• NICHOLAS KIRKWOOD: ALWAYS ONE STEP FURTHER

    Written by Ksenia Rundin

    Nicholas Kirkwood is always one step further, in both the boldness and originality of his innovative shoe design and the sustainable choice of materials and practices. Odalisque Magazine met the designer during Fashion Tech Talks in Stockholm, where he was one of the speakers, and had a chat with him about sustainability, co-creation, artificial intelligence, coolness, art and even music.

    You started your brand in 2005, already then uniting craftsmanship with innovative design and sustainable materials. How has the sustainability aspect improved since the start? What is sustainable strategy for your company today?
    Even though it has been a big change, I think, it is still right in the beginning. When I started, there was quite few in the industry, who really thought about reusable materials. My approach to sustainability is like Tesla’s, when they came about and said something like, “Why aren’t any electric cars made to look good? Why cannot an electric car be a sexy sports car?” The strategy should not be dictated by the concept, which is sustainable, it should just be given. During a couple of seasons, we are now looking at all my material lines, going all the way back. For the next season we change all our linings to become degradable and I am also looking at the similar strategy for the soles. Thus, sustainability for me is a kind of natural regression, considering all the material innovations during last three years. My intention is not to use sustainability as a marketing angle, but to apply it as a part of the process.

    You and Farfetch are doing a project together with an element of co-creation integrated. Do you plan to educate your consumers in the matters of sustainability through that co-creation process?
    Partly from the next-next season – Spring/Summer 2020 – and the following season, we are looking at the labelling system, which is similar to one you can see at a supermarket. We are trying to make the consumer understand how the information given to him/her at the point of purchase makes an impact on the latter and the degree of certain impact. Nevertheless, it is a long way to go but we are doing our best. There is an element of transparency in that concept and if we are honest about what we sell, it will strengthen the consumer trust.

    How does artificial intelligence (AI) challenge your creating process?
    To be honest, we are not using that much of AI in our creative process right now. My current roll in the company is a merchandiser and we work with merchandisers, where there is always a kind of love-hate relationship with them. Generally, designers want to think outside the box, while merchandisers look at the data, deciding what price to set, etc. I do not think AI affects design process as such, where you are both following a trend and creating a trend.

    Do you think the notion of luxury will change due to the presence of AI?
    There is the design process and the manufacturing. I am still making my shoes manually today, using the fine craft. However, it is also important for me to combine my products with new technologies such as 3D printing and new materials, using the best of both worlds. It is about a combination, while choosing either the one or the other does not feel right for me.

    It is said that through your studies, you became aware of the ‘excitement of a movement’ as well as artists embracing ‘a coolness in their manufactured edge’. What is coolness for you today, when the subcultures seem to have erased any borders among them?
    I am always blending multiple references, sometimes a reference might be for a silhouette or a fabrication. Sometimes, I mix youth subculture with architecture, with technology with how a certain music piece makes me feel. Thus, it is about multiple references and how you put those into a mix and it comes out something that looks different, looks original and not too direct as a reference. You do not merely use a punk rocker as a reference to make punk rock shoes. But you mix punk rocker with Zaha Hadid and then you get something different. This is my approach to design.

    By providing access to different information, AI makes brands vulnerable for counterfeiting. How do you protect your brand equity in such a case?
    It is a bit of a constant battle. If you put your design out there, it might directly become reinterpreted or directly copied. I try to be faster, one step further with my design in order to keep others one step behind.

    What do you prefer, the Bloomsbury Group before the Bauhaus school or the Bauhaus school before the Bloomsbury Group?
    I like Bauhaus - the movement and Bauhaus – the band. The Bauhaus school was a massive revolution. It was something that all the 20th Century architecture is related to, in one way or another. It is Modernism, Postmodernism. Potentially, it can go slightly further back and forth in little bit of arts and crafts. The Bauhaus school made the most bold and vivid design and the music is kind of colouring into that in such an extraordinary way.

