28/03/2013

Minimalism at the Very Beginning

Minimalism at the Very Beginning

They say fashion is the mirror of the society, and if you have a fast look at the last fashion shows, you can easily understand that we are completely into an austerity mood, which is synonym for simple, strict and minimal. Minimalism got its chance to come back one more time on the main catwalks, and become again the way to dress up. Or down.

Majority of people have probably heard about big names such as Pierre Cardin, Jil Sander, Calvin Klein, Donna Karan and many others, but minimalism in fashion started its influence already a lot before these talents. Even if the term was coined around 1960, the real birth of the concept happened at the beginning of last century, before the World War I.

Talking about ancient Greek influences, many are used to indicate Madame Vionnet as the pioneer, although it was Mariano Fortuny y Madrazo, a versatile Spanish-Italian talent, to be the very first one who took inspirations from statues and hieroglyphs. Initially, he became popular for “Knossos” a certain model of scarves he created for a ballet. They were not minimalist as we intend the concept today, but their significance lies in representing an important step in terms of versatility and reuse of clothing.

In 1920, while Coco Chanel was creating her revolutionary comfortable clothes for women, Poiret was declining with his exotic way and the World War I was bringing Europe down, Fortuny launched Delphos dress. It was very simple in its own shape, composed of two panels of thin silk, cut out flat in a manner of kimono. Fortuny was the first to practice the all-important cultural fusion he got from sources taken up some decades later by Issey Miyake and Yohji Yamamoto.

Through 1930s sober fashion made roots also overseas, thanks to fashion designers such as Claire McCardell, Vera Maxwell and Clare Potter who created leisurewear for working class. On one side there were Europeans, who sought to simplify the 20s female look and on the other, Americans, who tried to simplify the whole life of women. The probably most iconic example of this was Claire McCardell’s collection based on six garments, totally interchangeable, with the aim of giving women a complete and practical wardrobe.

In the XX century minimalism has been crucial in the field of fashion, adopting different ways for expressing itself. There is no specific sentence that can define minimalist approach in fashion; you can basically recognize it by the construction in which every single garment element is part of, an abolition of superfluous and functional characteristics. Less being more.

Francesca Crippa 

27/03/2013

A Delightful Break

A Delightful Break

On a rainy day in Milan we had the desire to sink in a comfortable armchair in a warm and cozy lounge. We like the rain in the end of winter, it’s nice to look at, while drinking cherry juice or hot tea. In the center of the city, in an old house used as a location for photo and movie shoots, we improvised a really nice and tasty coffee break.

A traditional Saint Honoré gave us the warmth we had lost, tender and fragrant, incredibly good, with its vanilla aftertaste. On the second outfit we tasted a wonderful cheesecake with strawberry jam, a couple of cupcakes with maple syrup and nuts, and cookies with cinnamon, ginger and raisins. To accompany worthily we thought of a pomegranate tea. Here’s what you can do when the sun does not want to come out. The food is very therapeutic at times, rich flavors and a full belly helps us see things in a different way. And when it comes to sweets, we are right on track.




Stefano Tripodi

27/03/2013

Handcrafted Modern Europe: At Home with Mid-Century Designers

At Home with Mid-Century Designers

Have you ever dreamed about taking a sneak peek at someone’s home? Who’s home would it be? Do you find yourself looking inside people’s houses when taking a stroll around the block? Well, we believe we all do this. If we don’t have a perfect home, by looking at someone else’s house, we dream of living there. If we do have the perfect home, we still like to compare it to others, just to assure ourselves that, yes, our home still is the perfect one.


Leslie Williamson has often asked herself exactly those questions and has, thus, created her dream list of homes where she would have loved to visit, immerse herself in and immortalize. Her dream has become a book, titled “Handcrafted Modern: At Home with Mid Century Designers”, published by Rizzoli in 2010, a worldwide best-seller. The book itself is quite simple: it shows and tells the homes of one of the most interesting Modern designers: masters of studio furniture like Wharton Esherick, George Nakashima and J.B. Blunk; industrial designers like Russel Wright, Charles and Ray Eames and Irving Harper; architects Walter Gropius and Albert Frey.



Currently Leslie is working on a new project, a second book with the working title “Handcrafted Modern Europe: At Home with Midcentury Designers”, which explores homes of the grand masters of European design. Even though we are not allowed to know the complete list of designers, we already know there will be 13 names, among which Alvar Aalto, Bruno Mathsson and the Milanese Gae Aulenti. Speaking about her project Leslie declares: “I see homes as a portrait of their inhabitants, so I photograph each space with an eye not only to the architecture, design and wide views of the rooms, but also the small quiet moments that reveal these creative people’s character.” 
She recently also had to start a fundraiser on Kickstarter to fund her project, which, fortunately has ended pretty well and she is currently working pretty hard to finish the book on time.

