Irenebrination: Notes on Architecture, Art, Fashion, Fashion Law & Technology

Can the Blockchain and Cryptocurrencies Fix Fashion Journalism?

Journalism is under siege, that's undeniable: at the beginning of October journalist Jamal Khashoggi was murdered in Saudi Arabia's consulate and the Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, often criticised by Khashoggi, was accused of organising the killing; US President Trump, a man who labels all unfavourable reports against him as "fake news", recently attacked CNN journalist Jim Acosta who questioned him about the caravan of Central American asylum seekers at a press conference after the mid-term elections, and soon afterwards the White House revoked Acosta's press pass. In the meantime, in Italy the Five Star Movement (M5S, now governing the country together with far-right wing party The League) called journalists "jackals", "whores" and spreaders of "fake news" in connection with the coverage of the alleged abuse of power by MS5 Mayor of Rome Virginia Raggi.

So would it be possible to defend journalism from these attacks, while helping journalists getting the time and money for their researchers and investigations? Earlier on this year Brooklyn-based Civil Media Co. stated it was going to create a new journalism economy using the blockchain, the technology behind cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and Ethereum. The technology allows to distribute data on a network of nodes using cryptography, removing in this way the necessity for information to be controlled by a central authority.

Civil's plan consisted in creating a sort of a blockchain-based network for journalism: after raising over $5 million from blockchain venture firm (by Ethereum co-founder Joseph Lubin) ConsenSys, Civil aimed at selling $34 million of "Civil (CVL) Tokens" for $8 - $24 million. CVL tokens could then be used by consumers (and not by investors or speculators) to financially support independent newsrooms on the Civil platform with all token transactions recorded on the Ethereum blockchain.

The idea behind Civil was mainly establishing a free and independent press (working on local coverage, investigative and public policy reporting), and a link between journalists and citizens, eliminating advertising and third-party interests.

Yet things didn't work out that well so far: the token sale wasn't successful (only 1,012 investors purchased $1,435,491 worth of CVL tokens), the $8 million goal wasn't raised as hoped by 15th October and the startup had to announce they were going to refund transactions.

News organizations to which Civil tried to sell tokens and start partnerships - The New York Times, The Washington Post and Dow Jones & Co. among the others - refused to join the partnership (at the same time, Forbes announced at the beginning of October that it will be the first media brand to start publishing content on the Civil platform and 13 newsrooms signed to be on the Civil platform, including the Colorado Sun, and Documented, covering immigration policy in New York City).

Besides, Civil co-founder, Daniel Sieberg, a former technology journalist at CNN and CBS News, stated the business plan was flawed (apart from being a bit convoluted as well...) which is understandable if you consider the fact that there were no specific information about the size of the network of journalists involved and of consumers, and that cryptocurrencies have a volatile value, so the price of CVL could crash anytime. 

Civil's idea - creating a new environment for matching a creator and a content with paying audience, a marketplace regulated by the community (that said the community can commit mistakes...) - seemed bold, but it must be said that it doesn't necessarily generate any revenue for newsrooms to support themselves and their journalists.

Civil turned to the blockchain to foster independence and establish a responsible and ethical journalism policy: this technology ensures integrity as publications can store articles in a secure database (and therefore not concentrate them on a single server controlled by a powerful company), where they cannot be altered or tampered with (unless a voting majority of Civil citizens agree to do so).

But could the blockchain and cryptocurrencies be used to develop new models for fashion journalism as well? Adverts have always supported all sorts of publications, from small to big ones, and fashion journalism thrived on advertising: it is well known that writing an unfavourable review of a runway show or a mildly critical feature implies the loss of your seat at a catwalk show and of the contract from that powerful fashion house for their new beauty ad.

Eleven years ago Franca Sozzani, the late Editor in Chief of Vogue Italia and L'Uomo Vogue, was at the centre of a major conflict of interests as her partner and Vogue Italia/L'Uomo Vogue art director Luca Stoppini, also directed an advertising company and used to take care of the campaigns of quite a few fashion houses and brands appearing on Condé Nast magazines. The conflict sparked a debate: should these figures be called consu-journalists (a hybrid term combining "consultant" and "journalist") and should they be considered as objective reporters if their lack of integrity and criticism damaged the fashion system?

The answer was never found, but in the meantime traditional advertising models that supported journalism and in particular fashion journalism collapsed with the arrival of social media; new technologies introduced innovative systems to reach out to readers and consumers and, as brands started investing in new ways to advertise their products, ad revenue disappeared pushing some publications to find other funding alternatives (including installing cryptocurrency mining software on their websites, a trick that uses the computer resources of readers and that may be considered as unfair as users may not be aware of it).

Would the blockchain help? Well, the blockchain and cryptocurrencies could create a platform for a free and independent press, but this may not be of interest to mainstream fashion journalism. Blockchain technology can help introduce a new, ad-free model, but fashion doesn't exist without adverts and, while readers may be intrigued at the prospect of objective news stories about a fashion house or a designer (rather than in the usual trite articles about the best coats to buy this winter or the latest "It" bag being modelled by this or that particular celebrity), autonomous, impartial and objective journalism in fashion may remain a unicorn as it is would be almost impossible to write investigative features about a specific fashion house without having access to it (and PR officers wouldn't let you do it).  

As for payments in cryptocurrencies, well, while it would be intriguing to see if readers would be willing to do micropayments in cryptocurrencies for an article that could raise the tone of online fashion discourse, or if established magazines would use them to speed up payment processes (that can be long and annoying especially if you're a freelancer based in Europe and you're collaborating with magazines located in Asia). At the same time, cryptocurrencies may create further confusion and lead to unfair practices: at the moment there are influencers being paid in (money, garments, accessories, beauty products, trips...) in accordance with the (at times inflated and fake) numbers of followers and often they are not disclosing their blog/Instagram posts as adverts. Cryptocurrencies may be used for other purposes, such as reaching out to an influencer and paying them to write an unfavourable review of a product by a competitor or paying somebody to write a piece that sounds like a proper feature but it is actually a paid and undisclosed sponsored post, and then making such payments untraceable.

That said it is worth paying attention to the blockchain and cryptocurrencies because this is a dynamic and evolving field, but, rather than technology, fashion journalism needs a new ecosystem where conglomerates are not scared of reporters asking questions and designers do not use PR officers to answer questions sent to them via email, a new place where investigations could also be carried out (hands up who would like an investigation into the links between criminal organisations and the fashion industry?). In a nutshell, reshaping fashion journalism may be an entirely human endeavour rather than a matter of super innovative technologies.

Saint Homobonus, Patron Saint of Tailors, Shoemakers and Clothworkers

In previous posts we often looked at the tailoring traditions in Italy, studying the Milanese, Neapolitan, Sicilian and Venetian tailoring schools. But we never looked at a very revered figured for tailors – their patron Saint Homobonus.

Born in Cremona, Lombardy, in Italy (where he is known as Sant'Omobono - his name meaning in Latin, "good man"), Omobono Tucenghi was a wool and textile merchant.

He believed that God had allowed him to work in order that he would be able to support people living in a state of poverty and practiced his profession with honesty and devotion.

A frequent church attendee, he died on November 13, 1197, while attending mass and was canonized by Pope Innocent III two years later.

The church of Sant'Omobono in Rome is dedicated to him and his body is preserved in the cathedral of Cremona.

