Comme des Garcons: Body Meets Dress, Dress Meets Body - 4:3

Comme des Garcons: Body Meets Dress, Dress Meets Body - 4:3

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Comme des Garcons: Body Meets Dress, Dress Meets Body

Raw Footage

1 min

Rei Kawakubo arrived on the Paris fashion scene in the late 80s, at the height of the era of the supermodel, when the de facto message of fashion was that women were beautiful only insofar as they were polished and glamorous. Kawakubo’s collections decidedly rejected this idea, which came as a shock to the proverbial fashion system. All Kawakubo’s designs pushed the limits of wearability, but her Spring/Summer 97 collection (entitled ‘Body Meets Dress, Dress Meets Body’, but commonly known as ‘Lumps and Bumps’) went as far as to challenge the limits of the female body and its desirability. Inserting kidney-shaped pillows into the linings of each piece, Kawakubo emphasised traditionally sexualised body parts (hips, breasts, ass) as well as not-so (shoulderblades). Seen here on mixed-gender performers (a collaboration between Kawakubo and choreographer Merce Cunningham from 1997), the silhouettes, at once grotesque and familiar trip the eye, as if making us question what exactly is a woman.

Zsófia Paulikovics

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Fashion Collections: Identity

Flyer for event Hood by Air: Autumn/Winter 14.

Hood by Air: Autumn/Winter 14

Set up in the mid-noughties by designer Shayne Oliver and artist and director Leilah Weinraub (whose latest endeavour is the documentary feature Shakedown, exploring the black lesbian strip club of the same name in Los Angeles) Hood by Air has always been exceedingly good at dissecting identity with nuance and precision. The finale of Shayne’s Autumn/Winter 14 show began, with pleasing symmetry, like the show itself: with sculptural bodies emerging from a cloud of smoke. Wearing identical blonde wigs, Hood by Air trousers and a naked torso, the models erupted in an ecstatic, high-energy voguing performance, to a soundtrack by Total Freedom and Juliana Huxtable entitled ‘10 000 Screaming Faggots’. Arriving at a time when the intersection of black and queer culture was beginning to face increasing commercialisation with little actual shifts in power, the performance – combative but delicate, an homage but not an invitation – was an uncompromising statement. Zsófia Paulikovics

Flyer for event Rick Owens: Vicious.

Rick Owens: Vicious

Fashion’s treatment of women and how it fits into the political landscape is on everyone’s minds at the moment, and has been, more covertly, for the best part of the decade. How do you make sure women have agency, in a medium where they are fundamentally objects? For his Spring/Summer 2018 show entitled ‘Vicious’, Owens hired four sororities of step dancers, the Zetas, Washington Divas, Soul Steppers and Momentums, to perform and model his clothes. Choreographers Lauretta Malloy Noble and her daughter LeeAnet built the performance around stepping, a dance form which evolved in historically African American colleges as a mixture of step dancing, cheerleading and military drill, making the cast diverse by default, in race but also in body type, a fact almost as unusual on Paris catwalks as models of colour. The dancers, features arranged in a frown step terminology calls ‘grit face’, were anything but docile. They had a purpose, a reason to be on the runway. Their presence made the clothes necessary, rather than the other other way around. Zsófia Paulikovics

Flyer for event Mowalola: Central Saint Martins BA Fashion Press Show 2017.

Mowalola: Central Saint Martins BA Fashion Press Show 2017

Skip to 47 minutes in to get to Mowalola's show Fashion isn’t always kinds to its young but even with the relentless pace of the industry, every once in a while a new designer’s vision cuts through the noise. More often than not, it’s the ones with a clear idea of who they are and why, like in the case of Nigeria-born designer and Central Saint Martins student, Mowalola Ogunlesi. Ogunlesi’s graduate collection (her first ever) was inspired by Nigerian psychedelic rock from the 70s and 80s, exploring the culture and desires of the African male, in homage to the community she grew up in. The accompanying lookbook was shot by Ruth Ossai and styled by Ib Kamara, whose work Ogunlesi liked for being ‘unapologetically black’ - much like her own. Zsófia Paulikovics

Flyer for event Susan Cianciolo: Run 3: Pro Abortion/Anti Pink.

Susan Cianciolo: Run 3: Pro Abortion/Anti Pink

Susan Cianciolo, the New York-based artist -designer-conceptualist created 11 Run collections between 1995-2005 ceasing the line more or less exactly at the same time the fashion industry began to embrace her. The Run shows presented early versions of many of the fashion tropes that are still (or newly) considered subversive today: performance pieces, short films, non-model models, a focus on artistic collaboration. One of Cianciolo’s most memorable collections was not a show at all, but a film, depicting a group of women spinning around on a field arm in arm, and elsewhere, models hanging suspended on tightropes. The film itself isn’t explicitly political – created in the 90s, before the true rise of the id-pol era, gallerist Andrea Rosen recalled for Vogue: ‘No one was sitting around thinking, “Oh, we’re reactionary or against.”’ The film’s title, in fact (thought up by Cianciolo’s friend, Harmony Korine) is as provocative as it gets. But there’s a feeling of female community, without losing at the same time, the subjectivity of each model – gazing directly into the camera, suspended mid-air like real life Louise Bourgeois spiders. Zsófia Paulikovics

Flyer for event Gosha Rubchinskiy: 2018 Spring/Summer Collection.