Seen the success of her previous book and the positive result of the aforementioned campaign, we must note that it appears that we all want to have a peek inside those houses, too. Who knows, maybe we’ll get inspiration for making our perfect home.


Rujana Rebernjak – Photography by Leslie Williamson

26/03/2013

Behind the Shades

Behind the Shades

Pastels, metallic or just basic black – even though sunglasses work as a shield from the sun, in today’s society they function even more so as a way to reflect your personality. Choosing shades has become a way of choosing the identity for the season. A pair of Wayfarer’s has been branded classic chic whilst the cat eye pair flirts like the 50’s pin up. No matter the season, people will be seen in their shades and one might ask: why has this piece of plastic become such an important part of an outfit?


The essence of incognito can be found in any pair of sunglasses. It was in fact a Chinese judges who started to wear smoke colored glasses around the 1300’s to hide their eye expressions. Though, the sunglasses of today were created much later, in 1929, by Sam Foster and had then, as now, the main function of sheltering the eyes from the sun. However, celebrities soon copied the ancient judges and used sunglasses to stay unnoticed when walking amongst the regular ‘mortals’. Shades state to give a sense of privacy while making a fashion statement, putting the exclamation mark – of what a strong wearer can give – between brackets. On the other hand, the right pair of sunglasses can also add a sense of harmony to a bold print or vivid outfit.


More than putting the wearer at ease, sunglasses have also become the affordable way for people to discover and take part in the world of the fashion houses. Hearing from the red carpet the designer that a celebrity is wearing is probably not going to generate a vast increase in sales at the haute couture department, but more likely it will be the make-up and sunglasses sales that are affected: it is the affordable luxury.

All in all, sunglasses may just technically be a piece of plastic but the meaning to the wearer can be a number of things which makes them a key accessory in anyone’s wardrobe.

Victoria Edman

25/03/2013

Jeff Wall, Actuality

Jeff Wall, Actuality

Finally, after numerous exhibitions in the most important museums of the world, PAC – Contemporary Art Pavilion in Milan hosts the first Italian solo show by the Canadian photographer and artist Jeff Wall (Vancouver, 1946). 
Actuality is the title chosen for the exhibition by its curator Francesco Bonami. The title reflects the artist’s will to set up each of his selected 42 works – among new and already displayed ones – in a conceptual way; in a tangible horizon, contingent to the reality and to the daily experience. 
Yet, everyone overlooks Wall’s art for the first time can have the double feeling to be in front of images without time; visions, which float vaguely in a recent past (thanks to the photographic medium), and a moment that is about to happen.


This is mostly related to the fact that his works are made through the use of see-through cibachrome, later assambled and exhibited with a light box. That confers to each work a status that goes beyond the steadiness of the shot to look more like a movie still frame. It’s not by chance that Jeff Wall has many times declared that he looks at his pictures as “cinematography”. They are images, supported by big size format, which aim at becoming out-and-out beaming screens where the artist, as an experimental videographer, suspends a symbolic and incisive frame of a full length movie we’ll never see. A simple still-life, which is not so “simple”, seems to suggest the artist. It contains – in its structure and in its definition as an artistic form and visual system – the history and tradition, which convey from century to century the shared idea about how to look at and depict things.

In his production, Wall seems to be interested in post French revolution art and in those masters who redefined visual art in a crucial moment of human history: between the rise of the new social order and the modern and contemporary costume, but above all, that unique moment that gave birth to photography. Delacroix, Courbet, Manet, Renoir, Degas and also the big masters of Ukiyo-e are not used as specious visual references, but as formal structures to confront with. Each single work is a small cosmos into which you can get lost, where the space is analyzed in-depth with a philosophical approach that assimilates Wall to the artists of the Renaissance, sometimes with a slightly hermetic attitude.


We can feel the awkwardness of the man lying on the kitchen table of Insomnia (1994), but this feeling is not instilled only through the performing skills of the leading actor, it is the geometric break of the composition that underlined his uneasiness. The fundamental work Citizen (1996) tells us about issues such as freedom, democracy and civilization. 
In a time when the domination of the images – the “iconosphere” described by McLuhan – debase the value of each visual signs, the accurate work by Jeff Wall is a referent artistic and philosophical point to investigate the artistic, social and politic role of our view: we, powerless spectators looking at the pictures of Abu Ghraib‘s tortures, could learn a lot from Jeff Wall’s Dead Troops Talk (1992). The enormous picture which seems to live midway of a photo reportage from the frontline and an episode of The Walking Dead, was analyzed by Susan Sontag who reports at the end of her essay Regarding the Pain of Others: “The figures in Wall’s visionary photo-work are “realistic” but, of course, the image is not. Dead soldiers don’t talk. Here they do.”


The exhibition will run until June 9.

