Colors in Fashion by Jonathan Faiers & Mary Westerman Bulgarella

Author:Jonathan Faiers & Mary Westerman Bulgarella [Faiers, Jonathan & Bulgarella, Mary Westerman]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Design, Fashion & Accessories, Textile & Costume, History & Criticism, Art, Color Theory, History, General
ISBN: 9781474273718
Google: 1tkaDQAAQBAJ
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Published: 2016-11-17T20:43:06+00:00

10

COLOR AS CONCEPT: FROM INTERNATIONAL KLEIN BLUE TO VIKTOR & ROLF’S “BLUESCREEN”

Michal Lynn Shumate

First there is nothing, then there is a deep nothing, then there is a blue depth.

Yves Klein quoting Gaston Bachelard (KLEIN 1959)

In an effort to understand the complicated relationship between fashion and color, this text enlists a case study Bluescreen (Long Live the Immaterial!) as a starting point, a point of return, and indeed a maypole around which to weave ideas and references. Staged by fashion design team Viktor & Rolf for their Autumn/Winter 2002 season, Bluescreen featured chroma-key blue, a color commonly used to create moving backgrounds in cinematic special effects, to present an alternate reality on projection screens that flanked each side of the runway. The show is at face value a visually arresting and innovative use of film technology within the fashion show genre. Upon closer examination, however, it is a door to the haunting power of blue in art and culture, and to the myriad issues that accompany it: color and line, surface and depth, and nothingness and infinitude—binaries that, as this text will illustrate, are central to the study of fashion, its histories, and its relationship to color.

In their twenty-year career, Viktor & Rolf, Viktor Horsting, and Rolf Snoeren respectively, have often mounted monochromatic (and in many cases non-chromatic) shows: the installations L’Hiver de l’Amour (1994) and L’Apparence du Vide (1995); the runway shows Black Hole (Autumn/Winter 2001) and All White Show (Spring/Summer 2002); and more recently Zen (Autumn/Winter 2013) and Red Carpet (Autumn/Winter 2014). Their work with color extended beyond the runway and into the gallery in 2004 when they guest curated Fashion in Colors, an exhibition of historic costume presented along a strict curatorial divide of color groupings (Fukai 2004). As an example of their monochrome projects, the fashion show Red Carpet gives a good sense of how the designers employ color: the show was in fact entirely red (Plate 10.1). Dresses made of red carpets were draped over models that walked in red shoes down a red carpeted runway while Steve Reich’s 1972 Clapping Music was performed on the balcony overhead. The basic shapes of the garments—many reminiscent of a quickly wrapped towel, combined with the cultural signifier of the red carpet and the awkward non-applause clapping of Reich’s piece, together formed a kind of surrealist comment on emptiness, pointed sharply at the fashion industry as per usual and, in this instance, directed at celebrity culture as well.

Viktor & Rolf (V&R) appropriate color in their work the same way they appropriate all other elements: as something to be manipulated at the service of a visual commentary. Commenting on fashion with fashion has defined the career of this Dutch design duo; their play with formal elements drawn from sartorial tropes and traditions oscillates between celebrating fashion and all of its infinite possibilities and the cynical exposure of fashion’s inevitable unattainability and general absurdity. In fact, a V&R show frequently operates in both modes at the same time, taking the form

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.