This exhibition importantly fulfills a gap in scholarship available about the eco-fashion movement. Recent exhibitions like the one that Francesca Granata and I co-curated at Pratt Manhattan Gallery, Ethics + Aesthetics = Sustainable Fashion, surveyed and tried to make sense of the movement as it exists today, seeking to suggest ways to balance aesthetic needs with environmental stability. However, Farley and Hill have taken a different course. They have used a tough mandate – to chronologically tell the history of fashion over the past two centuries using only the MFIT collection – and ingeniously exposed the ways in which sustainability and fashion have always been intertwined. There are some very special things in the exhibition – besides an arsenic-dyed dress, there is a rare cape made from exotic bird feathers, a man’s dressing coat made from a patch-work quilt, and an electric blue fringed cellophane cape from Parisian couturier Lucien Lelong. I wish there would have been some examples of 19th century aesthetic dress, like a robe Jane Morris might have worn, but given the tight constraints of the gallery and the six themes, such a garment doesn’t really fit in. For any fashion student or scholar who is interested in sustainability (which is hopefully all of you) this exhibition should be a requirement.
What happens to a country’s visual culture when it moves from Soviet communism to post-Soviet liberalization? A pathbreaking exhibition in the former Soviet Central Asian republic of Kyrgyzstan, Epoxa (‘Epoch’) grapples with this question. It presents the republic’s initial independence years, 1991-2005, under the rule of the country’s first post-independence president, Askar Akaev. The Akaev era was brought to an abrupt end by the so-called ‘Tulip Revolution’ of March 2005: after two days of unrest in the capital, following rural mobilization and one night of looting, the president himself fled the country, and a new government headed by Kurmanbek Bakiev took power.
Known internationally also for its rapid liberalization in the 1990s, which earned it the nickname of Central Asia’s ‘island of democracy’ and for being the only Central Asian state to continue to host a US airbase, this small landlocked republic struggles to search for its cultural identity in the twenty-first century. Its population of just over five million is strongly influenced economically and informationally by neighboring China and Russia respectively. For the project’s curator, Gamal Bokonbaev, the sudden change represented: ‘a rejection rather than succession: time lept forward and offered opportunities, encouraged boldness in interpretations.’ How do we interpret what artists did with their new-found political freedom but also the loss of economic subsidization after communist collapse? How did the politics of the era co-exist with these new art forms? Epoxa explores the relationship between visual culture and liberalization through five spheres: film, advertising; painting; modern art; and, photography.
Held at the close of 2007, the exhibition was complemented by two beautifully produced catalogues, including an excellent analysis by Bokonbaev himself. Managed by Asel Akmatova (who runs Bishkek’s KuramaART Gallery), Evgenii Boikov and Furkat Tursunov, the project set out to include works finalized after independence and before the departure of Akaev. Further selection, Bokonbaev explained, was based less ‘on the merit of individual works than on their representing general tendencies in visual culture.’
While post-communist collapse increased the influence of global communications, certain features specific to Kyrgyzstan’s visual environment remain important. As a bilingual country (Kyrgyz and Russian), and one forging a new post-independence unity, the importance of visual culture assumed added importance. The upshot is a series of visual culture products that combine influences largely from: pre-Soviet tradition, the Soviet past, and recent Western influences.
At the exhibition’s entrance lies sand shaped in the form of a nude female body, reproducing a scene of Aktan Abdykalykov’s powerful film, Beshkempir. Although commercially financed, Aktan Abdykalykov’s cinema appealed to the new political elite’s independent state ideology. The gentle, kind, funny characters in the trilogy Selkinchek (1993), Beshkempir (1998) and Maimyl (2001) conveyed a positive image of the country, idealizing rural life, rooting the country in tradition and optimistic of its future. Marat Surulu’s urban-set films, also displayed at Epoxa, notably Wild river, Calm Sea (2004, released as In Hope), were the first to question the sustainaibility of this optimism, and portrayed individuals in the city grappling with psychological unease. How, these two cinematographers were asked, would they classify the Akaev years? For Abdykalykov they represented: ‘A terminus. Neverending expectations… huge emotional swings’. For Surulu, ‘a feeling of beginning which gave a sense of independence. A lot was not realized, and there was an inglorious end – producing yet another beginning. … But on the personal level it opened many possibilities.’
In painting, ethnographic postmodernism, argues Bokonbaev, trumped all other forms in terms of political support. This trend included painters such as Yuristanbek Shygaev, Kanybek Davletov, Suyutbek Torobekov, Jyrgal Matubraimov, and Bekten Usubaliev.
Combining imported elements from world art with local elements of folk art and nomadism, it conveyed heroic mythological content in international form. For example, Shygaev’s ‘Kurak’, the Kyrgyz word for ‘patchwork’, represents an age-old tradition practised throughout the centuries by craftswomen from all over the world. It holds, however, significance in Kyrgyz traditional culture, where the name comes from the word ‘kura’ which means ‘to piece together or to assemble from separate scraps’ and acquired specific symbolism in the peripetatic lifestyle of traditional Kyrgyz nomads.
These paintings are complemented by various installations of modern art. Ulan Djaparov, author of ‘I don’t see anything…’ comments how this was an ‘Epoch of neglected opportunities, profanation of all values, and breaking of all human fates. For me it was a difficult but interesting period, …’ The 2005 revolution itself is only marginally treated in the visual representations here. Vladimir Prirogov’s ‘Without Name’, taken in 2003, has been used by many to illustrate the political events of the years preceding the revolution, where popular demonstrations became a part of the habitual political system. The photographer himself comments that the Akaev era ‘started out with limitless optimism, which slowly changed into pessimism.’Beginning in late April of this year, Converse and Dazed & Confused launched the Converse/Dazed 2010 Emerging Artists Award, a major new art prize designed to offer an exciting platform to emerging artists under the age of 35, offering a first prize of £6,000 and each of the four short listed artists £1,000. A panel of art industry insiders made up of Sadie Coles, Mark Titchner, Tim Marlow, Tom Morton, Isobel Harbison and Dazed visual arts editor Francesca Gavin decided between hundreds of entries on a shortlist of five; Francesca Anfossi, Peter Ainsworth, Steve Bishop, Laura Buckley and Jess Flood-Paddock.
The "letterman" jacket is instantly recognisable as a symbol of belonging. From it’s roots in 50s American college sports teams it signified membership to an elite club- a garment that had to be earned by being on the team. A classic silhouette- part peacoat warmth, part bomber-jacket tough, the two-toned letterman merges sports heritage with references to youth subcultures from practically every decade since the 50s, where it has become an icon of the street as well as the stadium. Nike Sportswear’s limited edition interpretation, irreverently called THE DESTROYER, was always going to be a strictly luxurious affair just as we’ve come to expect from the most premium division of Nike.
What’s in the name? Back in ’06, Nike designers began a mission to re-craft iconic sports apparel in the most-technical materials they could find. The ubiquitous American varsity jacket was an obvious choice for the experiment that would become Nike Sportswear. Raiding the All Conditions Gear (ACG) innovation cache, they found fabrics, laminates and bonding methods that could brave nasty weather but still look fresh. The first letterman’s jacket was for an imaginary team called the Dunk High Destroyers. Limited numbers were produced. The next version got even more technical, but the Destroyer name stuck. The laser-cut, waterproof, bonded zipper became a signature feature of those early hybrids, encapsulating what you often couldn’t see on the products: futuristic functionality that never detracts from a timeless aesthetic.
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