ΦIRMA GYPSY GLOBALES-Maria Papadimitriou (book excerpt)

MARIA PAPADIMITRIOU IRMA GYPSY GLOBALES text by Efie Falida

destefashioncollection 2014

MARIA PAPADIMITRIOU

CONTENTS BOOK A 6-11

INTRODUCTION

6 8 9 10

Bohémiens en voyage (Gypsies Traveling) The fascination of wandering A Foreword: IRMA GYPSY GLOBALES (What is this?)

Brief Chronology (Romania-Paris)

12-21 THE COURSE 13 14 16 18 20

Episode Episode Episode Episode Episode

A: The skirt of wrath. When Janos and Sylvia “leave” the group B: Scenes from a marriage. The song of Janos C: The “winter” of purification D: Loves and Demons, the dark sides of the couple E: The farewell: Awaiting death

22-27 APPENDIX A

History and Anthropology: traces of passage in Europe and Greece from the 11th century to date

23 24 26 27

Amari chib The origin of the Rom people The appellation “Rom” The appellation “Gypsy”

28-59 ON THE ROAD 60-71 CHRONOLOGY OF 62 66 68 70

IRMA

1926 1928 1950 1970

72-85 ATELIER 86-103

PRESS FASHION CLIPPINGS

104-115

IRMA GYPSY GLOBALES

116-168

MADE IN EVERYLAND

169-239

APPENDIX B Translations in Greek (μετάφραση στα ελληνικά μαζί με αποκόμματα εφημερίδων και σxέδια)

170 171

Εισαγωγή: Η έλξη της περιπλάνησης Αντί Προλόγου: ΦIRMA GYPSY GLOBALES (Τι είναι αυτό;) Χρονολόγιο (Ρουμανία-Παρίσι)

171-179 Η ΠΟΡΕΙΑ 173 174 175 177 178

Επεισόδιο Α΄ : Η Φούστα της οργής. Ή πως ο Γιάνος και η Σύλβια «βγήκαν» έξω από την ομάδα Επεισόδιο Β΄: Σκηνές από ένα γάμο Επεισόδιο Γ΄ : Ο «χειμώνας» της κάθαρσης Επεισόδιο Δ΄ : Έρωτες και Δαίμονες: οι σκοτεινές πλευρές του ζευγαριού Επεισόδιο Ε΄ : Ο δρόμος του αποχαιρετισμού. Αναμονή θανάτου

179-182 ΠΑΡΑΡΤΗΜΑ Α : Ιστορία και Ανθρωπολογία: ίχνη περάσματος στην Ευρώπη και την Ελλάδα από 11ο αιώνα - σήμερα 179 180 181 182

Αµαρί τσχιπ Η καταγωγή των Τσιγγάνων Η ονομασία «Ρομ» Η ονομασία «Γύφτος»

184-231 ΑΠΟΚΟΜΜΑΤΑ ΕΦΗΜΕΡΙΔΩΝ ΚΑΙ ΣΚΙΤΣΑ

234

CURRICULUM VITAE

7 ITEMS BOOK I III IX XI XVII

THE GOLDEN TOOTH THE COSTUME OF YORGOS MAGAS THE GOLDEN VASE SKIRT (ROTKIA), SCARF AND UNDERGARMENT GOLD JEWELLERY CONTENTS

Bohémiens en voyage

La tribu prophétique aux prunelles ardentes Hier s’est mise en route, emportant ses petits Sur son dos, ou livrant à leurs fiers appétits Le trésor toujours prêt des mamelles pendantes.

Les hommes vont à pied sous leurs armes luisantes Le long des chariots où les leurs sont blottis, Promenant sur le ciel des yeux appesantis Par le morne regret des chimères absentes.

Du fond de son réduit sablonneux, le grillon, Les regardant passer, redouble sa chanson; Cybèle, qui les aime, augmente ses verdures, Fait couler le rocher et fleurir le désert Devant ces voyageurs, pour lesquels est ouvert L’empire familier des ténèbres futures.

— Charles Baudelaire, Fleurs du mal

6

Gypsies Traveling

The prophetical tribe, that ardent eyed people, Set out last night, carrying their children On their backs, or yielding to those fierce appetites The ever ready treasure of pendulous breasts.

