Recycling and upcycling are definitely two key words the fashion industry has been recently using a lot to show its concern towards a more responsible and sustainable production. These words were always considered as the very foundation of Maison Martin Margiela's Artisanal Line, but for the Spring/Summer 2014 season the fashion house opted for what was defined in the press release as a collector's collection. The definition referred to the main materials used to make the garments.
The collection opened with shirts with panels made with Mariano Fortuny's fabric, and continued with evening gowns created by draping Frank Lloyd Wright's interior design fabrics; halter tops assembled with embroideries based on the designs of American tattooist Sailor Jerry matched with sequin-covered striped trousers; suits made with Raoul Dufy's "Les Violons" floral motif, and coats (one with a Gauguin's painting) collaged out of thick tapestries that called to mind the modernist designs (made in collaboration with artists) by Les Manufactures des Gobelins.
Old scarves were refashioned into a skirt, while a mini-dress and the sleeves of a trench coat were literally covered in bits and pieces of jewellery, buttons, crystals, chains, keys, beads, pearls and ring-pulls (the same materials were sprinkled also on the Cleopatra style headdresses donned by the models sporting these looks).
The collector's collection label referred therefore to the fact that most of the designs featured rare textiles designed by artists and taken from private sources. In Margiela's game of making and remaking, combining and recombining the best things remained indeed the textiles.
The narrative behind some of the fabrics is actually quite interesting: Fortuny's legacy continues to this day in the Giudecca factory and in his house in Venice, and there have been quite a few exhibitions celebrating textiles by Raoul Dufy.
The French painter was employed in the early 1900s by Paul Poiret to make woodcuts for the letterhead of his business stationery and textiles for Poiret's couture house (they established a workshop, the "Petite Usine" or "Little Factory", where Dufy could experiment with dyes and hues).
Dufy then started working for the Lyon silk manufacturer Atuyer, Bianchini, Férier, founded in 1888 (and called Bianchini-Férier after the death of Atuyer in 1912), developing new techniques that consisted in dyeing a piece after weaving it rather than in dyeing the yarn before it was woven.
There is also a very interesting narrative behind Frank Lloyd Wright's fabrics (apparently sourced from a private collection in Flagstaff, Arizona), produced in 1955.
Wright was actually against extremely commercial products: his abstract hand-painted fabrics were indeed originally intended as costume materials for a performace based on the work of Armenian philosopher Georgy Gurdjieff and undertaken by Wright's students.
The premiere of the piece took place at Taliesin West, Frank Lloyd Wright's headquarters in Arizona and, though the textiles were supposedly going to be used only for this performance, Elizabeth Gordon, editor of the interior design magazine House Beautiful, showed them to the Director of Merchandising at F. Schumacher.
The textile firm was founded in 1889 in New York City and became known throughout the years for commissioning patterns to both American and European designers, Paul Poiret included. Wright's designs were unusual rather than commercial, but the company's director was very much tempted by the idea of creating a line of textiles with a famous architect.
Wright was difficult to persuade, but in the end he accepted. The result was a collection - dubbed the "Taliesin Line" - of combined and recombined geometric motifs, repeated patterns inspired by existing architectural designs on plain materials and in bright colours for both woven and printed fabrics.
Some textiles were inspired by the architect's early art glass creations, others by his own plans (one was for example based on the spherical houses Wright designed for his sons in Maryland and Arizona and shows a complex pattern of interplaying spheres).
Throughout his career Wright designed not only carpets, rugs, curtains and table runners but also dresses and scarves for his first wife and for some of his female clients.
So far Margiela has been playing at turning bits and pieces (such as belts or baseball mitts) that through wear and tear lost their value into something luxurious, but, in this case, the main point was creating new luxury from old luxury.
Yet the collection also makes you wonder: apparently the fashion house took twenty-two hours to stitch a dress shirt with panels of antique Mariano Fortuny fabric, which sounds a bit too long for such a simple piece, besides it seems unlikely that the house found some rare bits of antique Fortuny fabric and stitched them onto a garment (any serious fashion historian would have killed you for doing that, unless the pieces were greatly damaged or stained, in which case they have lost their value and couldn't be considered as valuable). My personal guess is that these are original Fortuny fabrics, but they do not belong to the vintage category, but were recently made in the still existing Giudecca factory.
The same doubts may be raised about the Wright fabrics: Schumacher continued to produce Wright designs throughout the decades, dropping for a while some patterns and then reissuing them in the '80s. This may mean that the fabrics employed in the collection are not from the '50s but they are samples of the reissued '80s batch.
While the actual dates of the fabrics remain rather dubious, one things is for certain: there is a perfect parallelism between Margiela and Wright since both the Belgian designer who left his fashion house a few years ago and the late architect didn't like extremely commercial things. At the same time Wright and Schumacher believed that America's middle class should have access to good design. This collection - with luxury pieces aimed at very few people out there - reverses the final purpose of some of the fabrics employed, turning them into the main materials to create highly exclusive pieces.
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