent many of the themes and ideas that McQueen revisited throughout his career: polarized opposites, whether it’s to do with life or death, lightness or darkness, predator/prey, man/machine.” Continuing with this theme of polarity, the five collections on view explore McQueen’s engagement with the romantic sublime and the dialectics of beauty and horror: Dante (autumn/winter 1996-97), Number 13 (spring/summer 1999), Voss (spring/summer 2001), Irere (spring/summer 2003), and Plato’s Atlantis (spring/summer 2010).

“Jellyfish” Ensemble, Plato’s Atlantis, Spring/Summer 2010

The poetic references and the extreme craft involved are all about the dream that this immensely talented designer embarked upon, and in this case, ventures far beyond the concerns of conventional season-to-season output and retail concerns. The untimely death of McQueen in February 2010 threw into question the unbearable pressures of the fashion industry and the houses that set unrealistic delivery expectations and bottom line goals. It is no wonder that McQueen set out to push our buttons, challenge us like never before, and drape us in the very shrouds of life and death that we rotate through as consumers.

I am not going to pluck apart this exhibit by highlighting certain pieces or favorites, as this would be like dismembering a multi-headed organism that is so much more than the sum of its parts. We all know what the showman McQueen artfully and cleverly served up upon graduation from Central Saint Martins in London and his time at Givenchy. He shook the fashion world then, and he continues to now, even with Sarah Burton at the helm.

Widows of Culloden, Autumn/Winter 2006–2007

What I took away from my initial visit to “Savage Beauty” was just how much we need to address those fashion conventions that genuinely stifle our creativity and ideas about self in relation to the environment. Not everyone will relate to McQueen’s tartan-infused Highlander designs or condone the use of exotic (animal) references in gowns that mimic wild creatures or repressed beings contorted into exaggerated silhouettes. What one can marvel at though, is just how apt the “polarized opposites” are for the dialogue that we need to have with our psyches as “Rulers, keepers, or stewards” of  the natural world.

Spray-painted cotton muslin, No. 13, Spring/Summer 1999

It is not very sustainable to live in a tidy state that revolves around only one part of the equation. We need to look the other half in the face and try it on, feel its threads, and reweave “it” into something of an unprecedented, rule-breaking design. Savage beauty is not safe; it might not even be beautiful as we have come to tame it. But we are definitely at a crossroad where sustainability and fashion should not be safe either, to the degree that we isolate ourselves from unprecedented change and repeatedly deny that the grotesque is actually part of true desire and an even deeper connection with the natural realm.

Images: Metropolitan Museum of Art blog (photographed by Sølve Sundsbø)

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