(from left) Photography by Horst P. Horst; Photography by Toby McFarlan Pond for Prada, Spring 2004

A new exhibition being shown at the Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Musuem of Art in New York is both an interactive film and exhibited space that projects two leading fashion designers of their respective periods that of Elsa Schiaparelli and Miuccia Prada. It’s a discussion between Schiaparelli (played by Australian actress Judy Davis) and Miss Prada herself exploring feminine ideals with the compass of fashion, to fashion as art and mobile concepts that categorise what is deem beauty and ugly chic.

The exhibition showcase lead by the Curator in Charge Harold Koda and curator Andrew Bolton have digress from the film presentation to seven galleries of thematic clothing, creating a nexus between the two designer’s works. Encompassing ‘Ugly Chic’, ‘Hard Chic’, ‘Surrealisim’, for ‘Waist Up/Waist Down’, Miss Prada embellished her skirt enigmatically whilst Schiaparelli does so on the collars and work jacket’s placket on Diana Vreeland in April 1937.

In Ugly Chic, the concept is translated as reinterpreting military garb and uniforms of masculinity. Schiaparelli who had met and was encouraged by French fashion designer Paul Poiret in 1920 had pioneered surrealist graphic knitwear in 1927. In both the Classical Body and Exotic Body category, both women explore the contours and silhouettes of liberating their female wearers into dresses that conform yet drape around the body for which express both movement and freedom. It is interesting as Andrew Bolton explains the ‘Dionyism and Appolism’ dichotomy for which in the ‘Exposed: Photography and the Classical Nude’ held in 2011 at the University of Sydney’s Nicholson Musuem, portrayed classic Greek sculptures idolising the perfect human proportions. In corelation to this exhibition, the exertion of expressing sensuality through drapery was most apparent.

If Miccia Prada’s outcry that the exhibition, the film itself focused too intently on commonalities between herself and Schiaparelli, rather than the embrace of differentiation, she could agree that through the mode of fashion women became strong and designed ingeniously. The Italian masculine design tradition had encompassed the field of architecture in which Massimo Vignelli states, “They [Architects Castiglioni] were among the few to work in the entire field of design and of architecture and were already famous for having created radios, flatware, furniture.” Vignelli like Ettore Sottsass and Enzo Mari worked in rational and functionalist states unlike Schiaparelli and indeed Miuccia Prada who used an artistic and emotional methodology.

It was lucid for 2012, this year’s reincarnation of Australian Fashion Week being aligned with the major sponsorship of Mercedes-Benz for the world’s premiere fashion week events, that there was less of a prêt-a-porter pedigree. Individual designers who continued to demonstrate their strong talents were divorced from this season’s event. Both Jade Sarita Arnott of Arnsdorf and Bianca Spender were not in attendance due to their respective new births and focusing on their motherhood. The fashion industry gasped and near-collapsed at the hearing of two premiere designers that of Josh Goot and Dion Lee MIA with both intending to developing their collections silently and away from the media rapture.

With all too often that the projection of the Australian fashion industry be lacerated by iconographic terms of glamour, sexiness and femininity, Australian fashion can be caught out by the inaccurate usage of terms such as ‘craftsmanship’. Craftsmanship denotes a production process that utilises master skills honed by many years of being a stagiaire within an atelier or factory and those skills mastered to specialise in the ‘crafting’ of a material or fabrication. The innumerable number of designers showcasing this year with an essayistic profile questioned their level of formal coherence and communication of their ability to create.

Focusing on three designers who showed a continual development in their respective design ability, Magdalena Vevleska, Gary Bigeni and Christopher Esber produced collections that remained integral to their fashion vocabulary and enhanced their focused vision on taking their points of inspirations or references to a new scale.

Magdalena Velevska Spring 2012/13

There was a pleasurable experience when upon the handiwork of macramé and the silhouettes that Magdalena Velveska had envisaged last year were developed with a sense of originality. In a concise collection, manifestations of the blouse were incisioned with higher armholes (a rope shoulder) placing it with an assertive structure and formalised with the placement of a round collar. Point de france needlework lace was intricately spliced on knee-length skirts of pale white and flurorescent yellow giving it an aquatic scalloped edge to the collection’s soft languidness.

