McQueen’s fashion often illustrated exaggerated feminine silhouettes of the 1860s, 1880s, 1890s and 1950s, but always reinterpreted and evolved. That is, at a very first sight, these silhouettes come from the future, not from the past. 

Ensemble It’s a Jungle Outhere A/W 1997-1998 

“Recurring themes in McQueen’s work that are explored begin with “The Savage Mind” which examines his subversion of traditional tailoring and dressmaking practices through displacement and deconstruction. “Romantic Gothic” highlights McQueen’s narrative approach to fashion and illuminates his engagement with Romantic literary tradition such as death, decay and darkness. “Romantic Nationalism” looks at his fascination with distant past, while “Romantic Exoticism” examines his focus on distant places. “Romantic Primitivism” explores McQueen’s engagement with the ideal of the “noble savage”. Source http://www.luxuryculture.com 

Dress A/W 2010

Dress The Horn of Plenty A/W 2009-2010

Dress Irere S/S 2003

Dress A/W 2010 and Ensemble Plato’s Atlantis S/S 2010

Ensemble Voss S/S 2001

Oyster Dress S/S 2003

Dress Sarabande S/S 2007

Ensemble Dante A/W 2006-2007

Dress Widows of Culloden A/W  2006-2007

Dress Voss,S/S 2001

The New York Metropolitan Museum of Art features between the 4th of May and the 31st of July, 2011, 100 examples of Alexander McQueen’s work his 19-year career in fashion design, some of them being the creations above. So, if you are in New York, don’t miss the opportunity to see them. 

Why not a message for all of you? Because this time, it’s about my dear women. 

Considering you are on a fashion learning platform, I guess you should get this message from a double perspective. First, as aspiring or time being designers and secondly as human beings. 

I am going to talk in this post about TACTILE, an awesome project by the Romanian designer, Adrian Oianu. 

TACTILE is a project illustrating once again the designer’s vision on femininity, which is synonymous to sensitivity, emotion, fragility, refinement and delicacy. And one can identify all these terms in his creative work: from design, to photography and fashion film. 

As Adrian Oianu reveals, his point of inspiration is the kind of woman he met in his mother, in his sister, in his friends, in those he saw walking down the street, all of them having something in common: they are all Romanian women whose femininity is totally unaggressive. 

I’d love to say that, actually, TACTILE speaks about the authentic woman all over the world. So, please, watch, feel and rediscover yourself!

Episode 1

Episode 2

What I have learned from Adrian Oianu’s project TACTILE is, first of all, the need of pursuing a dominant concept when building a collection, or maybe when building an entire creative life, and also, that besides presenting the actual designs, one should let us play with different creative media supports like photography or fashion film in order to communicate in a very inspiring way our creations to those we are making them for. 

P.S. Today, during one of the design courses he teaches, besides an awesome professional, I have also discovered a truly inspiring human being. 

“My only influence has come from space,” declares Pierre Cardin. And this is obvious, I would say, if looking at his fashion and industrial designs.

Evening gown with embedded hoops. 

Strapless gown in bicolor velvet, 1994

Strapless dress in gazar

Sunglasses

Winter collection 1966

Pearls neckless 

And here are some of his beautiful industrial designs:

Junior circles and Scale lamp

Neon clock

“Almost all fashion starts on paper … where the ideas begin. This is the part I enjoy most about fashion, because you really can create anything you can imagine (even if it can’t actually be made). So I joined the idea of ‘Paper’ and ‘Fashion’ in creating the name,” explains Kathryn Elyse, the creator behind Paperfashion.

Read here the rest of an amazing and useful interview she made with Infashuated.com

I love interdisciplinarity. It involves research in the goal of connecting and integrating several academic schools of thought, professions, or technologies. More than that, it also applies a lot in the initial step when artists “gather” inspiration. 

We’ve been talking a lot on this blog about the important role of inspiration when creating, about how inspiration from different areas applies in fashion. Now I’m presenting a nice example of how fashion inspires artists practicing other kind of arts.

That is, LACOSTE challenged Chinese artist Li Xiaofeng to create two different polos for the 2010 Holiday Collector’s Series. 

photo (c) Miko He

photo (c) Miko He

photo (c) LACOSTE

Li Xiaofengtrained as a muralist but turned to sculpture to explore a new concept and expression of Chinese landscapes. His choice of material is unexpected; instead of marble, wood or even glass, he  prefers buying shards of broken porcelain recovered from ancient archeological digs, some dating from the Ming Dynasty, and then shaping and polishing them, drilling holes into each corner and linking them together with silver wire to create ’rearranged landscapes’.

