Dear readers,
Please check out the work of Nico Uytterhaegen, the Belgian designer who produces some brilliant bags, footwear, jewelry and a perfume series. We are glad to share the showroom space with Nico in Paris during the men’s fashion week next month at 13 rue de Thorigny in the Marais district.
“It’s all about embodiment in the digital age,” – I overheard at the opening of the Iris Van Herpen’s exhibition at SHOWcabinet, Belgravia’s new installation space curated by Nick Knight’s SHOWstudio project. The man who said it was Tobias Klein, one of the artists whose work accompanies Van Herpen’s in SHOWcabinet. His sculptures shown here include an extract from The Invisible Human, a 3D-printed Magnetic Resonance Image of a human abdomen with aluminium sulphate crystals grown over it in a process that echoes those occurring in the body when it is dying. If this sounds a bit complex, it is because Klein’s work, just like that of most participants’, oscillates between art and science.
In case you did not know, GUIDI, the Italian maker of shoes and bags, is also a tannery with a 120 year tenure, called Guidi & Rosellini.
Next season the company pays tribute to its heritage by relaunching the Guidi & Rosellini brand of shoes and bags. All products will be made from cowhide leather that will not be shaved before tanning, rendering each hide unique due to its varying thickness.
First time I came across Taiana Giefer’s work, I spent a while examining one of her scarves. It was majestic, in a fairy tale way, something from another era. I wondered about how it was constructed, the crisscrossing wool felt surfaces that formed a kind of a grid, leaving openings like fortress embrasures. The fringes looked liked dreadlocks; the whole things was tactile, alive. A year later I met the California-born designer when we used her scarves for one of the StyleZeitgeist magazine editorials.
Dear readers, I am happy to announce the launch of OtherFashion, the new e-commerce project curated by StyleZeitgeist. This venture arose quite spontaneously, from numerous encounters with under-the-radar designers who do impressive work but are not necessarily well-known, usually because they do not want or cannot afford to play by the rules of the…
Dear readers,
We wrote about the otherworldly work of Aoi Kotsuhiroi in our second print volume. Those of you who will be attending the Arnhem Fashion Biennial in Holland, curated under the theme “Fetishism in Fashion,” will be able to experience Kotsuhiroi’s creations in the flesh, but we offer a little preview here.
Dear readers,
We want to introduce to you another outstanding under-the-radar brand, Piece d’Anarchive. We came across their clothes at Susan of Burling Game in San Francisco and we were thoroughly blown away by the quality of fabrics and construction. They do best what we love vest – take the traditional values of craftsmanship and make them absolutely modern.
From the 29th to the 31st of May 2013, during the Preview days for 55th International Art Biennale, Paris-based under-the-radar label Aganovich will join forces with Venetian brand Setecento to present a womenswear capsule collection at Bauers l’Hotel in Venice.
In 2011 Zhao Wu and Chen-Ling Fan decided to solve an all-too-familiar problem – how to offer interesting basics without breaking the customers’ bank. Thus VOIDTHEBRAND, the line of not-so-basic men’s tops was born.
The business opportunity seemed a no-brainer. There clearly is a void to fill, as there is significant demand from those who want to neither pay $350 for a designer t-shirt nor be stuck with a run-of-the-mill crewneck offered by mass market retailers.
A 1970s cabinet from the German Democratic Republic with a frameless mirror on top, a low and narrow single bed, an Uzbek patterned carpet: the furnishings that fill the newly-assembled living-room in the basement of Dover Street Market are unmistakably Soviet. As someone born and raised in the USSR I immediately recognize the utilitarian shapes, yet the textures are unfamiliar: every piece is coated in a heavy mix of plaster, latex, liquid rubber and hessian that makes the objects look like ghosts of themselves. The mirror does not reflect anything, the carpet’s pattern is barely intelligible, the once-glossy wooden surface of the chest is rendered white and matt; the overall dreamlike feeling is that of stepping into the living-room of my childhood decades later, and finding everything in its old place but buried under the weight of time passed. This is the newly opened installation by Cherevichkiotvichki, the London-based shoe label that takes inspiration in abandoned spaces, time and memory.