The men travel on foot with their gleaming weapons Alongside the wagons where their kin are huddled, Surveying the heavens with eyes rendered heavy By a mournful regret for vanished illusions.

The cricket from the depths of his sandy retreat Watches them as they pass, and louder grows his song; Cybele, who loves them, increases her verdure, Makes the desert blossom, water spurt from the rock Before these travelers for whom is opened wide The familiar domain of the future’s darkness.

— William Aggeler, The Flowers of Evil (Fresno, CA: Academy Library Guild, 1954)

7

INTRODUCTION

INTRODUCTION The fascination of wandering

There is a trauma that joins us with the world of Gypsies. A trauma like family secrets which are never spoken yet their painful experience keeps festering, as described by the French psychoanalyst Serge Tisseron in Les secrets de famille, and contaminating the temperament of subsequent generations. Similarly, this large nomadic family that moves through space and time carries its eternal ‘secret’ and suffers for it.

The true story of Gypsies is the pain of displacement. It is what they could not process, and it brings them to a constant renegotiation with the rules of their communal life. This secret, carried by all Gypsies as part of their primitive oral tradition, is not confessed. The cause that spawned it is unclear, but the experience is conveyed through their motions and the emotional charge of their voice, especially when they dance and sing.

The Gypsy feels at once accursed and powerful, because he speaks with nature. He lives in nature and turns down the closed organised systems he has been meeting over a period of eleven centuries—ever since, according to ethnologists, Gypsies embarked on their incessant wandering from East to West.

The adventure of their life was a source of fear and fascination for those unable to break out from the stability of organised society, who had to experience the anxiety of death within

8

its confines. Gypsies, on the contrary, exposed to the freedom of their primitive existence, had developed a defence mechanism for expelling fear by invoking properties of magic and divination which brought them into contact with the elements of nature and the world of a parallel reality. Wild beasts themselves, they accepted their herd-like condition in order to deal with the fear of those who persecuted them and avoided to touch them.

Vengeance does not exist in nature. Beasts attack only when driven by their instinct of survival. Yet although Gypsies remain outside the law and the realm of rationalisation, they do not deny their human condition; very close to their primordial needs, they are stimulated and excited by the power of instincts. They will ensnare their victim (the naive romantic, the disillusioned melancholic, the metaphysical anxiety of urban life) and exploit it with a carnivore’s heightened reflexes.

This contradiction in the Gypsy’s image as both liberated being and sly creature we have come to admire today. We are at the stage of a processed tolerance towards the “other” who survives and aches and the Gypsy who haggles and slips away. We admire the repetitive instability that governs an irregular way of life. Without realising it, the ‘Secret’ of the Gypsy family has been passed on to us, even though they never wanted to touch us…

A FOREWORD IRMA GYPSY GLOBALES (What is this?)

It is a Gypsy fashion house.

The weird fusion between an imaginary universe and a historical tradition of nomadic life.

A game of fashion and art at the vague borderline of style, anthropological tradition and artistic inspiration.

An attempt to document the impressive phenomena created by existing special persons.

The narrative of a visual and tactile adventure, like the adventure of a population group which has learnt how to live with and overcome the consequences of fear for the “other.”

A call for abandoning oneself to primordial instincts, to the rules of the group, to the convictions of free living, to discovering the essence of being. is a fairy tale for grownups.

An opportunity to descend to the exaggerated feelings that come after sorrow, mourning, passion or joy. is the love story of two people— its founders: a man (Janos) and a woman (Sylvia). With roots in Romania, activities in France, traces of habitation in Greece.

It comes the way it was conceived by their creator, Maria Papadimitriou, and the way she chose to present it.

It comes the way it was recorded in terms of the written ‘absurd’

by Efie Falida.

9

INTRODUCTION

40

41

ON THE ROAD

54

55

ON THE ROAD

1926 Amidst some heaps of litter in Marais Janos discovers a trunk with a broken lock. It is a traveller’s trunk full of documents, order forms, stamps, ribbons, laces, period patterns for clothes, brocade fabrics, a pair of men’s gaiters, a velvet coat and a rubber stamp with the emblem “ΦIRMA.”