Riccardo Conti, Editor’s thanks for translation to Monica Lombardi – Images courtesy of Jeff Wall

24/03/2013

Sunday Breakfast by Love For Breakfast

Sunday Breakfast by Love For Breakfast

The harmony of a moment that I would love to last all the week long, without putting an end to the one passed.

Alessia Bossi from Love For Breakfast

22/03/2013

Dingle Dreaming

Dingle Dreaming

For the ultimate escape flee to a land of historic mystery, literary allure and unique – or should that be rugged – natural beauty. Nestled within the occasionally lifting cloud, verdant fields and subtle charms of County Kerry is the thoroughly enchanting Dingle Peninsula. Stretching 48 kilometers into the Atlantic Ocean, this is a corner of Ireland that seems to have fallen from the pages of a fairy tale. It is after all the home of rainbow-dwelling, gold-hoarding leprechauns.


Fantasy beings aside, the Peninsula is dominated by the Slieve Mish mountain range (home of Ireland’s second highest peak), sea-cliffs, sand splits, endless beaches, eccentric locals and pubs that let county tunes ring out late into the night. And then there’s the history. Visit a ring fort or stone circle to feel the true magic of this area. Often orientated on sight lines for the rising or setting sun, stone circles are thoroughly humbling – and shrouded in local legend. Medieval history runs deep here too. In the deepest, dankest depths of the Dark Ages, when literature looked as if it was set to leave Europe forever, a group of book-loving monks fled from the barbarian raids on the Continent and began their Irish life in isolated stone igloos, known as ‘beehive huts’, working as scribes and keeping the adoration of words alive. Venture into one of these huts and you’re transported. Dark and misty, these spaces helped save literature and still give off an air of dedicated passion. Add to this a mix of archeological sites, Iron Age promontory forts, early Christian monastic sites and seventeenth century tower houses and you begin to understand how rich and varied the history of the Dingle Peninsula truly is.


The area still feels slightly removed from the modern world. It’s a place where fishing and farming actually matter; with the boats that sail from the rain-stung harbor in Dingle (the largest town on the Peninsula) giving off a nostalgic whiff of peat and the landscape dotted with farms and houses that come in every imaginable hue. Stay here and you’ll forget to worry, forget to stress and forget that the real world actually exists. This is pure Ireland. And pure Ireland is wonderful.

Liz Schaffer

21/03/2013

Applied Design at MoMA

Applied Design at MoMA

The word design has infinite meaning. We witness it every day while we shop for our groceries, drive a car, use the computer or buy our clothes and furniture. Every single object we touch has, to a certain level, been designed. That is what makes design so interesting, because it impacts our lives in deep, yet almost invisible ways. Nevertheless, its meaning and usefulness have for so long been publicly distorted. Hence, we often confuse design for styling, for a superficial quality which can be applied to an object to our choice. But this conception of design is completely wrong, since without this silent practice we wouldn’t even have those objects we interact with daily.


As Paola Antonelli, senior curator of architecture and design at MoMA puts it: “We were able to realize that design artists are the ones that transform the great revolutions into small gestures. Scientists and engineers produce disruptive inventions but designers are the ones that transform those innovations into objects that we can all use.
 Without them, there would be no progress in our lives; we wouldn’t have microwaves to heat up our food, we would not be able to use the Internet, we wouldn’t be driving cars with such ease. I could go on because the list is long, and the same goes for all the different types of technology. So design artists therefore play a fundamental role. If you compare society to a digestive system, design artists play the part of enzymes because it’s thanks to them that society is able to digest the inventions it receives.”


It is exactly this approach to design that the current exhibition at MoMA, “Applied Design” curated by Paola Antonelli and Kate Carmody, tries to highlight. It testifies the amazing diversity of contemporary graphic design and all the different forms it can take, from interface and interaction design, dynamic visualizations, products, furniture, 3D printed chairs and bowls, emergency equipment, and biodesign. Hence, you can see mine detonator by the young Dutch/Afghani designer Massoud Hassani to a bowl made by transforming desert sand into glass using only the energy of the sun, together with 14 video-games that the museum has recently acquired with the idea of pushing the boundaries of common preconceptions about what design is, or should be.

As the wider public, through bombastic design weeks and posh magazines, is being falsely induced in thinking that design should only be beautiful, almost as a piece of art you can just sit on, it is the work of curators like Antonelli and shows like “Applied Design” that we should all be more aware of since as Gui Bonsiepe states: “Design still is in this transition period, in which it is often considered a kind of external extravagance, which you can do or not do. For this reason, the notion of design as ‘added value’ is so misleading, because it presumes that you can have an object that is without design, to which you can ‘add’ something. But no, it is design by itself, whether it is bad design, this is another question.”

“Applied Design” is on show at Museum of Modern Art in New York until the 31st of January 2014.

