Catholicism at the Costume Institute

Well, well.  How nice is this?  The Met is going to take up the themes of V&R this year in its annual meditation on fashion.  The topic is the place of Catholicism in the lives of so many fashion designers (https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/08/style/met-museum-costume-institute-catholicism.html).  I shall certainly go and give you some of my thoughts here.

Circuits printed onto fabric x David Hume

This is some news: researchers at Cambridge have printed electrical circuits directly onto sustainable fabric (http://www.cam.ac.uk/research/news/fully-integrated-circuits-printed-directly-onto-fabric).  If we don’t literally become cyborgs, looks like we’ll be wearing fabrics soon that’ll make us rather like cyborgs on the outside.  Clothes linked directly to the internet?  Your Pinterest moving across your jumper?  David Hume is thrilled.

Vitrine x Huizinga

Paris is currently celebrating the vitrines of Leïla Menchari of Hermès (http://www.anothermag.com/fashion-beauty/10351/the-fascinating-woman-behind-hermes-window-displays).  Pierre-Alexis Dumas, artistic director of Hermès, describes each window as a little theatre in which each piece plays its role perfectly.  Huizinga approves.

Dressing UHNWIs: Dolce & Gabbana

The best line in a recent article on Dolce & Gabbana’s couture business: “After dinner, back at Palermo’s Villa Igiea hotel, which had been reserved for those clients who were not staying on yachts…” (https://www.wsj.com/articles/behind-the-scenes-at-dolce-gabbanas-couture-club-for-top-clients-1506527428: annoyingly, The Wall Street Journal puts articles behind a paywall. Sorry).   Dolce & Gabbana is now exclusively a couture…

Dries Van Noten x Shaftesbury x Scheler

A good article on Van Noten (https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/16/t-magazine/dries-van-noten.html) dwells on two things Shaftesbury and Scheler would enjoy: gardens and heritage.   In light of Shaftesbury, in a few blog posts I explored the relationship between flowers and fashion.  According to Hanya Yanagihara, Van Noten’s use of colour is derived from his fascination with flowers and their…

Nationalism in fashion

Ever since Brexit, fashion pages have beaten the same drum: collapse is nigh because fashion is global.  In an earlier post (http://www.ethicsoffashion.com/fashion-and-nation/), I pointed out the very obvious point that this cannot quite be true: heritage brands trade on their nation all the time. Happily, the well-known Suzy Menkes has made another obvious point: the…