DSM magazine createdby AvrilHarding
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Tachiagari
4
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8
Fashion
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Fashion
CdG S/S13
28
IsFashionArt?
34
Fashion
CdG PLAY
36
Art
KimTaylor
40
Feature
OrionFacey
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Feature
AitorThroup
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Essay
‘CONCEPT NEW’ NEW INSTALLATIONS/SHOPS NEW ARTISTS/DESIGNERS
THE BIANNUAL TACHIAGARI
‘Just experimenting with an own brand’Adrian Joffe
With the heads at charge of Dover Street Market, Rei Kawakubo and partner Adrian Joffe constantly oversees the bi-annual ‘Tachiagari’, meaning beginning in Japanese, this twice yearly event sees them constantly refreshing and redesigning it’s retail space. Whilst shutting down for three days and re-shaping the store, for each ‘Tachiagari’,guest designers collabarte with Dover Street Market to create their own installations and shops , with revamped space from Hussain Chalayan, Ann Demullemeester and the introduction of Sarah Burton for Alexander Mcqueen. ‘We hope to make Dover Street Market more and more interesting. We enjoy seeing all the customers coming to Dover Street Market dressed in their strong, good looking and individual way. We would like for Dover Street Market to be the place where fashion becomes fascinating.’- DSM ‘I want to create a kind of market where various creators from various fields gather together and encounter each other in an ongoing atmosphere of beautiful chaos; the mixing up and coming together of different kindred souls who all share a strong personal vision.’ -Rei Kawakubo
Photography/AvrilHarding Styling/LucyBarnes Model/SebCopple
DOVERSTREETMARKETSGRADUATES
ThisPage/T-shirt/GinaWilkes Shorts/EllieDaniels Opposite/Jacket/AdamChudecki Trousers/BeckyAmos
7mens
T-shirt/Backpack/ GinaWilkes
4mens
Jacket/TomLincoln
Thispage/Jacket/EmmaBeasley Opposite/Jacket/BethStrong/Trousers/BeckyAmos
Trousers/AdamChudecki
dover street market presents simone rochas n e w s h o p
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comme des g a r c o n s s/s 13
s
IS FASHION ART? BY ORION FACEY The question of whether or not fashion is an art form is a much-contested topic. With this text I would like to dispel many dispositions and theories concerning the relationship, if any, between the fashion industry and art. I will use the fashion group Comme des Garçons to support my explanation. In the past fifty years, consumerism has exploded and has shown its face in a myriad of avenues. The growth of consumerism was an inevitable effect of capitalism. The concept of fashion lends itself well to a consumerist society in that its exhaustless discourse provides a nondepletable reserve of goods that respond well to many specific audiences. When a new audience arises, fashion is quick to respond. It is an incredibly supple industry that is constantly fluctuating and mirroring the desires of the consumer. There are many conflicted views as to what the term ‘art’ means. For the purpose of the question I have proposed at the beginning of the text, I will take the term to mean the pursuit for beauty, the subversion of beauty or any form of effort centralising around the admittedly arbitrary idea of beauty. I will also have to explain what ‘beauty’ should be taken to represent in the context of this essay, that is, simply an intimate relationship between the artist and beauty – a word that due to its relative subjectivity and nonexistence in a physico-epistemological sense can only be defined in and of itself, particular to the person who meditates on it. It is clear then, that art does not have an ideal correlation with industry. By its nature, art is not optimised to suit a machine whose primary concern is gaining profit, because the relationship between beauty and the artist may not necessarily compliment any given audience. A business that is as naïve as one whose sole purpose is to remain true to their intimacy with beauty will likely be poor business, and could not compete with more streamlined businesses.
COMMEdesGARCONS S/S13
Any aesthetic engineered towards a specific goal – particularly profit in any sense of the word – that is not primarily or even exclusive of beauty is what I will take to call design. If the goal is something that requires the response from an external person or persons, namely the consumer, the objective of design is not to appear beautiful to the author, but to the receiver. In other words, art has no considered destination, but in design the target destination is predetermined. Picking apart the difference between design and art may be at first an incredibly difficult task. Often, the mask of design can appear at times seamless with the supposed face of art. The most obvious brand that comes to mind when considering the question of art’s place in commerce is Comme des Garçons (which hereonin will be referred to as CdG), which is often sited as a ‘conceptual’ and ‘anti-fashion’ brand (terms which for reasons I will explain below must only be taken in a figurative sense). It is said to be an ideal marriage between art and fashion, beauty and good business. Although these statements may be true to some extent, I believe that their prominence is undeserved and inflated. Let us take a look at a few quotes from Rei Kawakubo, head designer of CdG, and Adrian Joffe, CdG International’s president.