Homobonus incarnated the figure of the kind entrepreneur, focused on distributing wealth rather than accumulating it and therefore became patron saint of business people, tailors, shoemakers, clothworkers, as well as the city of Cremona.

The Madonna of the Tailors, painted by Bonifacio Veronese in 1533 for the altar on the ground floor of the Tailors' School near the Jesuit Church in Venice, depicts in a Mannerist style Saint Homobonus on the left of the Madonna and Child, giving alms to a man. Saint Homobonus can be easily identified by the tailor scissors on the pavement near his feet.

Celebrations are organised in the honour of Saint Homobonus in November, but it is not rare to see a mass being said to remember him whenever groups from the association of tailors in Italy get together.

In Pescina, in the Abruzzo region, the devotion for this saint was strong in the 1800s. Local tailors started celebrating Saint Homobonus in 1861 in the local church of Saint Bernard.

By 1901 they had a street dedicated to tailors next to the church and in the same year  they organised a sort of open air runway show in this street to launch a coat designed to pay homage to the local style. In 1902, a local tailoring house created tunics for the Good Friday procession, combining fashion and devotion in the designs.  

Traditions were abandoned around 1915 when people started migrating, among them many tailors who continued their professions abroad. The devotion to saint Homobonus was rediscovered after the Second World War in Pescina and revived in a minor form in more recent years.

Local tailors were extremely skilled as proved by archival footage from 1955 showing Pescina-based tailor Serafino Cordischi making a suit in 2 hours and 15 minutes using 1.75 metres of fabric. Must have genuinely been inspired and protected by Saint Homobonus. 

The Successful Formula Behind Alibaba's Singles' Day? The "New Retail" Strategy

Thinking outside the box. This has been the life motto of Jack Ma, founder of Alibaba and, while it is unquestionable that the e-commerce giant wasn't really based on any extremely new models, his motto genuinely worked when it came to certain retail strategies or events like Singles' Day.

Held every year on 11th November, Singles' Day, 11.11 (so-called as the numerals resemble single individuals...) or Guanggun Jie was first celebrated in the 1990s by young, single Chinese students as an anti-Valentine's Day and an excuse to buy themselves presents.

In 2009, Alibaba co-opted the informal celebration and started using the date to offer 50% discounts at retailers on its e-commerce platform Taobao.

Little by little and slowly yet relentlessly, Singles' Day transformed into a mighty shopathon, China's own celebration of consumerism with more power to shift goods than the Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales days in the United States combined.

In 2016 Singles' Day sales reached $5 billion in an hour with a total of $17.73 billion worth of sales in one day; last year Alibaba hit a new record reaching $5 billion in transactions in less than 15 minutes and closing with $25.3 billion of sales (a 39% increase compared to Singles' Day 2016). 

This year Singles' Day topped $5.3 billion in 12 minutes, closing at $30.8 billion in sales (an increase of about 27% over last year's total; the slower growth compared to the previous year may be due to the fact that the festival is becoming more known).

Celebrations were in typical Alibaba style: there was a countdown gala in the hours leading up to the stroke of midnight on 11th November and a live broadcast on two Chinese satellite television channels. Local and international acts performed, among the others singers and musicians such as Mariah Carey and Jay Chou, the Cirque du Soleil and model Miranda Kerr.

Company founder Jack Ma didn't give a speech, but made an appearance on a screen, maybe conjuring up visions of extremely wealthy lifestyles à la "Crazy Rich Asians". Yet Singles' Day is not just for rich shoppers, but for all sorts of consumers and, looking from the statistics, for consumers based all over the world (in 2007 Russia, Hong Kong and the US were the main three non-Chinese Singles' Day markets).

Singles' Day has indeed been spreading from China to South Korea, Southeast Asia (where online shopping is a relatively new venture; Alibaba also has an AI-powered tool that provides instant translations from English to Thai, Vietnamese and Indonesian), Europe and North America (AliExpress, Alibaba's global retail platform, offers an AI-translation tool allowing English speakers to communicate with Chinese, Russian, Spanish, French, Arabic and Turkish speakers). 

Singles' Day 2018 will be remembered for representing Alibaba's expansion in Southeast Asia: its subsidiary, Singapore-based Lazada, offered indeed special discounts in Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand and Vietnam.

China-based consumers often expect to buy overseas goods during Singles' Day and Japan, the United States (despite Trump's trade wars...) and South Korea were the top three countries from which shoppers bought goods this year.

Xiaomi Corp., Apple Inc. and Dyson Ltd. products were the top three brands in early sales, but consumers bought a wide range of items, from smartphones and TVs to clothing, furniture and health products. There were also interesting extremes represented by high end products such as cars and daily perishables like toilet paper.

The shopping extravaganza with massive proportions is usually supported by a solid marketing campaign (this year it kicked off in June...), but this time Alibaba offered some new features to shoppers. The emphasis was indeed on strengthening the link between online and offline retailers. Alibaba's Tmall and Swire Properties opened a brick-and-mortar shopping mall in Beijing at the beginning of November to mark the event; besides, Alibaba's Tmall shopping site offered tie-ups with 200,000 brick-and-mortar shops (selling 180,000 brands). Ele.me, Alibaba's food delivery platform, also provided delivery for select Starbucks stores across 11 Chinese cities (Starbucks did a deal this year with Alibaba to work together in China).

That said there may be some problems for Alibaba as its latest quarterly earnings report highlighted sales of 85.15 billion yuan for the three months ending September. Although that was a 54% increase compared to the previous year, it fell short of the consensus forecast of 86.51 billion yuan.

China's slowing economy could be attributed to the falling stock markets and the trade war with the United States; that said, growth may be slowing, but it is not stopping and this may mean that there are lessons to be learnt for retailers based in the West as well. 

Alibaba's strength at the moment is indeed represented by considering online and offline as parts of the same coin, and trying to create deals and bonds with brick-and-mortar stores. Amazon has been trying to do the same recently, but at times it hasn't been too consistent: there have been experiments with Amazon pop up shops and events with selected brands such as Calvin Klein, but Europe hasn't seen too many of such initiatives. Alibaba has instead been focusing on what it calls "new retail" strategy (the Starbucks deal is part of it), a way to take the O2O (Online to Offline) model forward and merge the digital and the real world by offering or advertising special deals in stores. The concept was already presented by Jack Ma in 2016 and it was conceived as a combination of offiline, online, logistics and data across a single value chain. The "new retail" principle was applied to Alibaba's Hema Supermarket where innovations include for example barcode scanning on mobile to reveal product information and recommendations of complementary products (things you may find in Amazon's temporary pop up shops), but also the possibility of paying or opting for a free delivery via the Hema app, solutions that offer consumers a personalised shopping experience.  

Alibaba also aims at increasing sales by forging different collaboration agreements with brands and online platforms, creating an ecosystem and empowering sellers and vendors; Amazon is instead a gigantic empire with a sort of conflicting attitude towards its own vendors (especially small and independent ones), who often even end up seeing their products censored or blacked out in a random and casual way (usually it happens because they are considered as "offensive", but criteria are puzzling as adult toys may not be censored while a book, manga or DVD for the adult market may end up being censored for common decency reasons regarding their covers...). So, while the two e-commerce giants are different, there things they could learn from each other.