Gary Bigeni’s invitational print (link) had alluded to the collections’ title Fractured Appearance and the eventual collection. An optical art CMYK print developed by commissioned graphic designer Rohan Myles Peterson, according to Peterson, Bigeni solely conversed the print’s art direction without computing aid. Peterson explains, “He told me that there would be contrasts within the collection, soft and hard, sharp and smooth, different textures. The starting point he gave me was the idea of differences in perception, for example how when you meet someone for the first time, there could be a huge difference in what you think of that person based on your first impression of them, and how they actually are – so the idea was about the different faces we put on, in public, in private, with friends or with workmates and so on. The different facets of people. So from that I just started making illustrations and patterns based on hard-edge shapes overlaid with soft, organic curves and circles to try and combine the qualities that Gary had talked to me about.”

Gary Bigeni Spring 2012/13

This kind of meticulous relationship mirrors that of British graphic designer Peter Miles working with Celine’s creative director Phoebe Philo echoing a precision in graphic communication. The semblance of his garment assemblages fractured Malevich’s black square by leather blocking and circumventing lace around the shoulders, to the intense blue skewed from French artist Yves Klein’s monotone blue concept. Peterson had also cleverly composed the print to project an incongruent hypnotic eye or ripple effect that seemed to soften and harden his tailored leather pieces in a raglan sleeved mackintosh, and a duotone leather skirt and leather sleeved Mao-collar blouse. The only discordant element of the collection was the general cinching which prematurely fractured the malleable textures. It’s enough that the models are hit by the intensive and emulsified sienna orange, the collection’s showed it already had an intent and focus.

Editor-in-chief of Australian Vogue Kirstie Clements heralded Christopher Esber by saying, “We are all anticipating Christopher Esber’s collection. His small show at L’Oreal Melbourne Festival early this year was sleek, clever and creative.” Esber must have felt the protangonist in Isaac Asimov’s I, Robot short story series, with all converging eyes on him to lead Australian Fashion Week into a new frontier or horizon. Did Esber want to take us to a new scape or a new dimension? There were plausible possibilities given his visual aids were the nexus between Gattaca the 1997 production film by New Zealand director Andrew McNiccol and the ancient combative sport of Fencing. It is an interesting concept with the use of reflective mirrors as a way to project one’s collection. In 1964, artist Marcel Duchamp had signed the back of three mirrors and with his signature visible from the front; Daniel Byers an associate curator of the Carnegie Musuem of Art says, “Here the text ‘Marcel Duchamp’ is perhaps the site of the infra-thin, given form, scratched through the coating to the glass, articulating the passage between the surface and its reflection. The mirror becomes the world beyond its image.” So as to the seminal collections by Raf Simons who for his Fall 2009 collection, rotating mirror panels emphasised the double presence of his showcase.

Christopher Esber Spring 2012/13

The double métier of the reflective panels acting like vitrines is for Christopher Esber a display of his representational self and to show the technical attributes of his concise collection. He like Simons and more notably Martin Margiela all have an inconspicuous personality. If you could imagine Esber gazing into the panels, as a point of self-reflection, without the apparition of models, without the audience, he is accepting of his own flawed existence. As Vincent Freeman in the ending of Gattaca accepts his flawed identity, Esber’s shows evidence in this collection of expressing and harnessing his measured ability, potential and talent.

In reference to the collection, Esber transpired his DNA with high-mocked cotton blouses tucked into waistband pantaloons and a half-sleeved silk crepe dress with a crevassed bodice neck line that he has envisaged as diaphanous eveningwear. A waxy leather dress as someway to give it a ballistic fusion as with a chain mail skirt pantsuit and the silk voile that is visible down the knee is Esber’s interpretation of a protective croissard. Christopher Esber’s own ‘chicken game’ is the production of this collection. If we can learn anything from the Gattaca and fencing nexus, to indeed have a flawed existence means we can observe and distinguish this collection’s intricacies. So in the end, who wouldn’t want to steal Esber’s superior DNA?

Australian Fashion for it to prevail and to be a tour de force in future years to come must inquire its state of mind: is it enough to design clothes for women to dress fashionably or communicate a level of informed knowledge so as to inform customers points of inspirations and references as a cohesive whole?

Further information:
Gary Bigeni – http://mcmpr.com.au/home/fractured-apperance/
Magdalena Velevska – http://mcmpr.com.au/home/phosphorescence/
Christopher Esber – http://www.vogue.com.au/fashion/designers/christopher+esber,355

Kate Scardifield has worked tirelessly in presenting her new artworks entitled Votive Offerings. She was visibly fatigued as she was the patron of a restless opening night that was held in last month’s Sydney Art Month aiming to promote a range of cross-cultural artistic performances and installation art across the city.

A series of nine new works was produced by the young Sydney artist whose oeuvre carries an impetus of espousing, contorting, manipulating and splicing a range of mediums including paper, fabric, thread and card to elicit a diagrammatic response. Its arched title, Votive Offerings explores what Scardifield describes as “totems, amulets and effigies”.

