In yesterday's post we looked at Phelan's catwalk show, opened by a dance performance, but that wasn't the only connection established during New York Fashion Week with the world of the performing arts.
After launching last season's presentation with a pop-up photography show by Spike Jonze and opting to stage a theatrical performance directed by Jonze and featuring actor Jonah Hill for their S/S 2015 collection, Opening Ceremony added a dance twist to their latest catwalk.
Creative directors Humberto Leon and Carol Lim recruited indeed not just models to showcase their S/S 16 collection, but also dancers from the New York City Ballet, coordinated by its Resident Choreographer and soloist Justin Peck.
This wasn't a casual choice, actually: Lim and Leon recently designed costumes for a piece choreographed by Peck for the New York City Ballet's annual Fall Fashion Gala (to be held on 30th September 2015)
The event will also feature four further shows with costumes by fashion designers: Ballet Master in Chief Peter Martins' "Thou Swell" was matched with Peter Copping, Creative Director of Oscar de la Renta; Corps de Ballet Member Troy Schumacher has worked in partnership with Marques' Almeida; San Francisco Ballet Corps de Ballet Member and up-and-coming choreographer Myles Thatcher joined forces with Zuhair Murad; while Choreographic Associate with The National Ballet of Canada Robert Binet was paired with Hanako Maeda of ADEAM.
But how did the choreography work and develop on the Opening Ceremony runway? Well at the beginning models stumbled and fell with a series of intentional falls. Though looking like genuine falls, they were definitely less ominous and catastrophic than the ones involving models tripping on trains, falling off perilous high heels or sliding on slick and slippery runways. After each fall the dancers effortlessly rose again or sprang up to their feet, shaking the audience from fashion week fatigue.
While the surprising choreography was mainly devised to keep the attention alive, the collection actually had another dance connection as it was inspired by American architect Frank Lloyd Wright and by his daughter Iovanna, a modern dancer for whom the architect often designed sets.
Architecture and Lloyd Wright's concept of "The Living City" wasn't referenced in a very literal way: the stained glass window panels the architect designed for Avery Coonley House were recreated in a light installation incorporated in the catwalk venue, while some of the shades (and shapes for the bags) included in the collection palette were borrowed from the window panel patterns and from the textured murals incorporated in the house.
Sadly, architecture was largely forgotten in the modernist yet bland jumpsuits and tunics with plunging necklines, but architectural hints returned in the knitted dresses and skirts with a sinuous weave and in the oversized brass buttons decorating tops and jackets.
The intersecting geometries created by horizontal and vertical lines that characterised many of Frank Lloyd Wright's designs such as the Cloverleaf housing project were also integrated in the designs.
Garments were matched with sunglasses (made shoppable straight off the runway...) by South Korean brand Gentle Monster with frames inspired by curved furniture and the bent plywood technique that mid-century furniture designers used when creating their pieces.
The "Cara" sunglasses were also named after Cara Greenberg, the woman who helped coin the phrase "Mid-century modern" in her 1983 book, Mid-Century Modern: Furniture of the 1950s.
A fad that started on the runway only last season, interior design was indeed another key component as proved by the set for the show that included hundreds of potted lemon and fig trees, rosemary bushes, white and purple cabbage patches, eggplant, and squash, among other vegetables and herbs, lining the runway.
The plants actually hinted at a more natural relationship between the natural and the urban and at the possibility of capturing the landscape in the form of an exterior space and partially enclosing it.
The way the plants were arranged was based on drawings of Cloverleaf, an unbuilt housing development in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, modeled on Broadacre City, Frank Lloyd Wright's utopian plan for cooperative, agrarian living.
Frank Lloyd Wright's "Living City" and his utopian environments with houses that would fit in the agricultural landscape and be surrounded by factories, farms, schools, government buildings and offices, were therefore starting points for this collection.
The idea of homes and domestic environments was referenced in silk garments with chinoiserie embroidery of bonsai trees, a theme that immediately reconnected with the set and with the fact that the potted plants used for the show will be donated and replanted at four schools around the city as part of the Edible Schoolyard NYC non profitable program that helps developing gardens and kitchen classrooms in public schools.
As a whole, though, the collection wasn't always coherent and at times it felt as if the design duo had spent more time looking at random images linked with Frank Lloyd Wright on the Internet rather than sitting down and trying to grasp more in depth some of his concepts and ideas. It was indeed a shame that they didn't take architecture as the main point to construct something less bland and more sharp.
Choreography-wise everything worked, though, since there was nothing contrived about the performance: inspired by one of the main themes of fashion shows - the fall as a moment of shame and rebirth as well - the fluid movements looked spontaneous, albeit at times not graceful because of the rather clumpy shoes.
The fashion and choreography connection actually works pretty well, especially when in connection with Justin Peck. In Jody Lee Lipes' documentary Ballet 422, the director follows Peck as he conceives, casts, rehearses, and stages the four-hundred-and-twenty-second original dance piece by the New York City Ballet.
In the documentary Peck is focused on his work and seems to live a cyclical life: as he finishes working on one arduous ballet that drains his energies, he humbly starts performing in another.
The fashion industry works in a similar way, and the work of a fashion designer has absurd cyclical rhythms that demand that a new collection is started as soon as the previous one is finished. So it's only natural for fashion to be having a love affair with choreography, dance (and Justin Peck...) at the moment. Now, if we could just transfer Peck's anti-diva approach from the stage to the runway and from ballet to fashion, then we would even manage to bring a breath of fresh air into the industry.
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