64

65

CHRONOLOGY

1960 Their son, Michalis, true to the life cycle of his people, continues to write new chapters of creativity inspired by the history and the adventures of the founders of IRMA GYPSY GLOBALES.

70

71

CHRONOLOGY

78

79

82

83

ATELIER

88

89

PRESS FASHION CLIPPINGS

102

103

PRESS FASHION CLIPPINGS

108

109

IRMA GYPSY GLOBALES

130

IRMA GYPSY GLOBALES

131

MADE IN EVERYLAND

132

133

MADE IN EVERYLAND

168

7 ITEMS

I

The golden tooth The habit of Gypsy men and women to file down their healthy teeth in adolescence and cover them with golden caps is not about their views on oral hygiene. It is all about ‘doing their own thing’, as they state to those who ask them today. Gold teeth form part of their ideas about wealth. It must be movable, just as they are, and becomes a physical affair, a part of their existence that distinguishes them from others, the strangers in their race. At the same time it makes them part of their group; it makes them true to the age-old laws of their own tradition.

Human bicuspid tooth with its root. Tooth rout, gold tooth crown.

Item’s provenance: Dentist from Menidi gypsy settlement of Menidi, Attiki, Greece (p.II).

7 ITEMS

III

The costume of Yorgos Magas Yorgos Magas is a cult persona beyond the concept of a music idol, having acquired a reputation as an artist with metaphysical gifts.

He is a self-taught clarinet player who embellishes his playing with jazz improvisations.

This ‘shaman’ of music pays special attention to his choice of costume for a performance. Every one of Mangas’s striking outfits stands out for its decorative elements and stylistic excesses that hover between glamour kitsch and ethnic baroque.

The outfit for the destefashioncollection is made of hieratic garments of the Eastern Orthodox Church. In liturgical vestment tradition the red colour is semantically charged by its association with the Byzantine imperial court. It is reserved for specific occasions such as the days of martyred saints or the morning of Holy Thursday.

Throughout their history, church vestments have retained certain standard traits that set them apart from the garments of other social groups. Their main unchanging attribute is that they are designed to hide the human body as much as possible: the excessive length and the long, narrow sleeves of the inner garments, the absence of any visible belt and the simultaneous use of several overlaid pieces have contributed to this from Byzantine times to this day. These sartorial choices that conceal the body are probably associated with the clergy’s wish to steer away from all material things, even from their own human nature, in order to get closer to the Divine.

The Gypsy musician appropriates the symbolism of ecclesiastical clothing, adapts it to the norms of Western male attire and uses it as a tool for the attribution of his own metaphysical worldview.

Mens overcoat designed by Julie. Silk fabric embroidered with gold thread (p.IV).

Mens trousers designed by Julie. Silk fabric embroidered with gold thread (p.V).

Mens coat, with a pocket square made by Julie. Silk fabric embroidered with gold thread and cotton fabric, embroidered with white thread and beads (p.VI).

Mens headband and necktie designed by Julie. Silk fabric embroidered with gold thread (p.VII).

Mens vest designed by Julie. Silk fabric embroidered with gold thread (p.VIII).

7 ITEMS

IX

The golden vase If houses are the “vessels of life”, according to architect Aris Konstantinidis, to Gypsies the symbol of their own nomadic and traditionally homeless life is the vase. It is one of a Gypsy family’s few material possessions and forms part of their wedding ritual.

The morning after her first night as a wife, the newlywed woman fills this vessel with water, takes a glass and goes to ‘refresh’ the male chiefs of other families. Having taken the glass of water from the bride’s hands, the chiefs kiss her and throw something gold into the vase.

Turkish vase. Gold plated ceramic vase.

Item’s provenance: Maria, gypsy settlement of Aliveri, Volos, Greece (p.X).

7 ITEMS

XI

Skirt (rotkia), scarf and undergarment Gypsy attire is a female affair. The main element is the ample, long pleated skirt made of a thin, vividly coloured fabric with printed patterns. Purple, green, fluorescent orange with gold and silver, yellow, white over red or green over orange are the usual colour schemes for the skirts of all women, irrespective of their age. The apron (katrintsa) and a scarf (diklo) with coins or lace tied around the neck complete the main elements of Gypsy style. The skirt is fastened in front and the —narrower— apron falls over it and is tied in the back.