It will be intriguing to see where the "new retail" strategy will take Alibaba, but you can bet that Singles' Day 2019 will be even more stellar: Jack Ma is stepping down next year and hand over the reins to Daniel Zhang, CEO of Alibaba and key architect of the Singles' Day event, so something may be up his sleeve already. In the meantime, he may want to consider one major issue regarding the shopping extravaganza: Alibaba expects 1 billion packages to get shipped this year, something that will have an impact on the environment. Looks like Zhang will have to deal with this aspect as well before organising the next shopping gala.  

Sewing Sunday Project with a Vintage Pattern: The Draped Blouse-Like Back

The draped blouse-like back was a popular effect in the 1960s and, since it is not a difficult detail to create, it may be worth rediscovering it, especially for fans of voluminous and loose coats and jackets.

This effect essentially consists in creating a diagonal seam on the back (remember that the back must be longer than the front of the garment for this design) of a garment (as opposed to a straight vertical seam) and adding small vertical cuts along the back of the waist. The cuts are then sewn using the pinces effect, internal stitch folds that shape the garment and create a sort of movement, a draped blouse-like effect.

A trick favoured by Balenciaga in the '60s, this technique can be applied to jackets or coats like the one by Jean Dessès seen in the second image in this post and it can employed to create well-sculpted effects (like in the jacket showcased in the sketch with the skirt suit on the right) or more subtle ones (like in the Dessès coat).

In Italian this tailoring technique has a wonderful sound: it is called "dorso blusante" and that present participle used like an adjective ("blusante") makes it sound rather intriguing, as it gives the main noun a dynamic connotation, instantly conjuring up visions of a garment in movement. Ah, the power of words. Have a nice sewing Sunday!

Word-Based Vs Visual (and Tactile) Codes: Antonio Marras X Zanichelli

It is undeniable that image is everything in our world: we all abide to this modern truism and sadly too often forget the power of words in favour of visual stimuli. Yet one of the most powerful tools we may ever use against ignorance and superficiality is a dictionary. Usually filed in the reference section of bookshops, monolingual, bilingual, technical and illustrated dictionaries offer information on words and grammar and very good ones become friends for life.

To refocus the attention of younger generations on the power of words and of dictionaries in particular, Italian publishing house Zanichelli - known in Italy for a quintessential Italian product, the Zingarelli dictionary - turned to Antonio Marras.

In a world in which students favour smartphones and computers to books and struggle to relate to thick tomes (up until 30 years ago you would easily find one or two dictionaries, often by Zanichelli, in all Italian households, but nowadays you would struggle to find even an old one), the publishing house decided it was time to raise awareness about the importance of preserving a language by turning to a fashion designer and artist. 

The publisher sent therefore around 30 copies of their dictionaries to Marras and the Sardinian designer proceeded to transform them into artworks.

Marras has a passion for tangible things and materials: if you've ever sat down to interview him, you've probably witnessed him doodling on a notebook while chatting and occasionally using his espresso to paint.

The task was a bit daunting at the beginning as Marras didn't know how to approach things, but, little by little, he developed a theme - the sense of loss, almost a mourning feeling for language extinction - and, using his passion for different materials, transformed 16 copies of the Zingarelli dictionaries he was sent. The results were unveiled this week at the Circolo Marras (via Cola di Rienzo), the Milan-based atelier of the designer.

Marras stated in a press release that for inspiration he moved from disciplines such as art, dance, poetry, cinema, theatre and literature and from different figures, including dance choreographer Pina Bausch, naturalist Eva Mameli Calvino and Nobel Prize-winner writer Grazia Deledda.

At times he opened the volumes at a certain page and pierced the pages with nuts and bolts; in other case he poured concrete on an open tome and added some toy soldiers, almost recreating a small scene from the First World War trenches.

He added doddles, collages, sketches and cuts, burnt this or that page, applied fabric and gauze to one dictionary, almost to symbolise the fact that our languages are broken and fractured and we are losing the possibility of communicating, and glued cactus spikes to one cover and dolls eyes to another to remind that words are powerful things and that a dictionary is a sort of friendly guardian of a language. Marras created his own visual and tactile codes and applied them to the language code locked in the Zingarelli dictionaries.

Word purists may not like the fact that the designer more or less destroyed the tomes, but his intervention calls to mind the work of the late Sardinian artist Maria Lai, who became a friend, muse and collaborator of Marras.

The fashion designer's dictionaries are mixes of different materials, calling to mind Lai's "Telai" (Looms), assemblages of wires, scraps of fabric, wood and everyday objects, artworks inspired by the primitive elements of Sardinian culture.

The volumes remind of Lai's bread encyclopedia, notebooks and books made of fabric and integrating pieces of ceramic and paper or featuring fabric pages covered in embroidered texts.

Marras' stratified and layered Zingarelli dictionaries covered in dirty and drawings become messages to fight against banality and superficiality: they are eccentric and extreme, made useless by the interventions of the artist, but they have a core message, easy to grasp - culture is never unfashionable, so open up your dictionaries and get to know your languages more.

The life of this project is somehow limited as eight of the 16 works of art (on display until 21st November at the Circolo Marras) will be auctioned during a charity event at the Mudec museum in Milan on 13th November, but this exercise could prove inspiring for other publishers.

Fashion designers in the past created covers for limited editions of novels (remember for example how five tales by Beatrix Potter were republished in 2016 with covers by five fashion designers?), so the time has probably come for publishers to relaunch dictionaries maybe wrapped in designer covers. Who knows, grammar school students struggling with their Latin and Greek would maybe be more willing to open their classical language dictionaries if they knew they had been dressed, decorated and repackaged by their favourite artists and designers.

All images in this post by Daniela Zedda

No More Waste in a Freespace: Anna Heringer Talks about Made in Bangladesh Textiles, Sustainability and "This is not a shirt. This is a playground" @ The 16th International Architecture Exhibition, Venice

The label "Made in Bangladesh" conjures up in the minds of most of us images of sweatshops where garments for fast fashion retailers are produced in dangerous and precarious working conditions and the tragedy of the Rana Plaza factory complex that collapsed in Dhaka in 2013, killing over 1,100 people.

But architect Anna Heringer, inspired by her on-field experience and by the history of textiles in Bangladesh, is trying to change our perceptions of what this label really means. 

Heringer, who studied architecture at the University of Arts Linz, is the recipient of the Aga Khan Award for Architecture (2007) for the METI Handmade School (made using local materials such as mud and bamboo) in Rudrapur, Bangladesh, and of the Global Award for Sustainable Architecture.

The architect recently developed a project linked with textiles that she showcased at the 16th International Architecture Exhibition, Venice (on until 25th November 2018). Heringer, who is also UNESCO Chair of Earthen Architecture, is not new to the Biennale: in the previous edition she presented with Martin Rauch and Andres Lepik the project "Mud Works!" 

Her new project is entitled "This is not a shirt. This is a playground" and it is a wearable take on the concept of "Freespace", the theme of this year's Architecture Biennale, launched by curators Yvonne Farrell and Shelley McNamara and questioning the quality of space, open space and the presence/absence of architecture.

"We all create spaces, no matter if we are architects or not," Heringer says, "Sometimes the spaces are just so far away from us that we don't think about them, even though we may have a connection with them – think about Bangladesh where a lot of the shirts and clothes we wear are produced."

The architect is a firm believer in relying on locally available resources, a lesson that has so far inspired all her projects. 