Here are some of his other fashion inspired works:

photo (c) Miko He

And this is how the artist describes the steps to make his porcelain clothing sculptures:

Firstly, composing the piece is a process. I must reflect a lot about it. I must make a rough sketch, compose, reject it and start again. Sometimes, I straightaway use Plasticene or wire to create a model. After this, after confirming the period of the shards, I classify the colour of the patterns, then put together a rough arrangement of the shards, cut and polish each piece. This is a very repetitive process. I must pay close attention to the modelling as well as the original pattern colour of the shards. I then must weld the pieces and make the final adjustments.

photo (c) Miko He

Go to museums, fairs, exhibitions, shops, openings and make photos of appealing to you things and compositions. Include them in your inspiration board. They will be very useful later on in your creative process. Even if you are not going to be aware of it. 

Here is a set of photos I made at a fashion fair, called “The big ishoes”, in Bucharest. 

Today, I discovered the journal of a final year fashion student at Central Saint Martins on Tumblr. 

This is what he or she (I couldn’t figure yet) is doing for his/her degree work:

About this time next year the historic and important college will move from its Soho site and join other branches of CSM in a new purpose-built development in King’s Cross. As it is the end of an era for this legendary institution, I have found it meaningful to make a documentary film about the art college and the old St Martins school building on Charing Cross Road for my degree work. I am a first time film director, I have a year to make the film and to convience all the most famous and important CSM alumni and legends of fashion to talk to me and share their memories.

The entire process of the film making will be described on the blog. There are already a few posts published. I started following the blog and I can’t wait to get more inside information of this magic land of art.

So, I strongly recommend you to follow it, too.  

Within the fashion industry, intellectual property is not enforced as it is within the film industry and music industry. To “take inspiration” from others’ designs contributes to the fashion industry’s ability to establish clothing trends. Enticing consumers to buy clothing by establishing new trends is, some have argued, a key component of the industry’s success. Intellectual property rules that interfere with the process of trend-making would, on this view, be counter-productive. In contrast, it is often argued that the blatant theft of new ideas, unique designs, and design details by larger companies is what often contributes to the failure of many smaller or independent design companies. (Source Wikipedia)

In connection with this topic, I found an interesting TED presentation about the lessons that other creatives could learn from fashion’s free culture, which also explains how the industry of fashion works, by Johanna Blakley. Here is a transcript of the main points that she states during the presentation: 

There’s trademark protection, but no copyright protection and no pattern protection to speak of. 

Why there’s no copyright protection, it’s just because some time ago, the court decided that apparel design is too utilitarian to qualify for copyright protection. What I am going to argue today is that because there’s no copyright protection in this industry, fashion designers have actually been able to elevate utilitarian design that used to cover our naked body into something that we consider art. Because there’s no copyright protection, there’s a very open ecology of creativity. 

 People ask themselves how do trends happen. 

 Is it something magical? Trends happen because it’s legal to copy one another. 

It’s a top down and a down to top kind of industry. 

Consumers get inspired by what designers create. Designers get inspired by what consumers wear, by the street fashion. 

The virtues of copying

- Democratization of fashion, which satisfies our need of lots of options in fashion.

- Faster establishment of global trends, which is good news for trend setters.

- Acceleration of creative process. Creators are forced to be better, come up with new ideas all the time. 

Other industries with no copyrighted creations: food, automobiles, furniture, magic tricks, hair dresses, open source, data bases, tattoos, jokes, fireworks, the rules of games, the smell of perfumes.  

Watch the video bellow for more interesting insights and to see which other industries sell better, the copyrighted or the free from copyright ones?

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• Should Fashion be Protected by Copyright Laws? A Guest Post (freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com)

Central Saint Martins provides specialist education and research in the fields of fine art, fashion & textiles, film, video and photography, graphics & communication design, three dimensional design, theatre & performance and interdisciplinary art & design.

CSM building in Charing Cross Road, Photo by Marta Lamovsek 

Operating in several buildings across London, its main headquarter is situated in the heart of London, a stone’s throw from Sevile Row, a street with significant influence on Bristish fashion. One of the most competitive art and design colleges in the world, the school of Fashion and Textiles encourages students to concentrate on a fashion pathway such as menswear, womenswear, or fashion marketing. 

Born in 1989, from the merger of two, much older, colleges: the Central School of Arts & Crafts (founded in 1896) and St Martin’s School of Art (founded in 1854), the school has produced some of the smartest designers on today’s runways including Alexander McQueen, John Galliano, Stella McCartney, Zac Posen. Graduates also have gone on to work at companies like Dior and Prada. 

• Address:  Southampton Row, London, England WC1B 4AP
• Web address: http://csm.arts.co.uk
• Tuition:  £3,290 per year for Foundation and Undergraduate degrees for UK/EU students, and £9,300 per year for International students. For Higher Education, an international student will have to pay £12,250 per year.
• Undergraduate enrollment: 2,929

The learning and teaching are project-based and offer committed students the freedom to experiment and find, or rather re-define, themselves within a creative environment. It provides a supportive tutorial structure which emphasises breadth as well as depth of research and an innovative approach to design development.

CSM is budget and commuter friendly.