Various aspects of social life revolve around the semantics of the gypsy skirt. From the purchase of the fabric, the arrangement of the pieces and the sewing up to the offering as a ‘gift’ to a close relative or the accumulation of skirts as the dowry of a family’s girls, the skirt (rotkia, in the language of Romanian Roms) reflects women’s relation to their body. At the same time, it is the symbol of female authority, as the garment that covers and protects what Gypsies believe to be the impure area of female genitalia. The skirt thus stigmatises anyone who touches it. In Gypsy tradition, when a woman wipes her face in her skirt and then throws it at any man, even her own child, it is seen as a curse, the cycle of which can only be resolved with fire, while those stigmatised are ousted from the community and live on its fringe.

Gypsy strains from Eastern Europe and Turkey have one more garment in their sartorial vocabulary, a loose-fitting undergarment called sosten in the Romani language. This particular example comes from the Gypsy settlement of Aliveri, Volos. Its former owner, Marianna, believes that bloomers must be ample so that none of the female body’s erogenous zones are touched by the fabric.

Romanian skirt. Fluorescent orange polyester fabric with sequin details, embroidered with gold and silver thread.

Item’s provenance: Miranda, gypsy resident of Metaxourgeion, Athens, Greece (p.XII, XIII-XIV).

Underwear. Patterned cotton fabric with lace details .

Item’s provenance: Marianna, gypsy settlement of Aliveri, Volos, Greece (p.XV).

Headscarf. Synthetic fabric adorned with gold plated coins.

Item’s provenance: Miranda, gypsy resident of Metaxourgeion, Athens, Greece (p.XVI).

7 ITEMS

196

197

APPENDIX B

212

213

APPENDIX B

216

217

APPENDIX B

COLOPHON

Maria Papadimitriou ΦIRMA GYPSY GLOBALES Editing: Maria Papadimitriou Text: Efie Falida Design: Vassiliki-Maria Plavou Project Coordinator: Elisavet Stamou Translation: Tony Moser Marble paper cover designed by Susanna Voltarel ATELIER ΦIRMA GYPSY GLOBALES Costume designer: Thalia Istikopoulou Coordinators: Elisavet Antapassi, Elisavet Stamou Participants: Evangelia Bakogianni, Koko Dimitriadis, Giota Evelzaman, Evangelia Kiosse, Marilia Klaoudatou, Mirna Marianovits, Aristea Mylopoulou, Chara Stergiou, Sofia Tektonidou, Rea Tsiampaou, Eleni Zotou Drawings of women’s garments: Catherine Economou Sketches for the newspapers archives: Konstantinos Ktistakis PHOTO ΦIRMA GYPSY GLOBALES Technical assistant for the photograph page 108: Panos Kokkinias Persons who participated in the photograph page 108: Danae Avaraki, Aggelina Dagka, Maria Kotoula, Aggeliki Meli, Dimitra Patra, Georgia Perdikouri-Papadopoulou, Nikoleta Thamnopoulou Make-up-artist: Evmorfia Kontodiou Persons who participated in the photographs: Pages 81-160-161: Constantinos Caravanos Pages 82-83: Dora Papapdimitriou Pages 156-157: Harrie Photoharrie Photographs: Alexandra Argyri

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Special Thanks to Dakis Joannou & Yorgos Tzirtzilakis for the conversations I had with them and for our collaboration throughout the project and the present publication.

Extended Thanks to Regina Alivizatou, Eliza-Anna Delveroudi, Michalis Softas, for their support and Athina Forouli for her generous hospitality.

Published by: DESTE Foundation for Contemporary Art 11 Filellinon & Emmanouil Pappa Street N. Ionia 14234, Athens, Greece Tel: +30 210 2758490 / Fax: +30 210 2754862 www.deste.gr

Publication Š 2014 DESTE Foundation for Contemporary Art All artwork Š the artist

Printed in Greece by Alta Grafico S.A. Printing and Graphic Arts

ISBN 978-618-5039-11-0

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COLOPHON

ISBN 978-618-5039-11-0