An Alpine choir pivoted on hydraulic platforms as part of French fashion house Moncler’s Autumn Winter 2014 presentation at New York Fashion Week, which concludes today (+ movie).
Moncler created an audio-visual installation called Winter Symphony to showcase the brand’s Moncler Grenoble ski and winter wear collection at New York’s Hammerstein Ballroom on Saturday.
Members of the ten-piece Pendulum Choir stood on small platforms and were strapped to the mechanisms around the torso, legs and feet as they sang an updated version of a traditional Alpine song.
Dressed in down-filled morning suits, the nine singers and one conductor tilted in various directions as pistons behind their backs and under their feet contracted and expanded.
Behind them, sixty male and female choir members dressed in black and white Moncler outfits stood in rectangular boxes stacked four levels high.
Each box was illuminated around the edges, separated from each other so they appeared to float in the darkened theatre.
Lights shining on the choir members flashed as the larger collective joined in singing with the smaller group.
The presentation took place on 8 February during New York Fashion Week, which finishes today.
New York architecture studio Bureau V showed its debut menswear collection based on theories by German architect Gottfried Semper during New York Fashion Week.
Bureau V centred its first foray into fashion design around Semper’s nineteenth-century Stoffwechseltheorie, which describes the replication of old construction techniques when implementing new materials.
With this in mind, the studio used the performance-driven shapes of cycling shorts and fisherman’s waders and created garments in lighter, textured fabrics and a minimal palette.
“We’ve shifted the materials and tweaked the shapes to migrate some of the forms of this clothing outside of sport and into a more formal setting,” Bureau V’s Peter Zuspan told Dezeen.
Oxford shirts with mesh vents under the arms and bibbed long johns feature in the 12-piece collection, along with felt T-shirts and tweed shorts.
White and light grey tones help to emphasise the textures such as waffle cotton knit and quilted cellulose fabric, plus diverge from the overuse of black in architect’s clothes according to Zuspan.
“The original reason we chose the colours was a minor protest to architects’ (and New Yorkers’) longterm obsession with black,” he told Dezeen. “That said, we also appreciate the light colour’s ability to show off the more sculptural details in the clothing with minimal lighting.”
The studio enjoyed the speed of working on a fashion collection compared to drawn-out architecture projects.
“We’re a younger studio and one of our biggest frustrations we find with architecture is that it’s just too slow,” said Zuspan. “A fashion design project that we designed and worked on for 2-3 months was very refreshing.”
Bureau V collaborated with design platform BYCO to produce the garments, which are now for sale. The collection was first shown last Thursday at the Dillon Gallery as part of New York Fashion Week.
Other architects that have tried their hand at fashion design include Jean Nouvel, Zaha Hadid and Oscar Niemeyer, who have all previously created shoe collections.
Bureau V’s capsule collection takes as its point of departure 19th century German architect Gottfried Semper’s Stoffwechseltheorie, a historical theory that describes how forms derived from material-specific practices often shift into other materials, creating valuable lingering forms that bear no material justification.
The collection presented at New York’s Dillon Gallery
The collection expands upon this theory from material practices to utility at large. Taking extreme performance-driven forms (such as bicycle bib shorts and fisherman’s waders), the collection shifts both the clothing’s material and its context, removing much of the utility from the work, and thereby re-contextualising material formal artefact as sculptural gesture.
The collection presented at New York’s Dillon Gallery
The collection is presented by BYCO, a tech-platform for design, which has an ongoing project to collaborate with designers to create work outside of their respective discipline.
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