"In the villages in Bangladesh you have a fantastic situation as there is a lot of freespace and local materials," she explains. "You can use mud from a pond to build a wall and support it with bamboo, creating in this way houses and structures; you can use the fish in the pond for food and women, children and the elderly feel safe. Yet, because of poverty, people have to emigrate and follow the money flow: in Bangladesh textiles represent the main industry and people are forced to leave their villages and move to the industrial hubs. We are linked with this situation as the money flow often ends up being dictated by our shopping attitude and habits."

Heringer's installation at the Biennale comprises a shiny mirrored box with a TV inside, representing the world that workers find in the city after leaving their villages - fake gold, shopping malls and the hope of becoming part of the rich capitalistic world.

There is something ominously dark on the box: on its sides you can read indeed the names of some of the victims of the collapse of the Rana Plaza factory. "They represent scratches on this apparently shiny and polished surface," Heringer comments.

Stepping into the box is a way to experience the limited and stressful conditions people are living in the settlements of garment workers.

"The only freespace people have there is that same rented room with a TV that they share with other workers," Heringer says. "Our TV shows the spaces of the villages they have left that contrast with the spaces of the factory."

The box is surrounded by a display of very special blankets and shirts made with upcycled textiles. Their textures are striking as they seem to be made with layers of differently coloured fabrics that at times are peeled off to reveal the hidden colours underneath.

The designs seem to be going remarkably well with the walls of the Arsenale surrounding them and, like these walls, the textiles have a story to tell: in rural Bangladesh women get one sari a year from their family, while men get one lungi, a piece of cloth wrapped around as a skirt. These pieces are very fine and, when they get worn out, people collect and stitch them in layers (usually 6) by hand, making blankets with them.

"The blankets bear the imprint of several years of sleeping on them, representing a family's universe, story and pattern," Heringer explains.

"A layer may come off and somebody may associate that colour and texture with the time their daughter was born or with this or that event that happened in the family, so the blanket is a receptacle of the family's history. Once they become useless as blankets, people cut them in pieces and use them to wipe the floor or for other purposes." 

Heringer decided to take this tradition to a new level developing the Didi Textiles initiative with NGO Dipshikha and designer Veronika Lena Lang: with the help of the women around the villages of Rudrapur and Birgonj these blankets are turned into shirts, bags and pillows. In this way a network of local jobs are developed and migration to the cities is reduced.

The inspiration came directly from the local textile culture: before the British colonisation, Bengal, Kolkata and Dhaka boasted their own silk and cotton productions.

"This beautiful textile culture and production was suppressed with the British colonial rule that advantaged British produced fabrics, and was followed by the boycotting of foreign cloth, while in India the spinning wheel became the symbol of the Nationalist movement," Heringer recounts.

For her architectural projects such as the METI Handmade School and the DESI vocational school for electricians, Heringer focused on using local materials, but she did the same with textiles.

"In those cases I tried to focus on what's there and what's the potential of materials such as mud and bamboo. Textiles are there and they represent a great potential too, but I didn't want to focus on the conditions in the factory, because normally when we think about the 'Made in Bangladesh' label we attach to it a negative connotation and immediately think about fast fashion, but this is actually what 'Made in Bangladesh' genuinely means," Heringer says, indicating the fabrics surrounding her.

The possibility of getting a lot of orders for the Didi Textiles products does not scare Heringer as the workforce is ready. "I've been collaborating with the NGO Dipshikha for 20 years and they have a course every three months that produces more tailors and seamstresses, sewing is the only profession for women, and there's plenty of them who can sustain the production." 

The pieces they make are designed for decentralised production, since, as Heringer explains, they can be created without electricity or machines. "Besides, they aren't conceived for any fashion cycles," the architect highlights, "they are indeed timeless and unique pieces, and you won't find two alike anywhere else in the world". 

While women can make these pieces from their own houses, at the moment Heringer is working a new mud-walled facility: on the lower level it will provide training people with disabilities, while women will be working on the upper level. "Women love getting together and creating a sense of community, so this will be a good and beautiful place where they can gather, work and talk."

Heringer plans to keep this project as a travelling exhibition and a pop up store where people can buy things, but at the moment it is possible to sustain the project through the Didi Textiles Crowdfunding project as well.

The main aim of the project is self-empowering women and local communities, fostering independence in the villages of Bangladesh. "It is important to guarantee them a job and a steady income," Heringer says. "After developing projects over there for 20 years, I realised one thing is coming in with donations and another providing an income. The latter truly makes a difference: while we get a unique garment made by an artisan, the women over there get an income that also gives them a boost of confidence."

The project and the installation in Venice have many lessons for us all: usually consumers based in the Global North buy a garment made in the Global South. Once it gets worn out or they are fed up with it, that garment is discarded and quite often it ends up being exported again to the Global South, a practice that has so far destroyed local cultures and markets.

"With this project the Global South sends us back a lesson in recycling things over and over, these women show how to add another layer of creativity to an old piece and design something new with a story behind it."

The installation is also a way to think about how to reduce our wardrobes by buying fewer, but more selected pieces. "I was a fast fashion shopper myself," Heringer confesses, "but then I started wearing these pieces and I realised they simplify my style a lot. I never wonder what I should wear today and my life is easier because my style revolves around a few good pieces rather than around too many. They are always with me and they are dear to me. I have developed a bond with the shirt I'm wearing now for example as I feel it tells a story."

Last but not least, the installation is a lesson for all those visitors to the Venice Biennale who may feel such a project does not belong to architecture. "It's a little bit tricky as a woman to do such a project as you could easily be pigeonholed into the textile designer category, put in the wrong corner, and not labelled as architecture," Heringer claims. "But by looking at the installation and getting to know more about the project, all visitors and not just architects can contribute to freespace and maybe the next time they go out shopping they will think more about their consumers' habits. After all it is the everyday small decisions that shape our built environment and make a change."

Studio Anna Heringer's "This is not a shirt. This is a playground" project is on display at the 16th International Architecture Exhibition, Venice, Italy, until 25th November 2018. Anna Heringer will be speaking about beauty and sustainability and her projects in the village of Rudrapur, Bangladesh, at The Great Hall, The Cooper Union, 7 East 7th Street, New York, on 14th November 2018.

Calzedonia, From Made in Italy to Made in Africa

We all know that globalisation definitely had an impact on the fashion industry: many Italian companies that were famous for their "Made in Italy" products started for example manufacturing parts in other countries and then importing and assembling them in Italy; in other cases they outsourced the production to factories based in China, Bangladesh or Turkey or moved their facilities to Eastern Europe to benefit from the advantages of local cheaper workforce.

The Calzedonia Group is among them, but last month it launched a pioneering operation opening its first manufacturing plant in Ethiopia. Called Itaca Textile Plc, the plant is located in Macallè, in the Tigrai region.

The plant employs over 1,000 people (a number that, the group claims, will increase to 1,500 by mid-2019; the idea is to train local people rather than importing the workforce from other countries), 90% of them are women.

All the steps of the production - from cutting, sewing and ironing to quality control - are taken care of in the same plant and the factory mainly produces knitwear, pyjamas and leggings for the group's Calzedonia, Tezenis and Intimissimi labels.  

The group guarantees free transportation to its workers and the plant features quite a few facilities, including a free canteen, showers, a medical centre and a nearby well, created to serve all the villages surrounding the factory (each worker will also receive 10 litres of drinking water a week as a bonus).