  • THE EXTRAORDINARY WORLD OF CHRISTIAN TAGLIAVINI

    Written by Ksenia Rundin

    ‘The Extraordinary World of Christian Tagliavini’ invites us into the world of a photographer, who with the mind of an architect, creates unimaginably intricate and meticulously calculated silhouettes, and with the precision of a watchmaker, places every tiny detail into its own aesthetic space, bestowing his audience with a true historical and fashion experience wrapped in the imaginative lustre of the postmodern times. Christian Tagliavini is the artist, who turns photography into a complexed architectural process of planning, researching, designing and constructing an artwork, what at the same time is also extremely exciting. The eye is making its own voyage, bringing the mind along, while discovering new references, admiring new lines and applauding to new ideas. In his artworks, the rigidity of the architectural language is alleviated by the plenitude of historical allusions and embellished by the inscrutable enigma of fashion connotations, accommodated by the immaculacy of the craftsmanship.

    Going from Machiavelli to Jules Verne, from Il Bronzino to Modigliani, you create your own imaginary world, filled with abounding references, adhering to the spheres of art, fashion and engineering. From a passive beholder, you suddenly become an emotional co-creator, taking Christian Tagliavini’s stories into your own ingenious plane of your now roused imagination. The combination of different devices and 3D technology, intellectually engages you into something imaginary that might never have existed, and through the immersive sensations leading you further to a kind of splice of the existed knowledge and a self-constructed augmented reality. Henceforth, the exhibition is a unique celebration of Italian stringent splendour with its clear architectural lines, befuddled by the playfulness of mind, curiosity of history, versatility of fashion and flamboyance of art. Tomorrow the exhibition leaves Stockholm to conquer new horizons, but the experience will stay with us like the aftertaste following a sip of vintage Barolo Monfortino Riserva.

    What did you do before becoming a photographer? And what made you change your career?
    Before becoming a photographer, I studied engineering and architecture and ten years later graphic design was discovered. Then I started working as a graphic designer for a big publishing house in Italy. Nevertheless, the graphic design as such did not completely satisfied my creative side. Suddenly, I realised that I merely was a number in a big space among other graphic designers.

    Photography I have actually discovered by accident, while attending a solo exhibition of Patrick Demarchelier. At that moment something happened in my mind – I was captured not by the image as such but by its impeccable quality. It was that carefully performed back-and-white printing that conquered me. Exactly one month later, I bought my first medium format camera and started playing, photographing different objects, like still life, architecture and also people in the street, asking them to pose for me for free.

    In 2004 I discovered Mise-en-scen Photography through the works of Erwin Olaf and Gregory Crewdson. It is a strange type of photography, called in America ‘one-shot movie’. And I started taking my first steps in two series of photographs, inspired by another photographer and using a wallpaper - a work someone had done before me. Thus, in 2008 my first series ‘Dame Di Cartone’ was conceived, what also helped me to discover my personal identity in photography. Each new series helps me to explore more and more within myself and strengthen my own voice, establishing my personal signature in this type of art. It is not easy for me as my identity is very important for me and I try to re-discover it every time I start a new series. I try to do as much as I can by myself, besides tailoring. Otherwise, I work as a carpenter, engineer, designer – everything from tiny details to big parts. Photography has completely changed my creativity and my perception of this world. When freelancing, you give to the client all your creativity concentrated in the final result, which client can transform by moving some details. Meanwhile, in photography you cannot change anything, after the picture is taken, it is all there.

    When did you realize that photography was that something you were looking for in life?
    I think in 2011, when, after having created three series as a Mise-en-scen photographer and still working as a graphic designer, I received an invitation to Paris Photo [the largest international art fair dedicated to photographic medium] not as a visitor, but as an artist, I understood that the direction had already been chosen. All of a sudden, I realised that I had already hit the photography market with three series of successful photographs. Hence, I quit the graphic design and comprehensively dedicated myself to photography.

    Every detail in your work is unique, whether it is the wallpaper in the background of a photograph or some mysterious headgear. The face expressions in your photographs in the series “1503”are very hard to comprehend. Is it the mystery of the face you are looking for, as a fuel for your creativity engine?
    The series ‘1503’ were growing in a peculiar way, because the beginning constituted my first steps in the stage photography. Today I methodologically use a study board to decide colours, pose and dress but by then, I had no idea how to do such photographs. Nevertheless, the series is inspired by two artists and the epochs they lived in, where the first one is the Florentine Mannerist painter Agnolo Bronzino (1503-1572), to whom I pay homage in my artworks. The other one is the Italian painter and sculptor Amedeo Modigliani (1884-1920). In this sense, two Italian painters, belonging to two different art eras meet in my works, where I, by using mechanical trick, compound the photography and photoshop. If you observe the paintings of the past, you could recognize that no one is smiling on them, because the painting supposed to instill a sense of power into the beholder. The same trend you could see in the photographs of the first era of photography, by the end of the 19th Century.  Thus, this is the mystery in my photography.