A previous piece of work ‘Cerebral ceremony’ from her The Whole and the Sum of its Parts series may aptly congeal Scardifield’s rationale to ultilise for the first time, artist gouache that once hand-painted on, the illusion of her paper paintings appears visually optical. The depictions of ambiguous busts connected to internal intestines and body diaphragms in Votive Offerings considers that each body part is representational of ill-health and requires meditation or healing. “I spent six weeks in India as part of my artist residency and I was interested in developing a series of new works – looking at the body parts as amulets or effigies. Ailments which has been prevalent since the Etruscan period and we have had a 1000 year history and using this as a medium to pray through.”

Three previous exhibitions in Readyflayed presented at Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts in 2007, The Whole and the Sum of its Parts in 2010 at the Paper Mill Gallery in Sydney and False Narratives at Peleton Gallery in 2008, all have crystallised with a premise of theatrical assemblages of Victorian garmentry, pinned back corsets and a mélange of fabric cuttings that dramatise a set narrative. A silhouette of a rider and a horse is in a galloped suspension whilst Going into Theatre illustrates a maelstrom of eternal embodiment.

“My earlier works explores anatomical structures and the idea of the dress as a second skin and the way we clothe ourselves becomes an extension of the body. With the construction of garments and the relationship with the body. Seeing the seams, stitching and patterning that occurs”, remarks the Sydney artist. It is lucid to annotate Scardifield’s modus operandi as been surgical in procedure. Her paper and fabric scalping is scrupulous as they create a graphical nexus of connected spirituality. But whilst her previous works have been synthesised as an ‘act of dissection’ and the assemblages of tableu vivants one of a physiogramic analysis – how the contour of facial components might discriminate or classify class and personality, Scardifield argues that throughout her exhibitions, they remain figuratively anonymous.

‘False Narratives’ as part of 32 Metres Square at the Australian Council for the Arts 2009

If describing the physiognomic nature of Scardifeld’s work, she seeks a broader perspective that isn’t ingrained by medical science. With medical science establishing pictorial illustrations representational of the human body in the 18th century, Votive Offerings may create an a visual illusion. Scardifield’s process of cutting is fundamentally about seeing, observing and thinking, a title also conceived by August Sander whose photography were published on the eve of his exhibition at the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson in Paris in 2009 . Sander expresses, “Photography can also deceive us with so-called “double speak”. This medium can become flawed just in the way that Scardifield explains, “The [illustrative] figures that were used in those early anatomical illustrations were actually modeled on Greco-Roman sculptures – the idea of the ideal man and ideal body were used in those images. The Apollo Belvedere was a fictitious body.”

The pinned back garmentry of previous works including acute silhouettes that may manifest ‘acts of violence’ is neither to show pain or suffering. Scardidfield identifies the use of silhouettes as, “I’m working with a visual language – a symbology, part cutting and act of cutting to see the body and it is a representation (no physical body present). It is a facsimile or copy and alludes to the body.”

Instead, Votive Offerings is not so much about the criterion of physiognomy but the act of cutting in itself used by Scardifield is one of Deconstruction. Indeed, by ‘thinking, seeing and oberving’ the artist bears a hallmark of Jacques Derrida’s theory for which the artist has re-used leftover fabric and domestic furnishings to repurpose a piece of work. In this way, ‘Totems, amulets and effigies’ has revealed a more beautiful ecology. Initiating painting for the first time since high school, the threaded and conical totem poles with appliqué of gold, its designed arrangement is significant as it is sacred within many religious belief systems.

Perhaps Scardifield’s own totem is through the Brazilian female artist Lygia Clark who penned a journal essay, ‘The Full Emptiness’ in 1960. As with the effigies Scardifield has hand-painted, Clark expresses, ‘Forms, like all things express more than their mere physical presence. It is as if each thing radiated an energy to the energy of the living and real space.’ Clark’s own work notably ‘Bichos’ were geometric metal planes, hinged together to form as sculptural objects. Her premise was that they were organic and through a viewer’s participation in handling the sculptures, ‘he plays with life, he identifies himself with it, feeling it in its tonality, participating in an unique and total moment, he exists.”

Shrine work

To realise the significance of ‘Bichos’ by Lygia Clark, one can understand also the significance of Kate Scardifield’s oeuvre. Scardifield is not only a beautiful colourist but the spectrum of Votive Offerings as with her previous body of works surrounds itself around existentialism and the notion of sensory art. The insular body structures that displays the artist’s workmanship, the outlines or seams to create both a positive and negative space and although Scardifield expresses her hands as surgical in nature, her de-constructionalist illustrations convey bodily and spatial structures that grapple an eternal questioning of living memory, body and cerebral experiences and how each component drives our life reality.

