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I went to Camera 16, a tiny but beautiful art gallery in Milan, the curator has organized an amazing exhibition of the legend of Leigh Bowery, one of the most leading edge and controversial figure of the ’80s / ’90s, whose life has been narrated through photographs shot by Fergus Greer and Johnny Rozsa.

Leigh Bowery was an eclectic character, he was an artist, a performer, a fashion designer, an aspiring pop star and an object of art, he has changed the visual language influencing the world around him. Alexander McQueen, Vivienne Westwood, Lucian Freud, Boy George, Antony and the Johnsons and David LaChapelle have shared and spread his ideas of style. Leigh Bowery had an uncommon ability to change identities.

He represented a kind of soul who did not accept rules of behavior and appearance, with a vision of art that testified a closeness to transgenders and the overcoming of distinction between male and female. Leigh proposed codes of seduction and communication through bodies and clothes, creating new concepts of glamour and beauty.

February 10th – March 31th – 2012 . Camera 16, Via Pisacane 16, Milan, Italy.

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I have been told that sleeping well is perfect for the mood, some good rest helps for sure our health and it affects all our daily activities. In addition to a good sleep why not also to improve the aesthetic side of our night or of our comfort zones? One week ago I ended up on the website of an amazing gallery called Yellow Velvet where the artists express their creativity through a curious media: the pillow.

At the moment I’m working on a fashion movie, so the first images that came to mind while looking at these amazing creations were motion pictures of people embracing their pillows or sleeping on their sofa in a snowy afternoon. Others fragments of memories came from one of my favorite movie: The Pillow Book, directed by Peter Greenaway. The movie tells the story of a young girl in Japan who grows up, obsessed with books, papers, and writing on bodies.

Thanks to Yellow Velvet  we cannot only sleep well but we can also have artist’s artworks under our noble head. The gallery presents: “Artnatomy“, an interactive exhibition of Cecile Dachary that takes place on the “Absolutely Fabulous” session of their site. It’s needless to say how much the result is interesting, both in the choice of physical organs depicted than in the surreal way she represents them sewing with embroidery or crochet techniques. She likes to contrast the delicateness of needlework and the notion of trash by using damask fabric and applying fabric images of organs, like embroidered bones or crocheted breasts.

Focusing primarily on the human body and its different forms, her work centers on the notion of memory and  the passing of time. One of my favorite cushion is “Balcony“, she created a pair of “boobs” made from pink damask covered by a pink crocheted breast with a raised red nipple; it’s not easy to see it, but there’s also a tiny silver nipple ring on it. An absolutely abstract and sophisticated way to bring human bodies in your bed.

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Following other choices of designers who have realized cushions for Yellow Velvet Gallery.

Charlene Mullen

Sophie Demenge . Oeuf NYC

Yves Andrieux

Gabrielle Soyer . Lindell & Co

ni[D] Design

La Cerise sur le Gâteau

Corinne Hellein . COCOhellein

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It’s not so easy to choose your favorite illustration among the thousands realized by the artist Fabian Ciraolo, his work is so amazing that I found it difficult to pick some photos and ruling out others. The artist’s work is aimed to brush up famous characters from the past and to depict them on his paintings wearing stunning outfits with floral and geometric textures.

Therefore we can find heroes from comics (defined by Fabian as Old school heroes) dressed with contemporary clothes within unlikely dreamy situations or hilarious scenes. His work is so perfect balanced in some of his pieces, handmade artworks defile digital scenes, they give birth to a parallel universe of characters transformed in unexpected new fashion victims.

We can find the subjects close to sheep or riding a tandem bicycle, while singers as Jem and the Holograms turn into models coming from a défilé. He also depicts girls seated in rooms full of sweets with “cupcake figures” in their mind.

I really love both the colors and the subjects than the patterns and the technique, there’s a very high quality of details that make every piece worth for contemplation and inspiration for an imaginary personal look.