    What do you enjoy the most, the result as such or the process of creation, while mastering your own space?
    It is a good question, where the official answer is both. Every time I start with a new series, it is a huge fun to make new discoveries, realizing new things as for instance 3D technology, which I used for the last project, materializing the quality of 3D printing. In connection to the project, I even attended a 3D fair to gain knowledge and ideas surrounding the technology. Challenges I meet ‘behind the scene’, while beginning a new project, create a great dose of excitement in my mind. Furthermore, I spend a lot of time making research in order to avoid any bloopers in my works. Everything should be on its place the way I want it to be.

    How do you decide what series you want to create, what theme to start playing with?
    The ideas strike me in various ways. For example ‘Dame Di Cartone’, inspired by cubism, is based on the interplay of the 3D technology and two-dimensionality of the cardboard. I happened in a tailor shop, when the tailor brought me a piece of fabrics that turned to be quite rigid, reminding a piece of cardboard. It made me think and after a while, sitting in the car, I started discoursing about the relationship between 3D and 2D. That is how the idea of the cardboard dresses for the series was born. Another story concerns the series ‘Voyages Extraordinaires’, devoted to the theme of journey and traveller, inspired by the famous French poet and novelist Jules Verne. In other words, each series has its own source of inspiration acquired either by accident or through a certain scientific research.

    Could you describe the clothing creation process in general stages? Do you do the whole work from the sketch to the completed look?
    In the last three series the process turned to be all the same, because I could establish my own method for approaching a new project. First, I and my colleague Paola spend a lot of time to research things around the idea we have, what constitutes a significant part for me prior to any concrete work such as a sketch or a storyboard. I need to know the era I am working with, whether it is the end of the 20th Century or the Renaissance, as it is important in order to avoid any mistakes. When I have acquainted myself with all the details, I move over to sketching, inspired by iconographic research that I already have in my mind. My aim is not to make a reproduction of the past but to create my own interpretation of it, inspired by the latter. It is the period when my creativity is completely free. Later, we create a storyboard in black and white, which I hand over to Paola with instructions concerning for example the colour and quality of the fabrics we are using or of any details that we are going to put into the composition. Meanwhile, we are looking for a model. Previously, I could just find a model on the street with exclusion for children, where we always go through model agencies. Today, people are walking with their faces hidden by smartphones, what makes it difficult for me to see the faces. Thus, I use social media such as Facebook, to find a right model. Finally, we prepare the shooting and take a picture.

    Would you say that you combine architecture with fashion in your works, where fashion could be seen from a historical perspective?
    I used to make a joke, calling myself a fashion designer. When I work with a certain era, I usually have a book describing fashion during that era, which undoubtedly inspires me, modifying my creativity and resulting in a sketch for a dress I later place in the composition. I do everything by myself but the dress as such would be sewn by a tailor, based on the sketch I have provided. Thus, the tailor materializes my dress idea into a real object.

    What do you think architecture and fashion have in common based on your experience?
    I think that some fashion creations are well architected that they become art objects. The definition of architecture such as artistic elaboration of the structural, functional and aesthetic elements of the building can also be used for dress as the final result. In every era fashion has changed those structural, functional an aesthetical references in accordance with the premises given under the period.

    Have you had any fashion collaboration with designers or fashion magazines? Any in future?
    Not yet, but I had a chance to work with a seamstress and tailor and could appreciate their knowledge of techniques, tips and tricks.

    Could you please describe how you got the ideas for the design of your futuristic headgears?
    For the series ‘1406’ I was inspired by 1300 and 1400 paintings and ‘re-visited’ them with my ideas. As I mentioned before, prior to jumping into the design process and technical drawings, I do research of the period. For example ‘La Moglie dell’Orefice’ refers to the painting of ‘Sant'Eligio nella bottega di un orefice’ [St Eligius in His Workshop] (1449) by Petrus Christus.