Votive Offerings is also an immersive experience into the notion of a white cube space. “I appreciate the immersion of sound and light and the connection with artworks. An artist has a responsibility not just in the making of the work but also the presention as well. I’m constantly thinking how it is viewed, how the audience is moving through the space. I have worked with galleries and museums for the past six years. My interaction with artwork has been an immensely valuable experience.”

Her previous solo exhibitions would not have been possible without the Sydney arts community for which she has forged dispensable links with. As a previous director of Sydney run artist gallery Firstdraft from 2009 to 2010, she explains, “Other artists have been so supportive in the development of my career. It is an amazing artist-run initiative; I took a directorship of two years and it is hard work. In our circumstances, we renovated the gallery and when you are an artist, you realise that there is this amazing community that oscillates around the art world and that support network is so important because it is a hard profession being an artist.”

Kate Scardifield will undertake an upcoming artist residency at Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris in September

Kate Scardifield – www.katescardifield.com

After the condensation of Zero Hour, Yang Li’s first prêt-a-porter collection under his eponomous guise, the young London-based fashion designer aims to express a fission of uniformed and conjoined structures, that of de rigeur and non-descript in terms of utilitarian clothing.

‘After Hour’, his entitled second collection appears to have coolly liquified with greater dimensions in proportions and technical attributes. Engaged with luminary Italian factories to produce his double cloth wools, Li’s own sociology of the deep-noir fabric textures (using black PMS62X) he has ultilised is by one of combining military referenced livery with an enriched blend of sartorial tailoring. American writer Marshall Berman who wrote ‘All That Is Solid Melts Into Air’ published in 1982 can characterise this contemporary tailoring that Li constantly revolves around. The definition of modernism within fashion’s iconography visually defines something nouveau riche. Berman however writes, “But it is a paradoxical unity, a unity of disunity: it pours us all into a maelstrom of perpetual disintegration and renewal, of struggle and contradiction, of ambiguity and anguish.”

The short film produced by Dean Mayo Davis with Scott Trindle for the previous collection contains extracts of anarchy, chaotic uncertainty and military empowerment. Li draws from this flawed existence of modernity and has founded a chemistry of double cloths that fit both men and women without a segregated approach to patterns. The seamless technical splicing of shoulder and waist pocketing, the placement of darts to create apparitions of chevrons and pleats – the semblance of these outerwear silhouettes is as formidable as they are gallant.

What is considered ‘feminine’ is fictitious to Li. The structured tailoring is to demonstrate a new sensory pulse to fashion and that is by the enveloped function and fabric Li has chosen. The London based designer has already established retail patronages with two London based stores in LN-CC and Hostem and Blake in Chicago, Illinois.

Under the creative directorship of John Skelton, his buying team at LN-CC explains, “What really stood out for us about Yang’s work is his minimalist aesthetic but strong focus on a clean well-cut shape and interesting fabric mixes which are all woven in Italy; such as lycra and wool, lycra and viscose and polyamide elastane. Also his unusual details like the fluid fin at the back of the garments gives them an aerodynamic feel that is in keeping with his focus on the movement and feel of the garment when it is worn. Yang has successfully combined sportswear detailing and shapes with luxurious fabrications and a bold palette to create a strong aesthetic.”

Yang Li continues on a quest to establish his eponymous presence and whose strong business and fashion acumen also cemented by having worked at Antwerp based atelier of Raf Simons. The Beijing born, Australian raised designer is on a steady discourse with a future echoed by LN-CC. “What’s going to be very interesting is the development of his customer base and how he can move the collection on whilst keeping within his handwriting. Thats the difficult balance for all designers. We’re confident that he will be able to develop the brand and the collection in the right way if he stays independently focused on what he is doing and the commerciality and finance doesn’t take over the output. Again, this is the difficulties that face all young designers. Only time will tell.”

Yang Li – www.yangli.eu
LN-CC – www.ln-cc.com

However we view our own ecology and the way in which the rule of law governs our social activity and interaction with semiotics, we are all in bondage of design . From the mobile vehicles of transport, to the electronic devices we carry, even nature itself is governed by rules of design. Good design is when its function and semblance remarkably stays inconspicuous and serves its full purpose. Bad design is when its materiality and purpose are disproportionate. Dieter Rams, the perennial German industrial designer who still lives today espoused his ten points of decree that has become an overarching statement for the universality of design. “Good design is innovative, honest, long lasting and thorough to the last detail”, Rams’ products were for people, by people and his indefatigable design process meant that the composition of auxiliaries were ergonomic.

