Nick Paul is in stitches as the NSA gallery becomes a catwalk for a unique collaboration between art and fashion
Just when you think it’s time to entertain the possibility that we’ve run out of new ideas, along comes somebody and invents a backpack with only one strap. Ex fashion semper aliquid novi.
Actually, those asymmetrical backpacks aren’t such a bad idea, although like most fashions they do tend to favour the flatter stomach and accentuate the more normal one. But with all their ergonomic lines and velcro flaps, pen holders and phone pockets, they represent a serious attempt by fashion to enfold and fuse with function – and function in the new millenium will mean mobility. Mobility will be a commodity, a means of survival, a way of life. You read it here first.
Mobility was, if not a theme, certainly a thread at the Gauloise Durban Designer Emporium’s winter showing at the NSA gallery last Friday night. Entitled It’s the end of the world as we know it, it was DDE proprietor Neil Roake’s idea to give the 10 or so designers who fill his shop with everything from streetstyle to party frocks a chance to push their personal envelopes, to explore and speculate, to practise fashion as art.
So serious was he in this aim that he paired each designer up with a photographer, videographer or installation artist for an exhibition of fashion- inspired art which took over the NSA for a two-week run on Sunday.
On paper, at least, it looks like a troublesome fusion of those two awkward questions: “but would you wear it?” and “but is it art?” But in good-natured Durban fashion, these questions take a back seat to good old entertainment value.
The DDE fashion shows are becoming a minor Durban institution – Roake himself is a legendary entertainer with a great sense of place and a winning way with sponsors, so we’ve had fashion and vodka in a church, and fashion and cocktails in a swimming pool, and this time around it was fashion and Gauloises Blondes in an airy suburban art gallery.
It’s always interesting to see how each designer has moved on from the previous show. Colleen Eitzen’s rouched and slinky lines got medieval, with hoods, balaclavas and layers in black and burnt orange. Amanda Laird Cherry picked up on the mobility story by dressing her men and women in great fortresses and cathedrals of felt and serge, or garments which could be transformed into luggage and vice versa.
CNN continued their nostalgic love story with a Seventies that probably didn’t exist, but looks great in updated primaries anyway. Loshinie Naidoo brought to eveningwear an impromptu and unfinished beauty, with wraps and shells of pleated grey satin over thin dresses that hovered shiftily at the edge of vision.
There was only one award for the evening – Most Directional Range on the show – and it went to Terrence Bray. Directional is one of those bits of jargon the fashion world uses in its periodic attempts to pass as an exact science, but in so far as it suggests a departure from everything else on show, it’s a valid term.
Bray’s range was a delicately reconstructed confection of medicinal whites, shown on pale boys and girls whose red-painted feet and eye shadow to match suggested beautifully the early stages of healing, which is as optimistic a peek around the temporal corner as we can expect, really.
On Easter Sunday evening the exhibition opened, and for those who attended, Roake’s scattergun vision and mercurial enthusiasm were vindicated. It’s a show which has great popular appeal but ventures into more elevated realms without getting too highbrow.
On the popular side, Shelly Nel’s music video conspiracy thriller using the CNN range is a hugely watchable treatment of happy urban paranoia, and Mark Lanning’s airport billboard for Laurie Holmes will surely adorn an expensive and fashionably located wall some time soon.
Chipie’s gaudy interactive photobooth for portraits of buttocks was, well, cheeky, and suitably for the millenarian theme. Born again photographer Mark Cameron’s redemptive treatment of the Morticia-with- pastels range of Angela Devitzis and Catherine Braun was a bit contradictory, but moving nevertheless.
Some of the installations were more ambitious in their artistic scope. Lance Slabbert, ever the wild-eyed philosophical traveller, lent fluidity to some of Laird Cherry’s monolithic ALC menswear with his digitally-shot time exposures, and young Richard Keppel shot Laird Cherry’s womenswear with a mature eye for beautifully understated portraiture.
Bray’s winning range was transformed into a black and white patchwork quilt of images which showed flesh being pierced by the tools of the seamstresses’ trade. Picking up on the trade theme, Barry Downard’s depictions of Colleen Eitzen’s range, printed on transparencies and furled in elegant glasses against a lightbox, was underscored by a neat row of the designer’s scissors on the floor. The two have an understanding, clearly, that all good art starts life in the skills of a trade.
An exhibition like this is prohibitively expensive to mount, and the quality of production was one of this one’s striking features, thanks in no small measure to time and materials donated by giant reproduction house Hirt and Carter, Citylab, Kodak and Sony.
It’s not the future, necessarily, but this project suggests that a future for art might lie in its strengthening ties with more popular branches of culture, like fashion, video and music. And of course, huge amounts of corporate money.