Eco Chic: Towards Sustainable Swedish Fashion

Julian Red. Photo: Mikael Schultz @ Swedish Institute

by Francesca Granata

The Eco-Chic: Towards Sustainable Swedish Fashion Exhibition at the Scandinavia House opened with an interesting panel discussion including Marcus Bergman (managing director of Ecocotton, a pioneer in organic cotton production), Sass Brown (a professor at the Fashion Institute of Technology whose research focuses on women’s cooperatives in Latin America) and Karin Stenmar (a founder of the Swedish eco-fashion company Dem Collective). It was moderated by Hazel Clark, Dean of the School of Art and Design History and Theory at Parsons, who has a longstanding interest in slow fashion and the secondhand clothing trade.

Organized as a roundtable discussion, it covered the difficulty in sourcing sustainable material, partially attributed to the lack of innovation in the textiles industry, the need for living wages and the development of women’s cooperatives. Bodkin tied her interest in eco-fashion to her interest in Swedish Modernism and a drive towards functionality in clothing. However, it was interesting to hear how, according to Bergman, the ethos of Swedish design “of functionality and honesty in design” did not sufficiently enter the realm of fashion, due to the fact that fashion/textiles studies developed separately from other branches of design, at least in Sweden. The need for a new fashion design education was thus addressed to allow for the development of more aware designers. Also mentioned was the need for mass-market companies to join the conversation. According to Brown, this is actually occurring: As an example she mentioned Wal-Mart’s commitment to transitional cotton—a company which seemed odd to bring up due to their long-standing history of labour exploitation.

Clark asked about the creation of memories and narratives through clothes, something that Stenmar’s company, Dem Collective, addressed by having buyers record the life of their clothes in a project called One in a Thousand Jeans. This reminded me of an evocative and inspiring project I had been meaning to write about by a Dutch designer Ruby Hoette—Worn Relics—which involves the recording of the life story of one’s favourite piece of clothes.

The exhibition, shows the diversity of design comprising Swedish eco fashion, and proves a real commitment on the part of Sweden and the Swedish design community to the search for sustainable solutions for the fashion industry. It remains open through August 21.

Spring Fashion Events around NYC

Jane Fonda in Klute

by Sarah Scaturro

This spring there are a lot of events occurring around NYC with fashion as the main focus. Here is a breakdown of the ones that I’ve been able to find, and they are all free! Please leave a comment if I've left anything out.

April 9th - Richard Martin Visual Culture Symposium Tonight is the Annual Richard Martin Visual Culture Symposium at NYU, which allows the graduating students of the Visual Culture MA program to lecture on their thesis topic. Worn Through has a breakdown of the topics and schedule.

April 13th, 20th and 27th – Fashion In Film: New York City The brand new MA program in Fashion Studies at Parsons The New School for Design is hosting a fashion in film series for the entire month of April. Curated by Jeffrey Lieber, Assistant Professor of Visual Culture Studies, the series has some fashion classics - Annie Hall and Sabrina - but also some lesser-known films with impressive fashions, such as Klute (Jane Fonda) and On a Clear Day You Can See Forever (Barbara Streisand).

April 15th – 16th Bard Graduate Center Annual Symposium Bard Graduate Center is having their annual symposium on April 15-16th on the topic of Secondhand Culture: Waste, Value, and Materiality. I can’t wait for to hear Senior Curator of Costume at the ROM Alexandra Palmer speak on “Back to Back: Retro-fitting Fashion within the Museum.” There will also be a screening of the film “Secondhand.”

April 19th – Anna Wintour Lecture According to NY MAG Anna Wintour is giving a free lecture on the 19th at 6 pm at Pratt Institute.

April 22nd – FIT’s 4th Annual Sustainable Business & Design conference This year’s theme is Redesigning for a Sustainable Future. Go here for more information.

April 27th – Mannequins in the Museum: Perspectives on Curating Fashion The lecture I’m most excited for is by Joanne Dolan Ingersoll, a truly talented curator from RISD. She will be giving a lecture for SVA’s Design Criticism MFA lecture series on a topic I have great interest in due to my work: “Mannequins in the Museum: Perspectives on Curating Fashion.”

April 29th – Predicting Color Trends in Fashion FIT is hosting the seriously hardworking historian Reggie Blaszczyk on April 29th when she’ll give a lecture on the history of predicting color trends. I was fortunate enough to meet her at the Business History conference last year in Milan - I had just read her article on Dorothy Liebes called “Designing Synthetics, Building Brands” in the Journal of Design History. As someone who studies synthetics and has handled Liebes’ textiles, the article about blew my mind.

May 4th – Towards Sustainable Fashion Symposium In conjunction with the Scandinavian House’s Eco-Chic exhibition, there will be a panel discussion featuring Marcus Bergman, Karin Stenmar, Sass Brown and Eviana Hartman, and moderated by Hazel Clark, Dean of the School of Art and Design and Theory, Parsons: The New School for Design.

May 8th – FIT’s Annual Fashion and Textiles Symposium This year’s topic for FIT’s Annual Fashion and Textiles Symposium on May 8th sounds great - Americans in Paris: Designers, Buyers, Editors, Photographers, Models, and Clients in Paris Fashion.

May 21st and 22nd - Costume Collections: A Collaborative Model for Museums The Brooklyn Museum and the Costume Institute are hosting a 2-day symposium about their new costume collaboration. I’m looking forward to seeing both exhibitions this spring!