The Spanish born designer Isaac Reina undertook architectural studies in Barcelona which was followed by a seven tenure at local designer Antonio Miro. Spending eight years as an assistant for Hermes’ men’s prêt-a-porter under Véronique Nichanian, a comprehension of design aesthetics emerged and was born from the dualism of Spanish fashion design with its total vision of considering fabrics, silhouette, form and sculpting and the rich lustre of Reina’s employment at the aforementioned French Maison.

Reina didn’t separate himself from Hermes’ work ethos which craftswoman Maguelone De Ricaud described to Alice Pfeiffer as “It is a house with a real history, which started out small and is still growing – but it still remains family-orientated” [Acne Paper, Summer 2011], Reina wanted to divorce from an aesthetic that was an imbalance in design and cost. By immersing himself in the couture-like quality of the clothes and bags that remained quintessentially Hermes, his impetus was to establish is own business in 2006 under an eponymous guise. Reina realised that indeed within clothes and accessories, these two cultural artifacts were essential for human utility.

Leather fabric swatches, inventory paper work, tools and an archival history of previous collections at Isaac Reina’s Paris atelier

His first shop in Paris’ Marais district created both an atelier and showroom environ. The first prototype men’s bags initiated, constructed and hand-finished, the inaugural collection in 2006 beautifully reflected Ram’s design decree. Vernacular typically reserved for programming, size, proportion and usability were aspects Reina rigorously performed for the creation of the men’s bags. From his first season and consistent throughout his incumbent collections (to date he is into his seventh year, fourteen collections), two archetypal models have emerged: the standard satchel bag and the 24 hour weekend bag. The latter measuring 500mm by 250mm is constructed to lie as a flat octagonal plane when stationary, bearing no appliqued lining, the only visible elements consist of meticulous stitching and golden bald rivets. Within these two bag models lays Reina’s leitmotif of ingeniously designing portability from the guiding principles of paper origami, taking the techniques of paper-folding to populate an amorphous shape into what we instantaneously recognise as a compartment holdall or simply a bag.

Reina has subsequently expanded his product expertise to a range of other product accessories with an utilitarian semblance. Portfolios, card holders, classic wallets with card compartments, at the heart of all these products is the undercarriage of a living fabric in leather.

Speaking with Jérôme Schmitt, the assistant of Isaac Reina, he explains, “The leather of this bag [standard satchel bag] is quite special. This material comes from the east of France, very traditional, and ancient process. It’s been vegetable tanned twice, which means the skin is literally saturated with wax, nourished for life. For instance if you leave the bag aside for a while (a month or so) it will get recovered by some kind of whitish layer. No flaw here, it’s actually a sign of quality, the leather it’s spitting out its wax for it has too much within. A rubbing with a soft fabric (for the heat) will get the wax back in. And for these reasons, the more you use it, the more beautiful it will become.”

First published in 1966 and translated by Patrick Creagh in 1971, Italian visual designer Bruno Munari’s book Design as Art argued that, “Today we do not think in terms of beauty but of formal coherence, and even the ‘decorative’ function of the object is throught of as a psychological element.”

The ‘decorative’ function can be best described as the attached leather handles that propel as the product’s elevation and the rivets as to enclose its top canopy yet Reina’s perpetual accomplish is his ability to connect to his customers his own visual language. It is a language that considers a rhythm, a logic to construct a product with efficient portability yet be beautifully inconspicuous. “If the form of an object turns out to be ‘beautiful’, it will be thanks to the logic of its construction and to the precision of the solutions found for its various components. It is ‘beautiful’ because it is just right”, Munari further says.

www.isaacreina.com

German conceptual artist Thomas Demand working in the realm of photography has consistently synethesised a body of work that uniquely encapsulates scenes of everyday reality – where it be the experience of human aggravation at the airport luggage screening, to a child’s nursery and more prominently, The Oval Office or a room work made in 1995 of the remnants of a Stasi office. Such scenes have conveyed a semblance of a grandiose fraternity but Demand’s sculptural photography lends itself in an new series ‘The Dailies’, its rendering is much more subdued and of slower cadence.