It is estimated that the factory will export $786,000 worth of garments every month towards Europe, with the goods leaving from the port of Massawa.

While Calzedonia explored the possibility of investing in Africa in 2014, the Itaca Textile project only started in 2016 when the first workers were trained. In the early stages, the project encountered quite a few obstacles, including the lack of a properly developed industrial network and of quality primary resources and specialised workforce, plus issues dealing with logistics and problems linked with banks' operations.

In the course of the last two years the group, headed by Sandro Veronese and directing brands Calzedonia, Tezenis, Intimissimi, Falconeri and Atelier Emé, invested in the new plant over ten million euros.

The project launched by Calzedonia is part of a larger industrial regeneration taking place in the country, Ethiopia went indeed through a rapid transformation in the last few years.

The Ethiopian government has been working on developing industrial areas: Dukem, just outside the capital, is Ethiopia's first industrial park; Hawassa Industrial Park, Africa's largest hub, is 270km south of Addis Ababa. It was built by China Civil Engineering Corporation and produces fabric and clothing for a variety of brands including Levi's, Guess, H&M and American PVH Corp. (the holding controlling the Tommy Hilfiger and Calvin Klein brands). Manufacturing plants located in Hawassa Industrial Park also produce underwear for the American chain Wal-Mart and for Kgg Garment (producing for the American company The Children's Place).

By 2020 the government would like to open further industrial areas (the original plan aimed at 15 industrial parks by June 2018) and new hubs in Aysha, Smerea and Asosa that could strengthen the textile production of the country (by September 2017 Ethiopia already boasted over 100 American, European, Japanese, Ethiopian, Chinese, Indian and Sri Lankan textile factories). The main aim is to offer over 200,000 jobs a year, reducing in this way emigration rates.

So while globalisation is challenging the economy of some countries, it is also offering opportunities in other places (the Calzedonia Group registered an increase of 8,7% in 2017, also thanks to new shops in Spain, France, Russia and Germany, the US, Japan and China, and manufacturing plants in Italy, Sri Lanka, Croatia, Romania, Bulgaria and Serbia). Yet there are pros and cons in this story: the Calzedonia factory was the result of a humanitarian initiative based on social sustainability promoted by the group and their Fondazione San Zeno, that has been developing dedicated social and cultural projects in Italy and abroad from 1999.

But Calzedonia remains a business venture and the reasons why it chose to open in Ethiopia are easy to guess. The group was obviously attracted by a series of tax incentives and the fact that African exports enter the EU free of duty, plus low energy costs and the availability of cheap workforce (workers at the Calzedonia factory get 50 Euro a month, which is a good compensation in a country where a monthly wage can reach around 30 Euro, but it is still a tiny fraction compared to the wages in Italy or even in Eastern Europe, where Calzedonia moved some of its operations, consequently lowering the quality of a few of his products). All these elements naturally allow a business to dramatically reduce its production costs.

Besides, while Ethiopia is changing - last month the country elected its first female President, former diplomat Sahle-Work Zewde - other things will have to be improved for the Calzedonia Group.

So far the "Made in Africa" (or rather "Made in Ethiopia") label has worked out for Calzedonia only when it comes to the manufacturing side of things, but the group adverts do not present any diversity and their campaigns have often revolved around white models, ambassadors and testimonials (among them influencer Chiara Ferragni and actress Julia Roberts). Looks like, after working on creating new pioneering production facilities, the Calzedonia Group may have to reshift the attention on its image and on authentically and increasingly diverse marketing campaigns.

Have Faith in a Salvaged Utopian World: "Bodys Isek Kingelez - City Dreams" @MoMA, New York

"Without a model, you are nowhere. A nation that can't make models is a nation that doesn't understand things, a nation that doesn't live." Bodys Isek Kingelez (1948–2015)

Most of us think cities and urban developments should be planned by architects and civil engineers, but, after seeing the models of urban landscapes created by the late Bodys Isek Kingelez, you will start wondering if visionary artists should help as well.

Characterised by futuristic shapes and silhouettes, Kingelez's models of cities and buildings look indeed colourful and fun, like the maquettes for a sci-fi film about an optimistic and bright future.

"Bodys Isek Kingelez: City Dreams", the artist's first major retrospective currently on at New York's Museum of Modern Art (MoMA; until 1st January 2019), allows visitors to immerse themselves in these imaginative sets and discover more about the models and the urban scapes developed by Kingelez.

The late artist's cities occupy the Philip Johnson Galleries and introduce visitors to Kingelez's dreams about a future and harmonious society developed in and around imagined buildings.

Born Jean Baptiste in 1948 in the agricultural village of Kimbembele-Ihunga in the Democratic Republic of Congo (at the time Belgian Congo), Kingelez moved to Kinshasa in the '70s.

He studied part-time while teaching at a school and then started working as a restorer of traditional masks and tribal relics at the National Museum in Kinshasa, where he worked until 1985.

At the same time, he started creating some of his first artworks, mainly single buildings, but soon progressed onto fantastic and utopian cities (he claimed his first maquette came to him in a dream).

His craftsmanship came from watching men making masks or working at the forge in his traditional village: made of cardboard, paper, cigarette packs, drinking straws, styrofoam, tinfoil, tape, tins, bottle caps and other discarded or humble materials scavenged from the streets of Kinshasa, the models represented future visions for African megacities, while hinting at recycling, a practice found in Kinshasa and in other African cities (even when he had the money to develop his sculptures in much better ways, Kingelez kept on using found materials).

In his life Kingelez created more than 300 models, featuring parks, stadiums, hotels, restaurants, banks, monuments, schools, universities, buildings for public gatherings, places of worship, modern stations for high-speed transportation and skyscrapers.

Kingelez had an interest in real-world events and showed his concern for social issues by adding dedicated buildings such as The Scientific Center of Hospitalisation the SIDA, an integrated hospital and lab facility to respond to the AIDS crisis made from paper packaging from malaria medication (among the other materials) and characterised by a rainbow palette, a feature that made it free from the sterility and coldness typically associated with such buildings.

The Palais d'Hirochima (1991) addressed instead the condition of post-war Japan; U.N. (1995) was conceived as a campus for the United Nations to mark the organization's 50th anniversary, while his "New Manhattan (Manhattan City 3021)" (not in the MoMA show), built a year after the attack on the World Trade Center, proposed a third tower filled with water with a "cooling effect" to prevent any bombs from exploding.

Among his most famous pieces there are Ville Fantôme ("Phantom City," 1995), Project Pour le Kinshasa du Troisième Millénaire ("Kinshasa: Project for the Third Millennium," 1997) and La Ville du Futur ("City of the Future," 2000), that in the past were featured in exhibitions in prestigious institutions such as the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris.

The 33 models on view at MoMA include single buildings and urban scapes, created between 1980 and 2007, in an installation designed by the German artist Carsten Höller.

The pieces are utopian sculptures that seem to have been blessed by the postmodernist wand of the Memphis Milano group: they look like toys, even though their shapes evoke at times architectures from different places and eras, including Japan and the Soviet Union, rendered in festive pastels or vibrant shades.

Kingelez actually started travelling in 1989, so his architectures and aesthetics were probably more inspired by colonial Belgian Art Deco buildings and the ambitious structures that ruler and military dictator Mobutu Sese Seko wanted to build to express his power and influence, such as the Tour de l'Échangeur, begun in 1971 but never fully completed.

