After a few recent cases of copyright infringements in fashion with designers lifting specific motifs and patterns from contemporary artworks without acknowledging the artist, there have been a few features and articles on multiple sites highlighting how fashion designers should always credit the works behind their ideas. Besides, we may add, fashion designers should also rework such inspirations and maybe come up with short and coherent collections.
Nina Donis' A/W 2017-18 collection lookbook could be used as a sort of educational visual essay for many designers out there.
This very private and almost reclusive (bless them and their love of privacy in a world obsessed with fame...) duo of designers always had a penchant for art, music and postmodernism and always had the habit of crediting their inspirations in their moodboards, lookbooks and press releases.
For the next Autumnal season they first and foremost moved from Yayoi Kusama's trademark dots and infinity nets.
The duo painted polka dots on functional and practical dresses and separates, creating a sort of discrepancy between the mature look of their lady like tops and skirts (one image from their moodboard also shows Queen Elizabeth II) and the joyous exuberance of dots in illustrations from children's books including Svetozar Ostrov's We're Here Forever, Right (2013) and Vladimir Lebedev's Silly Little Mouse (1925).
A quirky childish atmosphere was sprinkled all over the collection: the lookbook does not feature any models, but a single dummy, a presence that also calls to mind the character of the mother in Soviet puppet film Varezhka (1967).
Things rapidly move on in the rest of the collection and, from Kusama's dots or David Mach's "Out of Order" picture with those iconic red phone booths covered in white polka dots, the designers went minimal.
They opted to give a bit of a geometrical twist to the collection getting inspired by Sammlung Ernst & Laszlo Moholy-Nagy's "AM 7" (1926), Barnet Newman's "Untitled Etching #2" (1969) and Agnes Martin's "Untitled #1" (2003).
These works provided rigorous lines, and a basic palette of black and white with some yellow or red added in, for trousers, tops and skirts that also nodded to futuristic designs from the '60s (think Audrey Hepburn in How to Steal a Million, another inspiration for this collection).
The tops with one vertical line were indeed combinations of artworks such as Mark Rothko's "Untitled, Orange and Yellow", vintage '60s posters for the RAF-977 E van produced by the Riga Autobus Factory and a top donned by cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova in 1963.
Interior design offered further variations and splashes of optimism and a solid or delicate palette: Le Courbusier's Convent of La Tourette and Cees Braakman's coloured stack of multiple sewing boxes for Pastoe UMS (in the style of De Stijl) allowed the designers to explore a combination of black, red and yellow.
The pale powdery pink of Muuto's Visu Chair or the intense yellow of David Irwin's Cross Side Chair inspired fluffy sweaters and linear and minimalist dresses.
At some point music also entered the collection: the suave pinks of Peter Saville's cover for New Order's album "Power, Corruption and Lies" (an inspiration also for Raf Simons' "S/S" 18 menswear collection) based on a painting by Henri Fantin-Latour, were employed for a sweater and skirt ensemble; the colour combination for the cover of Kraftwerk's "The Man Machine" was turned into a dress and Björk's iconic sweater on "Debut" inspired a series of knits in neutral shades.
So the main difference between this collection and other collections that recently caused copyright problems stands in a very simple point: Nina Donis credited their inspirations in a detailed way, besides, most ideas were reworked (or they do not create copyright infringement issues - a polka dot pattern is something too generic and can't be attributed only to one designer or artist, unless that pattern is characterised by something really unique such as the colour combination or the size of the dots...) or they were employed to provide just a palette, a mood or an atmosphere.
Last but not least, even though Nina Donis worked around a series of multiple ideas, the duo came up with a concise collection that mainly includes functional, minimalist and wearable pieces, proving that in our modern times we don't really need collections with too many overcomplicated garments.
Image credits for this post
Photos: Natasha Ganelina
Post production: Svetlana Yaroshevich
Layout: Dima Pantyushin
Model: Dotsy
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