In an interview with John Kaldor, leading Kaldor Projects as the arched patron of exhibiting large-scale art projects, Kaldor explains by chance that Demand had stumbled upon Sydney’s Commercial Travellers’ Association (CTA) building in the city’s Martin Place. A number of proposed suggestions including baron landscapes such as abandoned warehouses could contextualise an enrvion befitting for the German artist’s oeuvre. The CTA building in itself has remained largely inconspicuous since its birth in 1974 by the eminent architect Harry Sielder. The tower in true modernist glory was beautifully designed in hyperbolic geometry, resulting in a sprouted mushroom canopy. “I felt it was apart of the complex of high-rise buildings and somehow also it was completely on its own. It struck me as a forgotten scheme leftover somehow”, Demand explains.

Upon reaching the fourth level where Demand’s exisitential photographs occupy, the circumferential corridors lead to nondescript doors opposite each other. Once inside, the grasping of an enigmatic, leafy fig scent is infused by the stasis of an insular environ being immaculate. These rooms serviced by the CTA staff are usually inhabited by club travellers but replaced with a distinctive black framed photograph upon a woolen covered bed and tupperware laying by the tablesit. A specially conceived scent by Prada’s fashion director Micccia Prada had alluded to the interior being referential of Demand’s own documentation of daily sceneries and activities. A mini-fridge, silverware and drinking cups are artificially positioned with written extracts on invitational paper imprinted from American author Louis Begley’s ‘Gregor in Sydney’ a short story accompanying ‘The Dailies’ and within the exhibition’s book catalogue.

The fascination surrounding the conceptual art by Demand is the nexus of what is perceived as reality, constructed and contorted in materiality by the artist and thereafter destroyed. This elegiac process of memento mori and, whatever Demand has captured in his monocle rendered only as a photograph is as thrilling as a spy-novel or the highly secretive processes of committing espionage. The experience feels half Kubrick and half Hitcockian as you travel room to room disquietly. By far an agent, the outlooking misc-en-scenes, so clinically unperturbed and semblance spotless that the only imperfections noticeable is that of what is within the framed edges of Demand’s imagery. As scrupulous in all of this methods and procedure, the high-yielding prints are developed ultilising dye-transfer printing that combines traditional methods of negative photographic exposure development and emulsion processes like in silkscreening. The result of Demand’s photographs render them with colour tonality unparalleled by today’s standards of resin-coated base papers.

The circulating motion however – opening each door exposing the eyes of an account of each photography leaves you in a perpetual state of disorientation. But by a sense of arbitrariness then perhaps something more organic. It’s not like anything is actually happening in each elevated interior. In comparision, some of Demand’s own works lies hanging in the Kaldor contemporary art deparment within Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) and the hyperbolic space lends itself giving power and perspective to our own mundane and procedural existence.

Somehow, upon looking at the framed imagery, Demand’s The Dailies are ostensibly observing the room onto itself. It’s also interesting that this intensely physiological experience had also been developed by French contemporary artist Sophie Calle. Room presented by the French Institute Alliance Francaise in New York in 2011, Calle arranged more than 40 personal objects in a hotel room of Lovell Hotel in New York, inviting visitors to interact and investigate Calle’s autobiographical timeline as an artist.

The environs that contextualise Demand’s work is just as paramount as to what he conceives on dye-transfer paper. But overlooking, peering through the concave glass windows outlooking Sydney’s high-rise buildings, it is important to realise that unknowingly, the German artist’s renderings themselves are allegoric.

As penned by Margaret and Christine Wertheim, co-directors of the Institute For Figuring based in Los Angeles, California, they state in The Quick and the Dead published by the Walker Art Center is this, “We have built a world of rectilinearity – the rooms we inhabit, the skyscrapers we work in, the gridlike arrangements of our streets, the freeways we cruise on our daily commute […].” Demand’s photography do not just recalibrate paraphernalia left behind, residues such as contorted plastic cups stuck in our urban municipalities, the dugout of littered cigarette butts and suspended clasped clothes pegs as comprised within The Dailies, he aptly describes his process as, “Paper itself. It’s every much about the things I make out of paper and in the end the significance of what that material is. But it adds a weird, paradoxical idea that the piece of paper is becoming representable of a piece of paper.”

The jewellery Tanya Kovacevic lovingly handcrafts in her Elizabeth Bay studio is beautifully understated — so much so that you might forget you’re wearing it. And that’s kind of the point. “I love bling,” Kovacevic says. “But there’s something special about simple jewellery — jewellery that you can wear with anything; jewellery that you can fall sleep in and forget about.” Her pieces are just as much about intimacy as they are adornment. Wear one of her dainty chains with tiny charms, or delicate silk cord bracelets, and it becomes a part of you. “When I put a necklace on it will stay on me for months,” she says. “Eventually I’ll take it off, but whenever I look in my jewellery box, it’ll remind me of that period of my life. It’s like a snap shot in time.”