Fashion Projects #3: Editorial Letter

by Francesca Granata

Back Cover: Eugenia Yu, "Tie Dress" from Father Collection

In thinking of clothes as passing fashions, we repeat less than half-truth. Bodies come and go; the clothes which have received those bodies survive. They circulate though secondhand shops, through rummage sales, through the Salvation Army; or they are transmitted from parent to child, from sister to sister, from brother to brother, from sister to brother, from lover to lover, from friend to friend. (Peter Stallybrass, “Worn Worlds: Clothes, Mourning, and the Life of Things” The Yale Review 1993 vol. 81. no. 2, pp. 35-50)

The idea of dedicating an issue of Fashion Projects to the topic of fashion and memory started while reading Peter Stallybrass’s “Worn Worlds: Clothes, Mourning, and the Life of Things,” an engaging and lyrical essay on the author’s remembrance of his late colleague Allon White through the garments White wore.

Stallybrass’s piece elucidates people’s intimate relations with clothes—i.e. their materiality, their smell and creases—and the inextricable relations between clothes and memory. It traces the way in which clothes retain "the history of our bodies." Wearing White’s jacket at a conference, the author describes the way clothes are able to trigger strong and vivid memories: "He was there in the wrinkles of the elbows, wrinkles that in the technical jargon of sewing are called 'memory'; he was there in the stains at the very bottom of the jacket; he was there in the smell of the armpits."

My interest in the topic was then piqued while sitting in on a class on fashion curation taught by Alistair O’ Neil at the London College of Fashion, where a number of students curated a fashion exhibition comprised of used gowns and top hats, their main value resting not in their design or historical relevance to fashion in history, but in their being second (or maybe third or fourth) hand, thus retaining intricate yet irretrievable history in their signs or wear, their stains, their scents. This lyrical exhibition, titled "A Walk in the Wardrobe" and staged in an old and seemingly abandoned space, was a reminder of the importance of reconnecting with the materiality of cloth and clothes.

This issue’s focus on clothes and memory dovetails with attempts to promote sustainability within the fashion industry. It invokes a counter-tendency in contemporary fashion which reinstates the importance of materiality and emotional connections to our garments in the hope to slow down the accelerated cycles of consumption and discard promoted by current fashion models. As Stallybrass points out, moments of emotional connections with clothes and cloth become, in fact, rare in the accelerated rhythm of contemporary societies: "I think this is because, for all our talk of the 'materialism' of modern life, attention to material is precisely what is absent. Surrounded by an extraordinary abundance of materials, their value is to be endlessly devalued and replaced."

The various contributors to Fashion Projects explore this theme in disparate ways. Sarah Scaturro, textile conservator of the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, revisits, together with photographer Keith Price, the museum’s textile collection and her intimate relation with it. She also discusses curatorial practices with Judith Clark, whose exhibition “Malign Muses: When Fashion Turns Back”—based on Caroline Evans’s theories—is an exploration of the complex temporalities of fashion. Tamsen Schwartzman interviews Tanya Marcuse on her photographic work in fashion archives, while fashion designer Shelly Fox discusses her own design and textiles practice. Erica Weiner recounts her use of other people’s memories via old photographs and human hair for the making of her jewelry, while fledgling designer Eugenia Yu tells Erin Lindstrom of her collections based on her family memories. Finally, Lisa Santandrea revisits North America’s industrial past and obsolete technologies, as they remain embodied in knits produced by the now-defunct Ohio Knitting Mills.

Fashion Projects #3

Cover Image: Shelley Fox, "Foundation," Study and Telephone Room, Belsay Hall: Northumbria, 2004. Photo: Keith Paisley.

Fashion Projects 3 is out and will be available in newstands and bookstores in North America, as well as on our website! The issue focuses on the topic of fashion and memory and was inspired by a moving essay on the topic by Peter Stallybrass. It features interviews with fashion curator Judith Clark, fashion designer Shelley Fox, photographer Tanya Marcuse and much more—and was beautifully designed by Shannon Curren.

We hope you'll enjoy our new issue, as we much as we enjoyed making it!

K8 Hardy's Fashion Week performance at JF & Son.

K8 Hardy's various guises for her Fashion Week performance at JF & Son. All Photos: Eliza Douglas

Travis Boyer started a series titled MFT for My Favorite Things in which an artist collaborates to create “textile-based artist multiples that explore material and materiality using the innumerable resources of JF & Son.” K8 Hardy, with her longstanding engagement with fashion and performance, was an obvious match for the project—as was the store JF & Son, which, as the Timesrecently pointed out, is one of the most interesting new stores to open in the last year. Known for their unique textiles, the company—comprised of Jesse Finkelstein, "Katie" B. King, and Travis Boyer—partners with artisans and artists from New York and India to create “forward-thinking clothing through socially conscious strategies.”

K8 Hardy celebrated “the launch” of her collection, ironically titled J’APPROVE, with an irreverent performance in which she wore the various pieces from her collection in a day-long event, creating a new persona with each changing outfit. I only caught the tail-end of the performance, in which Hardy wore a bustier reminiscent of 1980s Gaultier. Perhaps surprisingly, the collection is eminently wearable and at times quite pretty, veering as Hardy’s various personas seeemed to do from a tough 1980s inspired body-con look to a slightly off-kilter pretty look, which featured whimisicallly printed dresses and shirts. Hardy's "styling" was also reminiscent of early Ann-Sofie Back. The collection will become available on line at the J & F Son today.

Francesca