    Are you inspired by haute couture? Any preferences there?
    I try to find references of the period that I want to include into my project.  Without making any reproduction, I try to follow the historical period but combine the latter with more modern materials and technologies. I can remember some fashion exhibitions that I visited and where the dresses really moved me in the way works of art could do. Talking of recent fashion, I remember an exhibition of dresses of Roberto Capucci, where I was impressed by the ability to combine the possibility of wearing a dress and the complexity of constructing the latter. The dresses seemed to look like sculptures. Another story is the exhibition of Gianfranco Ferré ‘The White Shirt According to Me’, where I could perceive his technical research to get to those results. I also remember a wonderful exhibition in Bilbao celebrating Armani. I would like to learn, see and admire more.

  • photography by JÖRGEN AXELVALL

    MARIKO MATSUSHITA: EAST ASIAN IDEALS IN A POSTMODERN SHELL

    Written by Ksenia Rundin

    Japan has never ceased to be a source of inspiration for the Western culture, starting with the two-hundred-year-long isolation under the sakoku (“closed country”) policy and ending with Japonism, whose influences have embraced artists such as Vincent van Gogh, Edgar Degas, Alphonse Mucha and also art movements from Realism to Art-Nouveau and Symbolism. Odalisque Magazine was given a chance to talk art with the Japanese artist Mariko Matsushita, whose art works speak the language of philosophical aesthetics, bringing the matter and form into a conscious meaning for the beholder.

    The references we see in Mariko’s art are a merely reflection of our mind, where those have already been hidden for a long time and now, provoked by the sense of exoticism, caused by the art works, are swiftly trying to break out. These are emotions that make us human, make us strong and make us feel real and alive. Looking at Mariko’s art we deal with a postmodern interpretation of East Asian ideals, where digital technology challenges our authenticity and questions our identity. Mariko makes you unpretentiously live it.

    Why did you decide to become an artist?
    I never thought of becoming an artist. I needed my own language to speak about myself. I seek for expression being driven by necessity. I am not an artist, I want to become myself.

    When I look at your drawings I think of Frida Kahlo and Finnish artist Markus Heikkerö because I see a touch of surrealism, sexuality and vulnerability. Could you say what message you are placing into your drawings?
    The message I breathe into my work is about the sense of “being alive”. During the course of one's life, you might feel pain like someone would be peeling off your rawhide. You feel a dark loneliness that no one can understand. You may experience a feeling of freedom, living like you were flying unconcerned. You feel the fate given to you by heaven. You feel the happiness which is warm and natural, spreading itself to every corner of the body. And you also feel the irony as all these might just be a lie.

    I strongly feel that I am alive, especially through physical sensations. I do exercise, daily training my body. And this practice reminds me that in spite of the technological innovations, we humans are all given a small body, as a mass of very sharp sensory organs. Our own body tells us that it contains a certain flame similar to the sun’s, and that it is complex and mysterious like the universe, as much as it constitutes a very small and insignificant existence in comparison to the latter.

    I always think about my sense of body and sense of time. Through experiencing my life, I think about life and death. Why are we alive, why are we humans, and why am I myself? In my actual sense of living, I also strongly feel an impulse urging and seeking for others.

    You paint female body a lot. Who is/are the woman/women on your canvas?
    Regardless of female or male, what I paint recently is myself or my close friends. My paintings are also words, mirrors, friends in my heart. So my models are often someone intimate or emotionally involved. The relationship may have ended, while painting. I interact and bring them back out of somewhere they don’t know they belonged to. In such a case, painting is also a ceremony of a fatal encounter and alienation.

    I could also see a shadow of Van Gogh in your brush strokes. Am I right or wrong? Please comment.
    I think that when you confront with painting, it is all up to the beholders, regardless who they are and how they think. The painting also acts like a mirror. Van Gogh lives in your heart, the heart that sees the shadow of Van Gogh on my painting. I think that is precious. In the movie “Fahrenheit 451”, there is a line saying something like, “There are humans behind the book, I am attracted to it”. I think that it could be applicable to all literature and all arts.

