Please forgive the free association below. I blame the coffee because I am a product of my culture and we overcaffeinate. (On reflection, it is disturbing that my huge Cthulhu tiki mug has become a perfectly acceptable single serving of coffee.) Really this is just an exercise in sloppily stringing together some of the inspiring fashion items I’ve seen recently.
We begin with a great article over at Tokyo Telephone on Coconogacco, or the Coco-Ten Exhibition at Trans Art Tokyo. The idea here is that the students are able to present their clothes in context before the fashion show:
…the design students of the Coconogacco school curated a series of rooms to contextualize their work which served as art exhibitions in their own right, and it is those that we are going to be looking around today. What you are going to miss out on though is the very real context of these rooms, housed as they were in a deserted seventeen floor building where you could comfortably go 10 minutes without seeing anyone else, all in the chill of the Tokyo winter, the only sound being scraps of found music before you accidentally stumble across a noisecore band rehearsing.
Chiaki Moronaga at The Coco-Ten Exhibition at Trans Art Tokyo.
Once you find a designer inspired by Russian philosophers there’s no going back.
Yvonne Kwok’s graduate collection, We Dance Like Little Mary’s Swaying to the Symphony of Destruction, is inspired by Mikhail Bakhtin’s ideas around carnival, among other things:
The use of neoprene gives a fleshy effect and refers to how artist Folkert de Jong calls it: “gebakken lucht”, which is a Dutch saying and means “nonsenseâ€. The use of cardboard and brads are inspired by the paper doll, which gives the collection a crafted feeling. The search for quick ways to optimize decorating is my reaction to the system because self-reflection is jeopardized by the lack of time, which for me is ultimately the essence of fashion.
Many thanks to Branko Popović for introducing me to the work of Ali Abdulrahim. His graduate collection, REVELATUS, showcases outstanding embroidery skills and striking silhouettes.
Influences include Magritte’s The Return of the Flame, clergy vestments and the typical Maasai color palette. Abdulrahim moved from Ghana seven years ago to pursue his studies in Belgium, graduating from the Academy of Fine Arts of Sint-Niklaas in June. I look forward to seeing more from Abdulrahim, as his own label, apparently, is forthcoming.
More photos of the collection and a chat with the designer at BPB. More on REVELATUS here.
Fashion Beast is to be released, fittingly, in September. Avatar Press has the details. You can preorder the first of ten issues and variant covers through the site. Better yet, you can get them at your local comic book shop when it comes out.
Thanks to Tokyo Fashion I was reintroduced to Towa Tei about a week ago. It was there that I saw/heard the new video for his song, “Wordy”. At first I was more impressed by the video than the song (by that I mean unsettled in a good way), in which it appears that a rave monster had a violent allergic reaction to all things phosphorescent and puked in a kigurumi party den:
But then the song got stuck in and started to soften my brain (does that make a song good?). I think that the leavening agent was Bakubaku Dokin singing the alphabet and getting stuck on “elamen, elamen”. So I looked up Towa Tei and found this 1998 collaborative gem with Kylie Minogue called, “GBI” (”My name is German Bold Italic. I am a typeface which you have never heard before….Let me adorn you. The bold design of you.”):
I say reintroduced because Towa Tei was a member of Deee-Lite, and I love Deee-Lite.
Also love this music video put together by Timotayo for Towa Tei’s “Ch. Galaxy”:
Red silk dress with cartridge pleats from the “Cocktail Culture” exhibit at the RISD Museum of Art. Designed by Norman Norell and Anthony Traina (under the Traina-Norell label), ca. 1949. From InStyle’s great slideshow of the highlights. The exhibit ends tomorrow (July 31st).
From my notebook. To be fair, though, most people here have been very friendly. Which is nice. (Excess yellowing is from a bad scanner at the local FedEx Office. Which sucks.)
Caught the War on Drugs show (touring with Destroyer) before leaving Seattle for SoCal and was really impressed. Keeping me company on a drive up the Pacific Coast Highway yesterday was their song “Comin’ Though”, which rounded the afternoon into perfection.
“Comin’ Though” is from the Future Weather EP, available here. (For some reason, buying directly from Secretly Canadian didn’t work for me.)