Gosha Rubchinskiy: 2018 Spring/Summer Collection

In 2004, Burberry’s now departed chief creative Christopher Bailey was promoted from design director to creative director, with the more or less explicit aim of containing the house’s rising image problem. The Burberry check had become associated with, on the one hand, the nouveau riche who flaunted wealth through excessive logo wear, and on the other, ‘chavs’, the predominantly white working class British youth associated with football hooliganism, antisocial behaviour and petty misdemeanours. Burberry’s UK sales were falling and the house was looking for a drastic image change, resulting in some surreal initial collections from Bailey, that stood out only for their saccharine Britishness. Fast forward fifteen years to the unveiling of Burberry’s collaboration with Gosha Rubchinskiy, at the designer’s Spring/Summer 18 show in St Petersburg. Rubchinksiy has often stated that his aesthetics are inspired by the figure of the ‘gopnik’, the Russian equivalent of the chav and the imagery accompanying the Burberry collaboration was shot on a football field – a clever nod both at Gosha’s own reference points and the image that Burberry tried so hard to shed. Despite the fact it was released under a Russian designer, the Gosha x Burberry was an important reclamation for British working class identity: ironic proof that a chav is only a chav when (s)he’s not in fashion. Zsófia Paulikovics

Flyer for event Comme des Garcons: Body Meets Dress, Dress Meets Body.

Comme des Garcons: Body Meets Dress, Dress Meets Body

Rei Kawakubo arrived on the Paris fashion scene in the late 80s, at the height of the era of the supermodel, when the de facto message of fashion was that women were beautiful only insofar as they were polished and glamorous. Kawakubo’s collections decidedly rejected this idea, which came as a shock to the proverbial fashion system. All Kawakubo’s designs pushed the limits of wearability, but her Spring/Summer 97 collection (entitled ‘Body Meets Dress, Dress Meets Body’, but commonly known as ‘Lumps and Bumps’) went as far as to challenge the limits of the female body and its desirability. Inserting kidney-shaped pillows into the linings of each piece, Kawakubo emphasised traditionally sexualised body parts (hips, breasts, ass) as well as not-so (shoulderblades). Seen here on mixed-gender performers (a collaboration between Kawakubo and choreographer Merce Cunningham from 1997), the silhouettes, at once grotesque and familiar trip the eye, as if making us question what exactly is a woman. Zsófia Paulikovics

Flyer for event Stephen Sprouse: Autumn/Winter 84.

Stephen Sprouse: Autumn/Winter 84

For some time, made briefer than it should have been by his untimely death in 2004, Stephen Sprouse was to fashion what Andy Warhol was to art: a social commentator, a superb executor of simple ideas and most of all, a New Yorker. Before launching his brand, Sprouse lived in the same building as Debbie Harry and art directed several of Blondie’s music videos. Autumn/Winter 84 was his first proper collection, held at the Ritz Club on New York’s Lower East Side with thousands queuing to get in. Transgender model Teri Troye opened the show in a waist-length blonde wig and cut-out orange sequin mini dress. The collection (a series of cashmere and alpaca pieces in acid neons printed with Sprouse’s signature graffiti writing) as well as the audience (a mix of fashion editors and downtown club kids) ushered in ‘the mix’, that New York-brand of hi-lo punk that lived and died with Sprouse – it’s earliest, irreplaceable version did, anyway. Zsófia Paulikovics

Flyer for event Raf Simons: Woe Onto Those Who Spit on the Fear Generation… The Wind Will Blow it Back.

Raf Simons: Woe Onto Those Who Spit on the Fear Generation… The Wind Will Blow it Back

It’s easy to wax lyrical about Raf Simons, partly as a byproduct of his incredible prolificness. But to understand the influence he’s had on young men growing up after the millennium – not just their clothes but their lives and sensibilities – it’s necessary to acknowledge that Simons anticipates how they will feel before they even feel it. His Spring/Summer 2002 collection, entitled ‘Woe Onto Those Who Spit on the Fear Generation… The Wind Will Blow it Back’ showed models barefoot with their heads and faces covered, carrying torches and wearing slogans like ‘We Are Ready and Willing to Ignite, Just Born Too Late.’ The collection went on to become one of Simon’s most influential, even though arriving unfortunately at the post 9/11 era, he feared it might end his career at the time. What Simons wanted showcase was a generation of freedom fighters, of idealist young men, ready to fight and willing to find a reason, a sentiment that in many ways, predated the outdated, claustrophobic, ready-to-burst masculinity of the later 2000s. Zsófia Paulikovics

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