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It’s interesting to see the result of different disciplines mixed together, they create new forms of expressions. Greg Lauren is the nephew of the fashion designer Ralph, what impressed me most of his work is of course his paper sculptures and without any doubt his paintings.

It’s very interesting the way he pictures women, they seem so fragile, a soft melancholy arises by their poses, a feeling that testifies the burden of being a woman with its contradictions and weaknesses. I really love the contrast of colors, the crumple effect in the dresses, the sharp light on the subjects skin, he creates metaphysical moments frozen in time.

Though all the figures have ghost faces, there’s an inner force in the artist style that make them amazingly expressive. Are the ladies running away from an oppressive person or undefined situations?

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Fedor Vozianov designs for beauty, even if he just started a few years ago, in 2004.

DC has met him many times and I must say that although it sounds predictable, for Fedor the woman’s body is indeed something beautiful that he worships with his fabrics and his incredibly complex patterns wich always surprise you.

Unusual 3D pockets, hand finished collars and details, light built yet strong structures are visible also in his fw collection. Observing his work since he came to White Show in Milan I noted that he always goes around key figures: the female body, the belly of a pregnant woman, the essential male tayloring, the square. He recreates a family, a fertile world that is full of meaning, mistery and natural power in its semplicity. And the mistery is carried by the female figure that the designer imitates in the act of creation first of all with the square dress project.

That’s not only beauty, it’s the beauty of life.

He started also to make puppets (and he inspired also his talented friend Masha Reva), not only for kids, as I saw when I visited his studio in Kiev. They’re sweet at first look but also a little scary I think… And that’s something that really attracted me in his clean essential atelier.

For other pics in his studio and aroud the world check his fb page.

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A drop of dew can catches little animals, they are lucky, they still can survive it staying alive; it happens the same with the resin, even if in this case, the best organic element to protect plants, steals life of what comes at hand (insects). Nowadays if we know a lot of species from the past is also thanks to some natural resins that frozen life of living, fostering them forever.

It’s interesting how nature sometimes gives a lot of inspirations to artists, when I studied history of art my favorites painters where the ones who took most of their subjects from nature. We remember things also thanks to photos, pictures that became the new paintings. Why not to create some pieces of life into little rings and protect them like three-dimensional parts of past? Shannnam is a designer who proposes moments of life frozen in jewels.

I think memories are important and so art, I’ve already seen miniatures from different artists but never with these shapes or transformed like Shannnam does with rings and pins. A sweety way to admire moments of life even when we are stuck in uncool situations. Think if you are in a cold day, outside, and you are freezing like a snowman, which sensations can you feel while you’re gazing the swimming boy into your ring? An instant warm one of course, these creations are a sort of biofeedback à porter.

Nevertheless, do we really need to remember? Is it so important for us to make comparisons between the past and the present? Sometimes it helps. I really love an Italian saying that reads: “Those who forget their roots are not masters of their future”; we can also say “those who have not memories are not aware of their tomorrow”. So fixing situations can be good for us in a new way, never forgetting who we are and where we come from.

Talking of memories, I might buy the swimming man, a way to recall scenes from the sea of a little village where I used to live as a child.

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The difference between paper and online magazines saw its beginning when for the first time we heard the magic word “.gif”, since then there has been no place left for the old paper. Flipping through magazines can be enjoyable for different reasons of course, I remember some friends who used to tear pages and go to their hairdressers with some pics of the hairdo of the moment. Of course you can show pics also on the iPad, but in that case it’s not convenient to tear or fold anything.

A friend of mine suggested to take a look at Gerda Postma’s website, it is interesting the way they’ve realized gif for their personal lookbook. Of course I love the clothes, the graphic and the way they designed everything is very clean and cool, the photos are in someway romantic and avantgarde.

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“Beauty is the most important word in the dictionary” said Cecil Beaton. I don’t know how to intend this sentence but I know for sure that beauty moves a lot of creativity and positive energy in the world; for sure it nourishes our minds and represents a relief and a pleasure to the senses.

