BODONI FUNCTION & AESTHETICS
BODONI FUNCTION & AESTHETICS
EDITOR AND DESIGNER Jamie Kao BODY COPY by Elyssa Dimant TYPOGRAPHY I May 2015
TYPE SPECIMEN BOOK Designer: GIAMBATTISTA BODONI (1798) The typeface is classified as Didone modern. Bodoni followed the ideas of John Baskerville, as found in the printing type Baskerville: increased stroke contrast and a more vertical, slightly condensed, upper case; but took them to a more extreme conclusion.
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FUNCTION OVER AESTHETICS
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01 04 AESTHETICS OVER FUNCTION
MINIMALISM & FASHION Minimalism, which reached its academic apogee between 1960 and 1968, has played a crucial role in the construction of the extant aesthetic panorama. The movement’s early proponents utilized the ambiguity of abstracted three-dimensional structures and the familiarity of reductive geometry to conceive objects that were astoundingly different from any sculptural or painterly forms that preceded them. Minimalism has since evolved to encompass a categorical artistic designation, a cultivated lifestyle, and an ephemeral sensibility in the realms of fine art, architecture, interiors, and fashion. In many ways, minimalism’s transition from a 1960s high-art movement to a persistent force in the contemporary artistic vernacular is due to both its appropriation within the field of fashion and to the many fashion designers who have equated reduction and abstraction with beauty and progress. Fashion positioned between utility and aesthetics, flat textile and sculpted garment, readily adopts the dictates of minimal art and espouses its legacies in the avant-garde and ready-made niches of commodity culture. 1
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Minimalism and Fashion pinpoints key objects in media that have catalyzed the longevity of a minimalist undercurrent that has alternately conveyed tenants of modernity, futurism, functionalism, or refinement over the last fiftyyears. Minimalism’s prioritization of aesthetics
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over function as well as its antiemotive dictates have been challenged and manipulated dur-ing this time, but its adherence to rigorous reduction and platonic composition has endured to become the characteristic goal shared by minimalist art and design in the postmodern era.
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The fashion theorist Rebecca Arnold suggested “Labels like Donna Karan and Calvin Klein provided the essential wardrobe for those who wished to be viewed as serious and career-minded.” These minimal designs and the aesthetics of New York career clothing began to influence the work of avant-garde designers from other fashion industries. While Ladicorbic Zoran, a Yugoslavian immigrant who arrived in the United States in 1971, channeled Halston’s work through rigorously basic garments in lavish, if restrained, textiles, Issey Miyake took an interest in the American employ of the working-classfabrics of cotton knit and denim. Miyake ultimately was inspired to look to his own heritage and adapted the quitled sashiko cloths and durable cottons of Japanese laborers’ clothes into oversized tops, coats, and loose pants for his lower priced Plantation label. In a 1983 New York Times article, Miyake told June Weir, “I’m working hard on Plantation, my less expensive collection. I see many people wanting comfortable clothes that are easy to care for. So many woman say, ‘I’m not interested in fashion. I want clothes that last for years.’
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I’m not interested in fashion. I want clothes that last for years.
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Since the early 1990s the collections of MARTIN MARGIELA HELMUT LANG HUSSEIN CHALAYAN MIUCCIA PRADA RAF SIMONS BOOK 10/18
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have emphasized simplicity of shape and realistic form, focused of aesthetics over function and employed repetitive structures and serial systems or progressions. The principles materialize in the designers’ interpretations of deconstruction fashion, defined by Barbara Vinken as the demonstration of constructedness.
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In “Deconstructing Fashion: The Making of Unfinished, Decomposing and Re-Assembing Clothes” (1998), the historian ALLISON GILL associated the term “deconstruction”
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in fashion with garments that are unfinished and transparent.
Approaching deconstruction through a minimal lens, the moniker encompasses the reduction and exposure of an object’s fundamental design in order to highlight construction and rejects the
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intentional deconstruction or demolition of a garment through tearing or fraying the fabric or pattern or the restructuring of garments through
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misplaced or reassebled component parts. 6
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In 1993 the Ne columnist AMY SPIND origins of the dec in the literary c French philosophe and cited the Oxford definition; the the constructi
ew York Times DLER noted that the constructed entity critisism of the er JACQUES DERRIDA d English Dictionary act of undoing ion of a thing.
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The garments are unfinished with care for the traditional sewing techniques.
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...Like the minimalists of the 1960s, the deconstructivist designers discussed here have created garments that concentrate on the specifics of form, pattern, and fabric rather than on the garment’s essential purpose as body covering. These designs reveal the various elements and processes of dressmaking and reduce the pattern to its fundamental parts; the subject of each of these designs is the garment itself.
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SOFTWARE Adobe Indesign FONT Bodoni Std PRINTED in Hong Kong TYPOGRAPHY I May 2015
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