Curators compiled on the opening wall label for the retrospective a long list of materials employed by Kingelez: when you examine them carefully, Kingelez's cities reveal themselves as meticulously curated assemblages in which repurposed paper, commercial packaging, fabrics, yarns, threads, beads, toothpicks, pins, aluminum cans, plastic bottles, ballpoint-pen shafts, circuit-board diodes and electric lights were rearranged to form a fairytale landscape.

Yet Kingelez felt that, through his "extrêmes maquettes" ("extreme models"), he wasn't presenting magical lands, but providing an alternative to his own experience of urban life in Kinshasa.

Among the themes tackled via his maquettes there are therefore exponential growth, economic inequity, how communities and societies function, and the rehabilitative power of architecture.

In one of his models, Kingelez re-imagined his native village of Kimbembele Ihunga as a complex metropolis incorporating also a stadium entitled to himself and a statue honouring his father.

This brave new world was also conceived by Kingelez as a regeneration project: the artist transformed Kinshasa, also known as "La Poubelle" (The Trashcan), into "La Belle" (The Beautiful) coming up with a building surrounded by decorative blue butterflies and topped with a pagoda.

The ingenious decorative palette employed by the artist may also have had a fashion derivation: Kingelez was indeed a sapeur, a representative of the Congolese Sape (Society of Tastemakers and Elegant People), a movement of elegant dapper dressers who are into dandyism and have a penchant for flamboyant colours, polished tailoring and attention to detail.

Featuring many pieces from the Pigozzi Collection, the exhibition at MoMA also includes a virtual reality rendition of Ville Fantôme (1996) by Third Pillar.

Visitors can immerse themselves in a digital scape and experience one of Kingelez's large-scale city sculptures (this is widely considered as the artist' masterwork as it took him two years to create and incorporates 50 buildings), the utopian and peaceful "Phantom City".

This multicultural town has eliminated all boundaries and barriers, even those between the living and the dead, it incorporates indeed a handy bridge of death that allows citizens to travel back and forth between both realms. In this city crafted for peace there are no doctors, soldiers or police forces because they are simply not needed.

In the exhibition catalogue, architect David Adjaye states that Kingelez's dioramas are "less a city than a representation of a hyper-condition that, if it were to become a reality, would drive us mad."

You don't actually need to be a professional architect or urban planner to realise that the buildings in Kingelez's maquettes couldn't have been built. But that's exactly why they are beautiful as they are - they represent something ideal, untouched by the gritty reality of life, places where harmony, prosperity, equality and equity can prevail.

Kingelez considered himself a designer, architect, sculptor, engineer and artist, but maybe he was also a cosmopolitan Afrofuturist. He knew he may not have seen one of his multicultural cities becoming a reality while he was alive (he died in 2015 at 66), but his models are tangible proposals for a happy utopia and, in our globally uncertain times, we definitely need such welcoming and joyously chaotic places where we can dream about a brave new world and society.

Image credits for this post

1. Bodys Isek Kingelez (Congolese, 1948-2015). Ville Fantôme. 1996. Paper, paperboard, plastic and other various materials, 47 1/4” × 8′ 8 7⁄16″× 7′ 10 1⁄2″ (120 × 570 × 240 cm). CAAC – The Pigozzi Collection, Geneva. © Bodys Isek Kingelez / Photo: Maurice Aeschimann. Courtesy CAAC – The Pigozzi Collection

2. Bodys Isek Kingelez (Congolese, 1948-2015). Untitled. c. 1980. Paper, paperboard, and other various materials, 32 15/16 × 14 7/8 × 9 5/8″ (83.6 × 37.8 × 24.5 cm). Private collection, Paris. Photograph by Kleinefenn

3. Bodys Isek Kingelez (Congolese, 1948-2015). Untitled (detail). c. 1980. Paper, paperboard, and other various materials, 32 15/16 × 14 7/8 × 9 5/8″ (83.6 × 37.8 × 24.5 cm). Private collection, Paris. Photograph by Kleinefenn

4. Bodys Isek Kingelez (Congolese, 1948-2015). Paris Nouvel. 1989. Paper, paperboard, and other various materials, 33 7/16 × 24 × 27 9/16″ (85 × 61 × 70 cm). Long-term loan from the Centre national des arts plastiques, France to the Château d’Oiron, France, FNAC 981003. © Cnap (France) / droits résérves; photograph by Frédéric Pignoux, Studio Ludo

5. Bodys Isek Kingelez (Congolese, 1948-2015). Paris Nouvel (detail). 1989. Paper, paperboard, and other various materials, 33 7/16 × 24 × 27 9/16″ (85 × 61 × 70 cm). Long-term loan from the Centre national des arts plastiques, France to the Château d’Oiron, France, FNAC 981003. © Cnap (France) / droits résérves; photograph by Frédéric Pignoux, Studio Ludo

6. Bodys Isek Kingelez (Congolese, 1948-2015). Stars Palme Bouygues. 1989. Paper, paperboard, and other various materials, 39 3/8 × 15 3/4 × 15 3/4″ (100 × 40 × 40 cm). van Lierde collection, Brussels. Vincent Everarts Photography Brussels

7. Bodys Isek Kingelez (Congolese, 1948-2015). Stars Palme Bouygues (detail). 1989. Paper, paperboard, and other various materials, 39 3/8 × 15 3/4 × 15 3/4″ (100 × 40 × 40 cm). van Lierde collection, Brussels. Vincent Everarts Photography Brussels

8. Bodys Isek Kingelez (Congolese, 1948-2015). Africanisch. 1994. Paper, paperboard, plastic, and other various materials, 19 11/16 × 22 7/16 × 24″ (50 × 57 × 61 cm). Private collection, Paris. Photograph by Kleinefenn.

9. Bodys Isek Kingelez (Congolese, 1948-2015). Africanisch (detail). 1994. Paper, paperboard, plastic, and other various materials, 19 11/16 × 22 7/16 × 24″ (50 × 57 × 61 cm). Private collection, Paris. Photograph by Kleinefenn.

10. Bodys Isek Kingelez (Congolese, 1948-2015). U.N. 1995. Paper, paperboard, and other various materials, 35 13/16 × 29 1/8 × 20 7/8″ (91 × 74 × 53 cm), irreg. CAAC – The Pigozzi Collection, Geneva. © Bodys Isek Kingelez / Photo: Maurice Aeschimann. Courtesy CAAC – The Pigozzi Collection

11. Bodys Isek Kingelez (Congolese, 1948-2015). U.N. (detail). 1995. Paper, paperboard, and other various materials, 35 13/16 × 29 1/8 × 20 7/8″ (91 × 74 × 53 cm), irreg. CAAC – The Pigozzi Collection, Geneva. © Bodys Isek Kingelez / Photo: Maurice Aeschimann. Courtesy CAAC – The Pigozzi Collection

12. Bodys Isek Kingelez (Congolese, 1948-2015). Kimbembele Ihunga. 1994. Paper, paperboard, plastic, and other various materials, 51 3/16″ x 72 13/16″ x 10′ 5″ (130 × 185 × 320 cm). CAAC – The Pigozzi Collection, Geneva. © Bodys Isek Kingelez / Photo: Maurice Aeschimann. Courtesy CAAC – The Pigozzi Collection

