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Emerging designers from The Netherlands and Belgium showcase their best efforts in contemporary design

Over the last year or so a number of smaller nation players in the global fashion game have gotten a creative boost from new cultural institutions funded by their respective government organizations. In the Netherlands, a new venture called High Fashion Low Countries has been initiated by the Dutch…

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Dezeen Wire: the famous white suit worn by John Travolta in 1977 film Saturday Night Fever has been rediscovered and will be on show at the V&A museum in London from October.

It had been missing after being auctioned at Christie’s in 1995 but the current owner came forward when they heard about the Hollywood Costume exhibition due to open on 20 October.

Here’s some more information from the V&A:

V&A to display unforgettable white Travolta suit this autumn in Hollywood Costume
20 October 2012 – 27 January 2012

The iconic white 3-piece suit worn by John Travolta as Tony Manero on the disco dance floor in the classic 1977 film Saturday Night Fever, has been discovered in London after an international search by the Victoria and Albert Museum. It has now been confirmed to go on display as part of Hollywood Costume, the V&A’s major autumn exhibition.

Senior Guest Curator of Hollywood Costume Deborah Nadoolman Landis set her sights on including the suit for the exhibition in 2008 whilst gathering together memorable costumes from a century of film-making. She discovered that Paramount Pictures had auctioned the suit for charity in 1979 where famous US film critic Gene Siskel had purchased it. At the auction, the suit was inscribed by John Travolta on the interior lining with the words ‘To Gene, so here’s to a classic, your friend, John Travolta.’ After Siskel passed away in 1995, it was then auctioned by Christie’s, after which the trail went cold.

Finally, after a high profile media launch for Hollywood Costume at the V&A in January 2012, Assistant Curator Keith Lodwick received a phone call from the current owner revealing the white suit’s London location and offering it for the exhibition. The owner, who wishes to remain anonymous, was the long sought buyer from the 1995 Christie’s auction. After visiting the costume to authenticate it, Lodwick was delighted to discover that it was the original suit and in excellent condition. The white polyester two-button single-breasted suit with wide jacket lapels, matching waistcoat, and 28-inch waist white flared trousers is accompanied by the original black single-cuff shirt with pointed collar. The lining inscription to Gene Siskel is still visible.

Saturday Night Fever is one of the most enduring films of the 1970s and Travolta’s legendary performance as Brooklyn youth Tony Manero is now embedded in international popular culture. Designed by Patrizia Von Brandenstein, the white suit became an emblem for the film and for the disco decade. The film’s director John Badham asked Von Brandenstein to shop locally in Brooklyn for the “perfect” suit for Tony Manero. She remembers throngs of girls screaming outside the shop for Travolta, then the star of a hit US television series, Welcome Back Kotter. As Curator Deborah Nadoolman Landis notes, “Badham, Travolta and Van Brandenstein did not know at the time of filming that this suit would come to define an era.”

Now remembered as one of the most classic costumes in cinema history, Badham and Travolta originally assumed that the suit would be black for the final dance scene, only to be convinced by Von Brandenstein to use white. She had two reasons for insisting on the colour; she felt strongly that white represented Tony Manero’s personal journey from ignorance to enlightenment and it ensured that the suit would reflect the dazzling lighting effects in the dark discotheque.

Patrizia Von Brandenstein commented: “When choosing what goes in to such a major dance costume, I paid attention to the usual factors of cut, “danceability” and maintenance and I thought about the character of Tony Manero. I reasoned that Tony’s position in his traditional Italian-American family (overshadowed by his brother the seminarian, and under valued for his compassion and dancing abilities) is in extreme contrast to his dominant position in the neighbourhood. By virtue of his style, panache, and above all his lithe grace on the dance floor, he is a hero to his local gang, and by extension, to all of us. Heroes from Sir Lancelot to Tom Mix wore white in the great contests to express purity and single-minded devotion to the task at hand. So for me, white was the only choice for the suit. I am grateful that our hero, John Travolta, and our producers also came to see it in this way. I am so thrilled that the suit is included in Hollywood Costume, and hope the public enjoy seeing it on display at the V&A.”

The suit can be seen this autumn alongside more than 100 of the most iconic costumes designed for unforgettable cinema characters over a century of film-making. Hollywood Costume, sponsored by Harry Winston, opens at the V&A on 20 October 2012.

The post John Travolta’s Saturday Night Fever
suit rediscovered appeared first on Dezeen.

Looks from Haider Ackermann’s fall 2012 collection.