Kovacevic has always been interested in jewellery. She spent two years working in fashion in London before landing a job as an accessories buyer for Zimmermann. Making jewellery began as a hobby; she found herself fiddling with beads, tubing and chain in her spare time. “It’s actually very relaxing,” she says. “I go into my own little zone. It’s almost like I’m in this meditative state.” She made pieces for friends and their encouragement gave her the confidence to pursue the business side of things more seriously. “It was very organic. All of a sudden I had a little collection. There was interest from bloggers and people in the industry, and I started getting some orders, and I just kept plodding along. And then I picked up some amazing stores.”

Petite Grand — which is now stocked in boutiques like Bloodorange, My Chameleon and Incu — was born, and Kovacevic couldn’t have picked a more apt brand name. Her jewellery whispers laid-back luxury; it makes a big impact with little details. “The simplest thing I’ve ever made is this little bracelet with one tiny bead,” she says. “All my friends comment on it. They might not see it from a distance, but the moment they sit down with you, they notice it. Petite Grand is all about the woman. When you get closer you see her eyes and her jewellery.”

As for that woman, she could be anyone. “My mum wears it. My little cousins wear it. The only woman in mind is a woman who likes nice jewellery that can be worn comfortably and easily.” Kovacevic has even made a point of using filled gold — as opposed to solid gold — to keep prices down and the brand accessible. “It’s a layer of gold over base metal, and it won’t rub off like plated gold tends to do. I didn’t want the Petite Grand woman to be a woman with money. A young girl can save for one of my pieces and that’s completely achievable.”

Petite Grand is refreshingly unpretentious. Kovacevic doesn’t care for trends. She makes jewellery she herself likes to wear and cites everyday life as her inspiration. “I’m constantly absorbing. I don’t have any particular points of reference.” She likes clean lines and art deco-like shapes. She puts hearts in her collections because “they symbolise love, and that’s just so lovely,” and uses stars because she can’t get enough of them — “I have glow in the dark sticker stars plastered all over my bedroom ceiling.” Her latest collection features anklets, partly because that sliver of skin between sandals and cropped pants is an underrated erogenous zone, and partly because she fondly remembers wearing anklets while growing up on Sydney’s Northern Beaches.

Jewellery designer of Petite Grand Tanja Kovacevic (pictured)

It’s that personal approach to design — and the fact that, at the end of the day, the pieces are just so pretty — that has made Petite Grand such a success. Kovacevic currently oversees everything — from the design, to the processing of orders, the invoicing, and the dispatch — but the brand is steadily growing. “I don’t want to freak out and not be able to fulfil the orders,” Kovacevic says. “But it will hard for me to pass it over because I love every aspect. Even the last bit, the box with the bow — that brings pleasure to me. I just want to continue what I’m doing because I love it. I really love it. I guess I’ll just have to wait and see where it takes me.”

Petite Grand – www.petitegrand.com

Click on Page 2 to view Petite Grand’s current collection

Modern architecture is underrepresented by women. With hopes to destroy an architectural adage, a limited number of them are unmatched by the superiority of their male counterparts. Zahid Hadid’s works is as compelling and spellbinding as to the work by SANAA’s Kazuyo Sejima’s deft and delicate touch that resists the male architectural dogma of pure form. It is architecture and its man-made properties, its relevance and inescapable shaping of human industralisation that has had a primal effect on this Australian designer’s latest embodied work that she has entitled, “Industriale”.

It is a description that reverberates a staunch national emblem, relating to powerhouse cogs running an entire city or country. Stephanie Downey was drawn to two illustrative elements that of French photographers Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre and Italian filmmaker Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1964 film Il Deserto Rosso. As referenced online on Downey’s website’s blog, she was swayed by the profound aftereffects of demolition sites, spatial abandonment and the decay of modern human and robotic interaction. Marchand and Meffre’s photographic series entitled, ‘The Ruins of Detroit’ depicted unrelenting scenes of scattered furniture, internally unstable structures, the industralised decay and exile of what was once a flourishing American city fixated by the mechanisation of automobiles, homes, schools, hotels and grand theatres. These spatial interiors once humanly occupied left a hallmark of ruin and neglect, paraphernalia a disease that left Detroit in decapitated splendor.

