robie-literowki

Once you are able to read the language of fashion, it helps you very much to understand society. For me, the language of fashion is the best possible tool to do forecasting. Textile, materials and cars are there first: they always indicate major changes. If you can read those things, then you can understand the rest of the world. It’s a very powerful tool. It modifies the body, behaviour, it modifies written language. It’s a very powerful script. It’s a bit different now, because there is so much economical concern. However, in the 70s, 80s, 90s, it was a highly powerful tool to understand what was going on. I still use it very often.


What is the specificity of fashion inside of culture?


Because fashion uses textiles, it has a softer side which many other disciplines don’t have. Textile is so important in itself because it is a creative domain. A little piece of fabric enables you to understand the time we live in: fashion, because of its textile component, has that double power. First the textile needs to be created, and then after comes the form, the volume. I understood it one day, when we went from the 80s to the 90s. In the 80s, the dominant textile was the diagonal, the gabardine. It is a façade fabric that is able to hide what is inside. So you can use a viscose that looks like a wool, and then you see that it’s not wool. It was exactly correlating to the façade architecture of postmodernism and the façade workings of the companies at that time, when we went overboard in the 80s. In the 90s, there was an ecological and economic crisis. From one day to the other, we went to square weave. Politicians wanted to look honest, and this is an honest weave, in which you can’t hide anything. When you have this square weave, you can embroider it, use it as a canvas. The message was clear; you had to be square. I understood that if you go back to history, you can understand the time period from knowing the dominant fabric. Like when velvet becomes important: velvet is a double, schizophrenic fabric. It’s very artistic and very solid. All the fabrics have a quality, which is like a character. Fashion is casually using these elements of development.

From: http://www.anothermag.com/current/view/1887/Lidewij_Edelkoort

I am just learning about African textile from this beautiful book. But also thinking about the Arts & Crafts's "truth to materials" and wooden art pieces made by Maciek Gąsienica Giewont (http://www.giewontstudio.pl/main.htm)

fot. Kuba Pajewski