“When you prick the tip of your finger, the blood is this beautiful shade of dark red. The color does not last very long—as the blood dries, it goes brownish and looks horrible, but for a fraction of a second it’s incredible. Discovering that you have cut your finger can be distressing and painful, of course—but looking at that magnificent shade of red is a beautiful distraction. I long to work with fabric in that color, and I am always looking for it, but I’ve never found it. I have seen reds in Francis Bacon and Mark Rothko paintings that are as intense as blood red, with the same violence and fear and with a kind of perversion. All those layers of red paint, one on top of the other, feel very sexual.”

–Haider Ackermann, in an interview with Alice Rawsthorn in the August issue of W

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Trinidadian architect Tara Keens Douglas presented a series of carnival costumes made from folded paper and twisted rope as part of her masters thesis.

The Ecstatic Spaces collection is based on the process of transformation that masqueraders experience at a carnival.

The four costumes are described as four operations: appropriation, exaggeration, submersion and sublimation.

Keens Douglas says the costumes are “ephemeral architecture”, adding: “They temporally distort the true nature of the body.”

Last year she completed her Master of Architecture thesis at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada.

Other fashion collections we’ve recently featured on Dezeen include dresses inspired by a Japanese novel and garments made from translucent lambskin.

See all our stories about fashion »

Here’s some more information from the designer:

The work represented here is derived from the Waterloo Master of Architecture thesis ‘Ecstatic Spaces’ by Tara Keens-Douglas. Originally from Trinidad, Tara Keens-Douglas received her Master’s degree from the University of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada in 2011. Her design work was selected for joint exhibition at the Cambridge Galleries in Ontario, Canada.

Her thesis work studies the relationship of Trinidad’s carnival festival to personal architecture and the spaces they create and occupy. It challenges architectural representation through costume design that embodies the transformative experiences of the masquerader. The costumes are referred to as four operations of appropriation, exaggeration, submersion and sublimation. They are all tools of communication, a medium between body and space. Each transforms the body during carnival, through its disguise and extension. Together they produce an out of body experience.

Trinidad’s Carnival was introduced by the French and adapted by Trinidad’s diverse population. Trinidadian’s reinvent and revitalize new forms within carnival: it is uniquely theirs. The participants revel in a festival that is not only excessive, but also temporal, occurring outside of ordinary life. In the festival, everything is upside down and inside out. This inversion is expressed in laughter.

The people of Trinidad communicate in the playful and sensuous nature of the carnival costume. They mock the seriousness of the political world, rejecting state and class. A medium for humor, the costumes stand in for the bodies we do not have; ambivalently, they both degrade and regenerate. Costumed, Carnival embraces laughter and the grotesque, and gives the community identity.

The chaos of parade, music, and dance fuses the body with the costume, transforming the individual, freeing him from inhibitions. The fusion of body and Carnival costume tells the untold story of the masquerader. The architecture of costume serves its wearers. Its significance lies in its affirmation of identity, while accommodating an emotional and sensuous experience.

New techniques, shifts in the local economy, and changing concepts of culture, have in turn, redeveloped the Carnival costume. New designs – departures – stand out. Carnival pushes this very idea. Over the years, costumes challenge the officials and the onlookers. They are daring, controversial, and crude. It is the contemporary female costume in Carnival that most challenges convention now. It is why I chose the female form as my muse for my costume designs, using the ornament of costume to amplify the grotesque. I began with the costume titled ‘appropriation’, a dragon costume for the contemporary female Carnival. It mimics the aggressive nature of the dragon costume and merges it with the highly sexualized female body in carnival. I used abstract forms that evoked the dragon.

Working with my hands, I mold and manipulate, pushing, pulling, creasing, and tearing to reach the desired volume. I compose based on a repetition of units. Three of these units make up a three-dimensional ‘spiked’ form. I approach its design with a sense of blind faith. Piece by piece, I assemble the modular ‘spike’ around the female form. I imagine what the series of spikes could represent, a twist in the dragon’s tail, the ridge on his back.

I variously scaled ‘spikes’ to draw attention to areas of the body used to communicate, whether as threat device or sexual lure. The completed costume is an appropriation of the dragon, made to suit the carnival female and their changing culture. Both the costume and the process of making it were transformative.

The four costume designs are grotesque, making extreme exaggerations and unfathomable representations of the body, violating the idealized, classical body. The costumes are an ephemeral architecture – fragile and mobile. They temporally distort the true nature of the body, transforming the wearer, perhaps disclosing new natures. They make a new “facade”, or emphasize one already in play. They are, in a way, architecture of the persona.

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Tara Keens Douglas appeared first on Dezeen.

Maud Vantours est une artiste designer et plasticienne française vivant à Paris. Celle-ci manie le papier avec un talent incroyable et compose des motifs et des formes de toute beauté pour créer des graphismes originaux tels des paysages multicolores oniriques. Une sélection de ses travaux est à découvrir dans la suite.