13. Bodys Isek Kingelez (Congolese, 1948-2015). Kimbembele Ihunga (detail). 1994. Paper, paperboard, plastic, and other various materials, 51 3/16″ x 72 13/16″ x 10′ 5″ (130 × 185 × 320 cm). CAAC – The Pigozzi Collection, Geneva. © Bodys Isek Kingelez / Photo: Maurice Aeschimann. Courtesy CAAC-The Pigozzi Collection

14. Bodys Isek Kingelez (Congolese, 1948-2015). Place de la Ville. 1993. Paper, paperboard, plastic, and other various materials, 15 3/4 × 33 7/16 × 29 1/2″ (40 × 85 × 75 cm). Courtesy The Museum of Everything

15. Bodys Isek Kingelez (Congolese, 1948-2015). Kinshasa la Belle. 1991. Paper, paperboard, and other various materials, 24 13/16 × 21 5/8 × 31 1/2″ (63 × 55 × 80 cm). CAAC – The Pigozzi Collection, Geneva. © Bodys Isek Kingelez / Photo: Maurice Aeschimann. Courtesy CAAC – The Pigozzi Collection

16. Bodys Isek Kingelez (Congolese, 1948-2015). Kinshasa la Belle (detail). 1991. Paper, paperboard, and other various materials, 24 13/16 × 21 5/8 × 31 1/2″ (63 × 55 × 80 cm). CAAC – The Pigozzi Collection, Geneva. © Bodys Isek Kingelez / Photo: Maurice Aeschimann. Courtesy CAAC – The Pigozzi Collection

17. Bodys Isek Kingelez (Congolese, 1948-2015). Belle Hollandaise. 1991. Paper, paperboard, and other various materials, 21 5/8 × 31 11/16 × 22 1/16″ (55 × 80.5 × 56 cm). Collection Groninger Museum. Photograph by Marten de Leeuw.

18. Bodys Isek Kingelez (Congolese, 1948-2015). Belle Hollandaise (detail). 1991. Paper, paperboard, and other various materials, 21 5/8 × 31 11/16 × 22 1/16″ (55 × 80.5 × 56 cm). Collection Groninger Museum. Photograph by Marten de Leeuw.

19. Bodys Isek Kingelez (Congolese, 1948-2015). Ville Fantôme (detail). 1996. Paper, paperboard, plastic and other various materials, 47 1/4″ × 224 7/16 × 94 1/2″ (120 × 570 × 240 cm). CAAC – The Pigozzi Collection, Geneva. © Bodys Isek Kingelez / Photo: Maurice Aeschimann. Courtesy CAAC – The Pigozzi Collection

20. Bodys Isek Kingelez (Congolese, 1948-2015). Sports Internationaux. 1997. Paper, plastic, and other various materials, 35 7/16 × 33 7/16 × 9 13/16″ (90 × 85 × 25 cm), irreg. Purchased 2013 with funds from Tim Fairfax, AM, through the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art Foundation. Collection Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane. © QAGOMA, Natasha Harth

21. Bodys Isek Kingelez (Congolese, 1948-2015). Ville de Sète 3009. 2000. Paper, paperboard, plastic, and other various materials, 31 1/2 × 9′ 10 1⁄8″ × 6′ 10 11⁄16″ (80 × 300 × 210 cm). Collection Musée International des Arts Modestes (MIAM), Sète, France. © Pierre Schwartz ADAGP; courtesy Musée International des Arts Modestes (MIAM), Sète, France

22. Screen capture of Bodys Isek Kingelez’s Ville Fantôme: Virtual Reality Tour. Image courtesy of Third Pillar VR and Plastic Demo.

23. Screen capture of Bodys Isek Kingelez’s Ville Fantôme: Virtual Reality Tour. Image courtesy of Third Pillar VR and Plastic Demo.

 

The Art of Adornment: "Jewelry - The Body Transformed" @ The Met Museum, New York

Jewelry and decorative body pieces have always played a role in the life of different cultures and civilisations: open an illustrated history book and you will find images showing archaelogical findings such as Mycenaean glass beads, Egyptian collars or lavish paintings showing coronations of kings and queens wearing precious jewels.

Yet the exhibition "Jewelry: The Body Transformed" (November 12, 2018 – February 24, 2019) opening next week at New York's Met Museum doesn't look at jewels for their monetary value, but for their aesthetics and meanings, exploring their power also through photographs, sculptures and paintings.

The event is a collaborative effort between six curators from different departments including, among the others, the departments of Medieval Art, American Decorative Arts, Ancient Near Eastern Art, Egyptian Art and Arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas, that came together to select the over 200 pieces on display, all from The Met collections.

"Jewelry: The Body Transformed" opens with a symbolic display featuring pieces from all over the world, organized according to the part of the body they are supposed to adorn - from head and hair to ankles and feet passing through neck and chest, arms, hands and waist.

Visitors are then invited to wander around the different sections in which the exhibition is divided: "The Divine Body", examines links between jewelry and immortality through pieces found in burial sites; "The Regal Body" looks at jewelry used to assert rank and status; "The Transcendent Body", celebrates jewelry's power to conjure spirits, appease gods and evoke ancestors; "The Alluring Body" explores romance and erotic desire, while "The Resplendent Body" features elegant jewelry designed for luxury and opulent adornment. 

Among the earliest pieces on display (dated 2600 B.C.) there are the strands of beads that come from the so-called Great Death Pit, one of the royal graves at Ur, in ancient Mesopotamia, where sixty-eight female bodies were discovered, all of them adorned with the most splendid jewelry made of gold, lapis lazuli, and carnelian. 

There's a lot to discover in between necklaces and bracelets, earrings, rings and brooches, headdresses, pectorals, gorgets and arm bands showcased along with sculptures, paintings, prints and photographs.

Among the 200 pieces on display there are many highlights, such as the astonishing golden sandals and toe stalls dating 1479-1425 B.C. that belonged to the funerary accoutrements of an Egyptian queen of Thutmose III and were considered as a burial luxury to protect the delicate extremities of persons of status and royalty.

The Egyptian pieces are particularly beautiful actually and they include a floral collar from the funerary cache of Tutankhamun that was probably worn at a funeral banquet and was made with flower petals and blossoms, leaves, berries, and blue faience beads sewn to a papyrus backing; a broad collar made with colourful faience beads and a collar with faience blue beads, part of a set of funerary jewelry belonging to Wah, the estate manager of Meketre.

Materials vary, going from precious gold to more humble bronze, from rich sapphires and pearls to jade, ivory and shells. Quite often the pieces made with the humblest materials are the most intriguing: the Peruvian Spondylus shell and black stone beads collar from the 12th-14th century is for example characterised by a beautiful shape that allowed the design to fall on the shoulders and chest of the wearer.

Techniques are equally interesting: the exhibition features a set of jewels made with the shakudo, a technique in which coloured metal such as gold, silver and copper were inlaid into a dark patinated ground to resemble lacquer.

In some cases the pieces on display are linked to rituals and celebrations, among them there are elaborate marriage necklaces from India, ceremonial breastplates from the Solomon Islands made with the hard marble-like shell of the Tridacna (giant clam) and the gold crown decorated with bright emeralds made to adorn a sacred image of the Virgn Mary venerated in the cathedral of Popayán (Colombia). 

