one piece

"Czarist Russia's Fascination With Italian Textiles"

The centuries-long pursuit of the finest Italian silk weaves by the Russian court and church and the prodigious sums they spent on them have left Russia, despite losses during war and revolution, with an immense patrimony of rich and rare Italian textiles, only a fraction of which have ever been put on general public view.

Between them the Hermitage in St. Petersburg and the Kremlin Museum in Moscow have well over 5,000 examples of historic Italian textiles. 

These two institutions have joined forces with the Hermitage Italia Foundation and Prato’s Textile Museum to lay out some of these fabulous wares, and relate the story of how they found their way east to the centers of Russian political and ecclesiastical power, in “The Style of the Czar: Art and Fashion between Italy and Russia from the 14th to the 18th Century.”

via: The New York Times 

"Fascist Fascination"

"Fashion at the Time of Fascism," out later this month from Damiani, struck me right away. Its pages are a collage of women framed in soft focus, elegantly attired and wistfully posed, all cigarettes and silhouettes. The refined furs and extravagant draperies are enough to make the glancing reader nostalgic for the reign of Mussolini. 

via: "The Book Bench" The New Yorker Magazine

"Dress Codes" at ICP

 

The Third Triennial will mark the closing cycle of ICP's 2009 Year of Fashion,

A series of projects that critically examine fashion and its relationship to art and other cultural and social phenomena.

The theme of fashion encompasses a diverse range of practices and ideas, including explorations of identity and affiliation; the production, distribution, and consumption of images and goods; contemporaneity; age; gender; and global industry. 

The themes of the Triennial express the exuberance, wit, and astute social observation taking place within contemporary image-making. These artists variously explore fashion—whether in everyday dress, haute couture, street fashion, or uniforms—as a celebration of individuality, personal identity, and self-expression, and as cultural, religious, social, and political statements.

Utilitarianism Meets Refinement

'Muji manufactured by Thonet'

is a collection of simplified, stylised Thonet designs made of bentwood and tubular steel, 

manufactured to Thonet's customary high standards at their Frankenberg HQ and available exclusively at Muji stores.

By uniting the design heritage, skilled craftsmanship and manufacturing capabilities of Thonet with the streamlined design aesthetic of Muji, not to mention its youthful, design savvy audience, beautiful designs gain new relevance for today's modern, urban lifestyle.

         Daily Tonic

Sartorial Selects

Scott Schuman has long been trailing the fashion-show caravan from Florence to Milan, Paris and New York City, photographing selected stylish folk and plenty of fashion world regulars for his blog, The Sartorialist.com, and becoming a sort of de facto cultural anthropologist along the way. 

His eye is discerning but it doesn’t discriminate: the quirky, the refined, the interesting, the elegant, the chic and the sometimes outrageous, all shot very simply on the street, come together in a visual history of the fashion business, marking our place in the timeline of style.

“The Sartorialist,” a hefty 512-page paperback hot off of the press from Penguin, is a clever nod to the democratic nature of his photography, more high school yearbook than highbrow coffee-table tome. It’s chock-full of photographs you will want to pore over with friends, searching for those you know — and maybe even yourself.

via: The Moment

"What Was Good Design? MoMA's Message 1944-56"

Exploring the concept of "Good Design" via iconic pieces by designers like Charles and Ray Eames and Hans Wegner, alongside everyday objects including an iron, a hamper, a rake, a cheese slicer and Tupperware -- Curators: Juliet Kinchin, Aidan O’Connor

What Was Good Design? MoMA's Message 

1944-56 Museum of Modern Art

May 6, 2009-Nov. 30, 2009

"Acrobati"

designer:

Piero Fornasetti

design year:

1950

manufacturer:

Fornasetti, Italy

materials:

hand-printed 100% silk chiffon with hand-rolled edges

notes:

These scarves, featuring the iconic graphic work of Piero Fornasetti, were introduced in the 1950s. After those initial pieces, only a small quantity were produced again in the 1990s. Since then, no scarves have been produced until the pieces seen here, which were re-introduced by Moss and Fornasetti exclusively for Moss at SLS.

dimensions:

17.75" X 69"

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"How To Wrap Five Eggs"

“We have come a long, long way from the kind of thing so beautifully presented in this book. To suit the needs of super mass production, the traditional natural materials are too obstreperous . . . and one by one we have replaced them with the docile, predictable synthetics . . . What we have gained from these [new] materials and wonderfully complicated processes to make up for the general pollution, rush, crowding, noise, sickness, and slickness is a subject for other forums. But what we have lost for sure is what this book is all about: a once-common sense of fitness in the relationships between hand, material, use, and shape, and above all, a sense of delight in the look and feel of very ordinary, humble things. This book is thus . . . a totally unexpected monument to a culture, a way of life, a universal sensibility carried through all objects down to the smallest, most inconsequential, and ephemeral things.”

George Nelson

via:The Parallax View

How To Wrap Five Eggs  By Hideyuki Oka

"Silk Stories"

Kunsthal Rotterdam, Museumpark shows a selection of 120 pieces of clothing from the collection of Jan Dees which can be dated back to the period of 1900-1940. A large part of the men's -, women's - and children's collection of clothes originates from the Taisho period (1912-26), the period of government of Emperor Yoshihito. The patterns on some of the kimonos have been derived from modern city life, but the vast majority of the designs are based on nature and traditional culture.

Ruling the Roost

On 30 June 1559, the young Florentine bride of the French King Henri II suddenly found herself a widow. In the failing light, her dashing and headstrong 40-year-old husband was killed in a friendly joust by the young captain of his Scottish guard whose lance accidentally pierced the king’s eye through his metal visor. In a tragedy said to have been foretold by Nostradamus, Caterina de’ Medici lost a husband and was surrounded by enemies, the Dukes of Guise and Montmorency, each vying for power over her frail 15-year-old son Francis II, the new King of France. As her own childhood had been shaped by intrigues and assassination attempts, Caterina knew how important it was to keep and exercise power. Palazzo Strozzi presents Women in Power: Caterina and Maria de’ Medici - The Return to Florence of Two Queens of France, on view through 8 February 2009. ...More