Rujana Rebernjak 

20/03/2013

The Believer Turns Ten

The Believer Turns Ten

The Believer celebrated its tenth anniversary at Le Poisson Rouge in Greenwich Village last week, and they’ll soon be having another party, this time at Greenlight Bookstore on Fulton Street in Brooklyn, on March 25th. The celebration at Le Poisson Rouge featured guest spots from editors Heidi Julavits, Vendela Vida, Ed Park, Sheila Heti, and a hilarious and insightful reading about the absurdities of day labor from noted author and Believer contributor Nick Hornby. It also included, to the delight of many, a dessert table overflowing with cupcakes, cream-puff strawberries, carrot cake, and free issues of the magazine’s 10th anniversary issue. It was delicious.

The Believer is ten. Woo hoo. So what’s the big deal?

Any print publication that can survive ten years in today’s publishing climate should give themselves a toast. But a literary magazine that routinely publishes things like reviews of forgotten foreign films, profile pieces on children’s books from the 1940s, innovative poetry and interviews, and an advice column by Amy Sedaris? They deserve the keys to the liquor store.

The Believer was founded by Dave Eggers and Vida, and it features regular columns by notable writers Nick Hornby, Daniel Chandler, and legendary cultural critic Greil Marcus. The magazine serves as something of a defiant reaction to a diminishing publishing industry and a diminishing demand for physical objects: it’s beautifully printed on heavy paper, in full color, thick at the spine, and full of thoughtful writing from serious writers who refuse to take themselves too seriously. “As you all know, the publishing industry is booming,” Julavits said at Le Poisson Rouge, “so we’re not going to sit up here and ask you to subscribe for a year, tell that it’s only $40, or that we’ll be throwing a raffle for those who sign up tonight.” The raffle included a week-long email conversation with Hornby, in which he agreed to answer any question about anything. Anyone who’s thumbed through “High Fidelity” has a pretty good idea about just how sweet that would be.

The night also found Interviews Editor Sheila Heti caught in a semi-awkward interview with comic artist Gabrielle Bell and author Amanda Filipacchi about the nature of creativity, habits, and where they would all be without an outlet for their artistic urges. “On the street,” Bell admitted, adding yet another reason to be grateful that The Believer continues to persevere against all odds.

Lane Koivu

19/03/2013

Men in Skirts

Men in Skirts

What would you say if we told you that Alexander the Great conquered half of the planet wearing a skirt? You would probably laugh, but it’s true. Back in the days, really back, wearing a skirt was routine, it didn’t matter if you were an emperor or a slave, a woman or a man, no difference at all. That was true until 1760. Later on, someone created trousers for riding horses easier, and they quickly became the standard apparel for working men, identified as the symbol of masculinity in the Western culture.



Except for the kilt, which was invented in 1720 by an Englishman, industrialist Thomas Rawlinson, and emerged as one of the main symbols of Scotland and Ireland, which was probably the latest official tradition of skirts in the male wardrobe. But there have been and always will be some rare exceptions. During the 60s appeared a kind of a unisex fashion movement, well represented by a designer indicated as the responsible for unisex clothing concept: Rui Gernreich. He conceived interchangeable clothes for men and women such as floor-length kaftans. His goal was to break down boundaries between genders.

After him there was London in the 80s. A group of cool, young people, tired of conservative and glossy fashion, created a movement called Buffalo, where random guys on the street turned into models wearing a mix of couture and second hand clothing. The leader of this revolutionary wave was the pioneer of stylists: Ray Petri. Not only was he mixing high fashion and recycled clothing, the look he created for men was tough and androgynous, feminine and very virile in his primordial way. Meanwhile the concept of gender-benders started rising thanks to Boy George and New Romantics who used to dress up with medieval and feminine clothes.



Some years later, in September 1984, Jean Paul Gaultier credited Buffalo creating a whole collection of men in skirts, “Et Dieu Créa L’Homme”. Another, Walter Van Beirendonck, during his Autumn/Winter 1999-2000 collection called “No References”, gave tribute to men in skirts. As Gernreich in the 60s, Beirendonck is considered a highly visionary designer using skirts to challenge the traditional idea of masculinity. He strongly believes that skirts on men are more than simple garments, they are statements.

In 2003 The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York honored the masculine skirt dedicating a whole exhibition to it. Outside the MET building there was a march of hundreds of men: “We have the right of wearing skirts as women wears trousers”, they declared. Recent years see skirts as protagonists again, on for example actors Jared Leto and Vin Diesel, designer Marc Jacobs and rapper Kanye West. Fashion gave them the chance to re-discover the item, thanks to Comme des Garçons, John Galliano, Etro, Rick Owens, Givenchy, J.W. Anderson and many others following the same path.

So, skirts have already been the item for the masculine men in the past, will they some day be that again?

Francesca Crippa

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