Australian masks and African statues provide a break from the jewellery, while the photographs, drawings and paintings help visitors contextualising the pieces on display (check out Josephine Baker sensually smiling in a sparkling evening gown accessorised with long strings of pearls and posing on a glittering backdrop in a picture taken by Baron Adolf de Meyer).

There's more to discover among the pieces from the 1900s, in particular Elsa Schiaparelli's 1937 sculptural collar-like gold metal necklace worn by devoted client and fashion icon Millicent Rogers; Art Smith's sculptural modernist piece, influenced by Alexander Calder, Surrealism, African sculpture, and tribal jewelry and Elsa Peretti's articulated snake necklace in sterling silver.

Legendary jewelry houses as Castellani, Lalique, and Tiffany & Co. are also included, but you can bet that younger visitors and Alexander McQueen's fans will be happy to rediscover in the event pieces by two of his collaborators - Shaun Leane's bejewelled yashmak and Simon Costin's "Incubus" necklace. 

Originally made for McQueen's S/S 2000 collection, the yashmak was reworked for the late designer's A/W 2009 collection, "The Horn of Plenty" and remade for the Costume Institute 2015 exhibition "Savage Beauty". The design combined the Islamic with the Medieval and with a touch of fetish as well, intertwining the Western and Middle Eastern cultures, and could be used as an example of a piece employed to manipulate and transform the human body. 

Modern pieces of jewelry often tell stories and the "Incubus" necklace by Simon Costin combines beauty and horror, sex and death, and the twisted dark and decadent sensibility of J. K. Huysmans' A Rebours (Against Nature) with pagan folklore and the stories around the male incubus and the female succubus. The piece, featuring roots made from copper and phials referring to the five elements called upon in contemporary paganism - Fire, Water, Earth, Air, and Spirit - but containing sperm, was seized by the police when it was first displayed in a London gallery in 1987 and the artist was threatened with prosecution.

The meaning and purpose of the various designs included in this exhibition may be different, but there is something that reunites all the pieces on display: they are unique and rare and they are used to activate the body they adorn, turning it into a stage where a performance can take place.

"To fully understand the power of jewelry, it is not enough to look at it as miniature sculpture," states in a press release Melanie Holcomb, Curator, Department of Medieval Art and The Cloisters. "While jewelry is ubiquitous, the cultures of the world differ widely regarding where on the body it should be worn. By focusing on jewelry's interaction with - and agency upon - the human body, this exhibition brings in a key element that has been missing in previous studies of the subject." 

"Jewelry: The Body Transformed" will be accompanied by a rich program of lectures, talks, exhibition tours and hands-on art-making events for younger audiences.  

Image credits for this post

1. Gold Sandals and Toe Stalls
New Kingdom, Dynasty 18, reign of Thutmose III, ca. 1479–1425 B.C.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Fletcher Fund

2. Broad collar
New Kingdom, Amarna Period, Dynasty 18, Reign of Akhenaten, ca. 1353–1336 B.C.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art

3. Broad Collar of Wah
Middle Kingdom, Dynasty 12, Reign of Amenemhat I, early, ca. 1981–1975 B.C.
Rogers Fund and Edward S. Harkness Gift, 1940
The Metropolitan Museum of Art

4. Floral Collar from Tutankhamun's Embalming Cache
New Kingdom, Dynasty 18, Reign of Tutankhamun, ca. 1336–1327 B.C.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art

5. Broad collar of Senebtisi
Middle Kingdom, Dynasty 12, late–early 13, ca. 1850–1775 B.C.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Rogers Fund, 1908

6. Pair of Gold Earrings with Ganymede and the Eagle
Hellenistic, ca. 330–300 B.C.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Harris Brisbane Dick Fund, 1937

7. Marriage Necklace (Thali)
Late 19th century, India (Tamil Nadu, Chetiar)
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gift of Cynthia Hazen Polsky, 1991

8. Large Brooch with Spirals
1200–800 B.C., Made in the Carpathian Basin region
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Purchase, Caroline Howard Hyman Gift, in memory of Margaret English Frazer, 2000

9. Jeweled Bracelets
500–700, probably Made in Constantinople
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gift of J. Pierpont Morgan, 1917

10. Necklace by Elsa Schiaparelli, 1937
Credit Line: Brooklyn Museum Costume Collection at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gift of the Brooklyn Museum, 2009; Gift of Millicent Huttleston Rogers, 1951

11. Archaeological revival necklace by Castellani, ca. 1880
Credit Line: Gift of Jacqueline Loewe Fowler, in honor of Stephanie Fowler Levin and Clay Fowler, 2016
The Metropolitan Museum of Art

12. "Incubus" by Simon Costin, 1987
Credit Line: Gift of Mr. Simon Costin, 2006
The Metropolitan Museum of Art

13. Copper necklace by Art Smith, 1949
Credit Line: Gift of Jacqueline Loewe Fowler, 2010
The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Wearable Scenes of Conflict, Glass Baubles as Hopes of Peace: "100th Anniversary of the First World War" Necklace by L'orMa

There are different ways to mark public anniversaries such as the end of a war, including site specific installations and memorial events.

Italian artist Lorenzo Mariani, better known as L'orMa (The Footprint), came up instead with a rather peculiar jewelry piece to remember the end of World War I.

On 4th November 1918, 7 days before the end of the war with Germany, Italy and Austria-Hungary signed the end of hostilities after the Battle of Vittorio Veneto, fought from 24th October to 3rd November 1918.

The war finished on 11th November with the Hundred Days Offensive, a series of Allied victories against Germany that had begun in August. After the Germans retreated to the Hindenburg Line, the Armistice of 11 November 1918 officially ended fighting on land, sea and air.

L'orMa interpreted the war using tiny handmade paper sculptures recreating battle scenes that he then locked into 23 glass baubles linked by silver and white gold.

The conflict developed as a trench warfare and the battles mainly took place at the front, where nine million soldiers died (seven million civilians also died during World War I), so Mariani mainly included in his necklace battle scenes.

While design-wise the actual piece is rather simple, since it is a classic bauble necklace, each sphere features an intricate scene starting from 1914 with the Assassionation of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and finishing with the signing of the armistice in 1918, a symbol of peace.

In between there are emergency vehicles and nurses, soldiers shooting in the trenches, boats sinking and Zeppellin airships and planes flying. 

The Milan-based artist and graduate of the Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera has been developing handmade paper artworks for quite a while.

Yet so far Mariani mainly produced medium-sized sculptures representing animals such as dogs or ostriches running (a trick that allows him to study dynamic movement), trees and chandeliers (the artist exhibited these pieces at the ArtFair in Bologna this year), while developing also sculptures incorporating paper, but mainly done with natural materials such as weeds, flowers and soil.

Mariani is obsessed with the natural/real and digital/virtual dichotomies and quite often he tries to transform a natural material into a surreal and virtual ghost, playing with shapes and silhouettes. He has indeed developed a series of small installations made with leaves that he deconstructs stripping them of their structures and that he then reconstructs, turning them into geometrical shapes such as triangles, rectangles and cubes. Rather than criticising the virtual and the digital worlds, Mariani uses them to transform and alter reality, provoking in this way the visitors to his exhibitions.

Showcased in September this year at the WopArt in Lugano, Switzerland, the "100th Anniversary of the First World War" necklace is the first wearable art piece by Mariani and hopefully it won't be the last.