Downey ostensibly enjoys this decapitated splendor. However, the French duo’s depiction is in peripheral contrast to those of German photographer Thomas Demand’s artificial settings. Constructed by Demand and in previous series such as cubicled offices, The Oval office commissioned by the The New York Times, they are surgically perfected and destroyed then after, reflecting the power and logic represented in the surge of building American’s Detroit. With Demand’s own point of inflexion (construction and deconstruction of his work), in the printed book, ‘On Altering Architecture’ by Fred Scott, he states, “Known for his photographs of meticulously constructed environments of cardboard and paper, Thomas Demand […] work enables an eerie merging of boundaries between the imagined and real. Critic Neville Wakefield observed Demand ‘proposes architecture as silent witness to the pathologies of social disturbance.”

Social disturbance is also explored by Antonioni’s film which Downey was drawn towards as visual inspiration. Asking her why Il Deserto Rosso as a point of initiation, she explains, “My personal reaction to the film was more an appreciation of the characters and story, and it was the pure visual elements that inspired my design. For me, being inspired by film and photography begins with a very simple aesthetic appreciation, and gradually elements drawn from the mood, colour, and landscape translate into my design. It’s not something that I think to hard about at the time, as the pattern cutting experimental process muddles with external inspiration and images that have been lingering in my mind.”

At first glance, Antonioni aborbs and fixates a perspective onto his protangist as a singular driven plot about a husband and wife’s turmoil of a factory strike and her unsuccessful suicide attempt. But on the contrary, edited by Seymour Chatman and Paul Duncan, an eponymous book exploring Antonioni’s Il Deserto Rosso revealed that, ‘the main character must confront her social environment […] the neurosis I sought to describe Red Desert is above all a matter of adjusting.”

Downey’s own neurosis is the absorption of industrialised beauty who also concurs with the foreground of factories, clinical office interiors and vertinguous cranes and smoke chimneys as a fabrication of the working class. At the heart of this, Downey exhibits the manufacture of working clothes: a pleated wool crepe jumpsuit with enveloped breast pockets, a wool buttoned mackintosh and long-sleeved round collared dress in wool crepe. These garments are utilitarian but each of which are marbled and the gossamer, weave felt like textures of Downey’s chosen fabrics are finely crystallized that even in the cap sleeved dress or blazer and trouser ensemble encapsulate the warped ruins and decay exhibited both in the photography of Marchand and Meffre and the film by Antonioni. And as technically precise as her catalyts, the Industriale collection overall demonstrates a redoubtable quality: her tailoring and dress separates all consist of beautiful and precise interior lining, Australian Woolmark yarns and synonymous elements in men’s tailoring: Italian curved breast and welt pocketing.

In this latest collection by Stephanie Downey for winter, Industriale lucidly demonstrates that she is ‘the girl who thinks’ coined by New Zealand’s NO Magazine. But this is to classify she is a cerebral designer of which she has detracted from. She is simply a working girl whose realism is in fashion and life – that one needs to confront, be protective and adapt to a contemporary brave new landscape as Antonioni suggests.

Dress Up – www.dressup.net.au

Raf Simons’ tenure at the Italian based German maison Jil Sander will be forever enamored by the fashion congregation in his rapturous ability to enact a fissure of modernity. He vigorously ensued tailoring, the exploration of dressmaking and annex a kind of industrialised approach to fabrics resulted in Jil Sander with an impeccable line of purity.

Simons’ departing collezioni was cloistered by grace in movement and to which the garments were presented. In sequential movement, the models were themselves celestial beings coming into apparition. Clutching at their hands, the vestment like robes came in a combinasion of two colours: hues of rose de malmaison, silver grey, Moulin rouge red and navy. The zeitgeist that surrounds these Jil Sander beauties constantly exhibit an emotional protection, even when things appear transculent or evocative (the bustier dresses), she is sheathed by a turtle-neck sweater and body dresses with slender camisoles.
Melissa Tammerijn’s ensemble in was seamlessly paired by way of a nude bustier tucked by a high-waist palazzo. It whispers the seven year comprisal of Simons’ past collections pensively constructed working wear for women who challenged himself to explore new shapes and silhouettes that broke free from the uniformed conventions of an office suit. For Printemps-Été 2011, Carla Gebhart wore a canon white t-shirt and black maxi-skirt designed with an approach of couture and a touch of gamine that would otherwise look dowdy; Simons’ winter 2008 collection that unequivocally defined a statement in his tenure of cocooned coats.

Simons’ remembrance will be illuminated by a stroke of brilliance. The hints of plasticised elements bordering on the subversive, he will always try to unbalance what appears balanced to create a new balance of his own. The white stage and high rise plinths with encased floristry signals his departure but his love of fashion will be evermore.