Fashion is a manifestation of ideals of beauty and social change, an expressive play between belonging and distinction, communication and trend. Its only constant factor is permanent change. In the sphere of beautiful appearances fashion/photography works in a both anticipatory and historicizing way: it reflects the change it creates.

This is what the exhibition Vanity at the Kunsthalle Wien explores by presenting about two hundred selected works from the F.C. Gundlach Collection (Hamburg).
Gundlach was a legendary fashion photographer himself who produced 180 covers and 5,500 pages for the editorial section of the magazine Brigitte alone. He regarded fashion photography as the most unequivocal indicator of social contexts: “Fashion photographs are always interpretations, results from a mise en scène. They reflect and visualize the day’s zeitgeist and anticipate that of tomorrow.”

I was impressed in fact by the real beauty represented in some photographs and also surprised by the picture of Leon
Levinstein (the women taken from the back with their big hats – street photography works shot in New York and San Francisco between 1955 and 1975) that totally looks like bloggers’ pictures taken nowadays outside the fashion shows.

And it is interesting to see how hard it is to deal now with simple beauty: from the 1970s on young photographers such as Guy Bourdin and Helmut Newton answered the need of a natural evolution of it with conceptual strategies of mystification and detached irony; for the contemporary vision of it the exhibition presents Edgar Leciejewski’s series of pictures of people taken from Google Street View. Is that beauty? or just “fashion documentary”? The exhibition is worth a visit, at least to remind us that not only the trend and the extreme and experimental paths you explore for themselves have a sense.

If you are in Hamburg you could visit the stunning library of the Gundlach Collection that counts, besides the prints also an incredible number of fashion and photography books and catalogues.

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clic here for a video interview of the granddaughter of Erwin Blumenfeld.

Fashion, one of the main elements in the contemporary Italian culture. Torino Italian crib of witch craft, Industrial city, full of contrasts between old and new, art and history; hosts one of the most representative exhibitions for Italian fashion of all the times, commemorating the 150 years of the Italian unity.
It is a time travel into the last 150 years in Italian fashion, gathering the most representative Italian couturieres and designers, from the Risorgimento Italiano in the mid 1800 s until the contemporary fashion in the mid 2000 where the Italian fashion protagonists such as Dolce & Gabbana, Prada, Gianni Versace, Salvatore Ferragamo, Gucci and so on take place.
Real historical pieces; costumes of cinema classics like Giuseppe Tomassi´s Il Gattopardo interpreted by Claudia Cardinale, to the iconic Fellini´s Dolce Vita interpreted by the exuberant blonde Anita Ekberg, shoes by Ferragamo for Marilyn Monroe, and many other divas; futurism, post war up to the pret a porter style of the 80´s.
Almost 200 pieces between historical, cinematographic and contemporary  fashion in the spectacular venue La Venaria Reale, an amazing castle in the outskirts of Torino. More than a fashion statement, this exhibition showed me were all about style, craft and passion for Fashion in Italy came from.

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Hong Kongese designer Zathew Zheng proposes architecture through garments.

Zathew builds up this voluptuous one piece dresses inspired in ancient Greece, with complex and exuberant silhouettes like Corinthian marble columns raising in the horizon. Manipulating and draping fabrics like cotton jersey, printing striking patterns and choosing an eye catching palette, completed with a delicious chunky threads on the collar; she tries to prove that even though her garments are inspired in classical features they still have some hints of avant-gardism.

Zathews passion for drawing and fashion brought her to study fine arts, later on to the De Montfort University in Leicester, from where she graduated, being invited to show her graduate collection in the London Fashion week. After her studies she had great working experiences as designer assistant with designers such as Louis de Gama, Avshalom Gur and Bert Clayton. Now she works as a freelance fashion designer in Hong Kong and produces her own brand.

Vigorous colors and intricated shapes back from the past, monumental dresses for a modern elegance.

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