    The impressive power that art can hold, is not only about creating the art as such, but also to deliver tremendous messages to someone through time and space. It is a message directed to life, which is not so easy to verbalize. It is a message directed to love and humanity.

    Please tell me about your collaboration with the photographer Mikito Tateisi. What did you endeavor to create?
    This is the record of myself. The day will come, when my own body dies. Until that day, I will continue to record my body and feelings of myself and others with paintings, photos, videos and poetry. I understand that I am an insignifiant person, but I feel that the record might help someone else to live. The place where human consciousness awakens is a very dark place. I think that art can be done by placing the next stepping stone in the dark without any concrete meaning.

    In 2017, I spent the summer in the Delfina Foundation in London. While in residence, I hung a red cloth on the window and thus, lived everyday in a room reddened with the sunlight. In the room there were daily necessities and what I wanted to create was something overflowing and accumulated. The red room was also mentally influential, I was experiencing various psychological conditions … The room would turn pinkish with the daylight, then it turned into deep red with the evening light… It made me slightly nervous, giving a strange feeling. I gradually started thinking that I would like to create an art piece using meat, imitating a fetus placed in a pseudo-uterus called “a red room”.

    At first I was making a small sculpture carving a little piece of meat in the shape of an animal, but the meat grew gradually and finally I walked around the city with a mass of meat weighting 14.4 kilos and spent time naked with the meat in my room. Thus, collaboration with Mikito is the record of the “red room” which also has been an installation and a performance.

    You have had collaboration with a fashion brand. Tell about your experience as an artist entering fashion.
    First of all, I merely lent the paintings, I did not participated in the designing process of the clothes as such. However, it was a very interesting experience of my paintings going to the town not only in the atelier and the exhibition place but also on the people's clothes.

    In the 1990s, when I was a teenager, there were several magazines that snapped Japanese Harajuku Fashion, and the fashion was the street culture for me.

    Two brands that I collaborated with are also brands for young women. Some people might get sceptical of such collaborations, but I would like to go out more on the street through production. I think that it will guide me to expressions that are not just paintings, such as images, performances and poetry.

    I hope that not only prints with my art works are to be viewed but also many people wear art, become art, live powerfully and be free. And paradoxically, even if you do not wear anything, you do not have anything. No matter how old you are, you can be yourself, you can jump into art from writing only one verse, this is what I want you to feel with my art.

    Do you have any future fashion collaborations planned?
    I have not decided anything yet, but personally, I would like to make kimonos. Kimono is traditional Japanese clothing. I would make it very planar and play with it as it was a painting hanging in the room.

    Like many Japanese people, I have had a modern childhood and thereof, have been separated from the traditional Japanese life. However, as I deal with art and deepen my various ideas, I gradually return to the Oriental ideas and thoughts.

    When I stayed in the Delfina Foundation last year and traveled all over Europe, there were many cases that reminded me of Japanese culture. I think that fusing not only clothes but also wisdom of the West and the East is important.

    What do you think art and fashion can learn from each other in the aspects of creativity and sustainability?
    I am not specialist concerning fashion. However, looking at the changing society, various things can be considered. For example, a genderless world expressed and driven by fashion, a screened communication of the body deployed on the Internet. Furthermore, the manufactured limbs such as artificial arms and feet which are concerned a necessity today will be eventually transformed from the perspective of trans-humanism. 
    Medical development encourages people to dress. The design of artificial legs is already quite artistic now.
    Imagining the future, the body expansion will be in the field of general fashion, I think that the sense of “human beauty” will become more diverse.

    An era may also come when you can genetically customize the skin color, hair color, height, etc. of a child coming to be born. Why, is it me? Where on earth do you live with your heart? With the expansion of physicality, there will be a time of reincarnation, when many people listen to themselves and the question of “human”. It is very important.

    We are living in the midst of the flow of the canal in the era of technology increasingly being developing.
    Every art, music and literature will play an important role for not losing your human self, growing to an intelligent, lovely adult, and always keeping paying it forward to the next generations.
    I am planning to travel the world from now on and I would like to know about gender and death in various cultures. I think that I will learn a lot about fashion and art as well.

    And I will never stop dreaming about the future, drawing my sense classically and magically like a cave painting.

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