Rei [Kawakubo] designs everything of the company. Her values permeate everything that constitutes the brand; The clothes, the shops, the printed matter, the way the clothes look in in the shops, the name cards and the retail strategy, all cannot be separated. - ¬Joffe (2011, pg. 2, HYPEBEAST) I strongly believe [Kawakubo’s] work is at the highest possible level of creativity; What one would call pure creation perhaps, […] many times it comes from just from a feeling, an emotion, not a concrete reference. - Joffe (ibid., pg. 3) My work has never been as an artist. I have only continued all these years to try to “make a business with creation.” This has been my first and one and only decision of any importance. The decision to first of all think of creating something that didn’t exist before, and then after that to give the creation form and expression in a way that can be made into a business. I cannot separate being a designer from being a businesswoman. It’s one and the same thing for me. - Kawakubo (2011, the Wall Street Journal) From these quotes, it is obvious that CdG is based on a tight and well-informed business model, with specific retail strategies and decisions that are aimed at business expansion and success, and not at a sort of attempt to capture beauty, in the sense I explained previously. Kawakubo, then, is not primarily an artist. She is very much a designer, as is any other commercially successful fashion designer. The conclusion may seem obvious given the job title fashion designer, but the distinction between designer and artist is often overlooked and never addressed.
Art, then, has a severely marginalized or even nonexistent role within the fashion industry. Certainly, an optimised or good business would contain no element of art at all. One might be inclined to think of art and good business as two circles in a venn diagram, with design being the area that overlaps the two. One might even consider the notion of a gradient between the two, or that some businesses are more art than commerce and vice versa. In actuality, art and good business circulate independently with no interaction between the two. Moreover, this makes redundant the aforementioned descriptors of ‘anti-fashion’ and ‘conceptual fashion’, as opposed to ‘fashion’ and ‘nonconceptual fashion’. The terms are simply alluring words that feed in to the brand identity and are integral to the image of the brand that may or may not appeal to a particular type of customer. There is no such thing as a garment that is anti-fashion; fashion is an inescapable system that is inseparable from the context of any garment at any given time. Even if a garment, outfit or style is contrary or even opposing of current trends or fads, it still plays a role in metafashion. To believe in the idea of anti-fashion is to fall for the trap. It is an elitist concept that promises the superiority over mainstream, ‘non-conceptual’, or design, and claims to be pure art. Furthermore, even the mainstream brand has a concept. Any good business must have a concept – a strategy – in order to survive in a capitalist society. So in effect, the argument of conceptuality as an attempt to verify a brand as the better form of fashion is a similar fallacy to that of anti-fashion.
In conclusion, the relationship between art and commerce is minimal at best. The heterogeneous partition of the consumerist society and the necessity of a business to expand in order to survive dictates a natural dispersion of aesthetics that are designed to appeal to any person. The bottom line of a good business is to make money. This is no less true for the complex vehicle that is fashion. Those designers that are on the mark with great design, and with no consideration for their own personal relationship with beauty, regardless of how similar their beauty and their designed product may be, will surely outperform the weaker, ‘truer’ brands. Whether the customer prefers Comme des Garçons to Louis Vuitton, the same game is played.
ABOVE EmmaHawkins/Taxidermy RIGHT LouDalton
KIMTAYLOR
‘paperspine2013’
‘Paper spine’ is based upon the theme of delicacy and vulnerability. I have used the symbolism of the spine in juxatposition to the material (paper). Which I have used in order to demonstrate not only the frailness of my own spine, but myself, as the spine is the pillar of strength on which we depend upon. The idea of placing the spine within the bell jar is to create the illusion that the spine is in fact an artifact that is distant and untouchable by others. It is isolated by it’s surroundings but secure and preserved but eternally trapped and stagnant. Sylvia Plath’s ‘The Bell Jar’ was a great inspiration, she wrote “because wherever I sat—on the deck of a ship or at a street café in Paris or Bangkok—I would be sitting under the same glass bell jar, stewing in my own sour air.”
AITOR THROUP
X
DSM
NEW OBJECT RESEARCH
Aitor Throup is a designer who created a unique business framework to make fashion work for him – and within that, there is his own distinct ecology. Throup has no interest in working to the diktats of the seasonal, instead conducting a practice he’s dubbed New Object Research which works on a project-led, conceptual basis.
Realising the artistic potential that comes with getting dressed, this is a designer that has both storified a group of football hooligans transforming into Hindu Gods and responded to the wrongful killing in 2005 of Jean Charles de Menezes with his work. For the first time, his reflections of (and reactions to) society are available commercially, exclusively at Dover Street Market.
It’s an important moment for the designer. After years of refining his practice, the crowning glory – and sublime conclusion – is that fans can now go out and buy Throup’s designs. That’s when their meaning is taken to a whole new level. For all the potency of statement, clothing is never better than when it’s lived in.
The Shiva Skull bag by Aitor Throup is the first commercially available product archetype from the ‘New Object Research’ line. They are available at DSM in three exclusive fabrications. Basement.
“The collaboration is really special for me, it’s been a long time coming,” Throup says. “I’ve held back commercially, selling things through retail, and the whole point was to make a statement that I’m not anti-commerce. That’s why I wanted to launch a completely new product, not in my own environment of an art gallery or my own presentation where I can control everything.”