GALLERY - THE MANY LIVES OF A GARMENT
1 - ARMOIRE
THE GUIDE STANDS NEXT TO THE WARDROBE:
Our journey into the many lives of a garment begins in the wardrobe. This is the gesture through which we inaugurate our days: we step into the closet, choose an outfit, and make it our second skin. The wardrobe is not just one of the many places in the world: it's the space we never leave behind. When we leave our home, we expose it to the outside world.
In this, its paradox is revealed. A wardrobe is first and foremost a small domestic museum. Folded and packed in piles, hanging from the metal shoulders of hangers, clothes are autobiographical tales waiting to be read. As if touched by magic, they can transform into a space of exhibiton, displaying who we are. A closet is thus not only the first but the longest and most fundamental museum experience that each and every one of us has, without even leaving our home. Because of that, we can become a museum ourselves.
The hanging garments are by Marius Janusauskas, a Lithuanian finalist of the ITS Contest 2012, inspired by Couturier Madame Grès and sculptor Pablo Atchugarry to tell the story of a woman trapped in time.
2012 Marius Janusauskas
2012 MARIUS JANUSAUSKAS
Lithuania
SLEEPING BEAUTY
Marius Janusauskas drew inspiration from the fairy tale "Sleeping Beauty", horror movies, the work of Madame Grès, and the sculptures of Pablo Atchugarry. The result is a collection based on the concept of "deference", outlining the story of his muse, a passive woman who does not move, a "non-dead": the colour of her skin fades, the only sign of life in her being the blood that flows through the seams of her garments. She is trapped in time, with a pleated front that symbolizes warmth, while the back is cold, minimalist and clinical.
2 - VITRINE
THE GUIDE STANDS NEXT TO THE SECOND STATION, CLOSE TO THE DISPLAY CASE:
In the streets of cities around the entire world, storefronts promote the items and products available for purchase in the shops themselves. Through them, we learn about clothes, we are tempted to try them on and to ultimately buy them. The display and presentation of clothes in an enclosed environment, under glass and in front of passers-by, is called visual merchandising. Its purpose is certainly to create a mirage, a vision that seduces potential customers and entices them to enter and live for at least a moment in the imaginary coordinates of that world behind the glass. Yet the decoration accompanying the displayed merchandise is a form of art in itself: storefronts articulate as a popular street museum, an intermittent series of ephemeral creations that transform the nature of clothes, revalue them and confer unexpected meanings upon them. If storefronts turn the city streets into an open-air exhibition venue, museums make this experience of immersion in an enchanted world the most precise and at the same time ordinary way of contemplating something.
In this shop window, two dresses that look at the monstrosity of fast fashion - one in white and one in total denim - produced by Louis Appelman, a Belgian finalist of ITS Contest 2019, and one dress by the Israeli finalist of ITS Contest 2020 Noa Baruch, inspired by the three-dimensional illusion of the anaglyph, a particular type of stereoscopic image.
2019 Louis Appelmans
2019 LOUIS APPELMANS
Belgium
I DON'T HAVE ENOUGH CLOTHES TO DRESS ALL THE PEOPLE I'VE BECOME
This collection stems from research into the fashion industry. In the twenty-first century, when acquiring new clothes, people often turn to mass distribution, without even considering the possibility of owning an expensive garment that could last for a lifetime. Despite always having a wide range of clothing, Louis grew up surrounded by the giants of fast fashion, never being able to experience tailored or custom-made garments. During his student years, delving into haute couture and artisanal techniques, Louis had the opportunity to observe and analyse this phenomenon from a different perspective, radically changing his opinion on fast fashion companies; companies with which he maintains a love-hate relationship, because they ultimately represent his first approach to the world of fashion.
2020 Noa Baruch
2020 NOA BARUCH
Israel
ANAGLYPH
Designer Noa Baruch always starts working from her grandmother's fifty-year-old pattern notebook. It is a source of inspiration and at the same time preservation of her cultural identity. The idea for this special project was to develop a total look entirely made of denim and inspired by the anaglyph, the 3D stereoscopic effect obtained by overlapping two images taken from two different angles in two colours (usually red and cyan). When observed using glasses with lenses of the two separate colours (the old "3D glasses"), the eye is tricked into creating an illusion of three-dimensionality. In the garments of her total look, Noa always overlays the front part outlined in blue on a back part outlined in red, achieving an imperceptibly new silhouette, with details extending to the buttons, customized to appear as two overlapping pieces in red and blue. Essentially, a 2D technique used to simulate 3D effects has been employed to create a three-dimensional outfit based on two-dimensional designs.
3 - CABINE D'ESSAYAGE
THE GUIDE STANDS NEXT TO THE THIRD STATION:
I invite you to take a look at yourselves in this mirror as if you were standing in a real dressing room inside a store!
In a small space enclosed by a curtain, the dressing room allows us to try on our own body the garment we have chosen, a piece that just a moment ago laid flat on a sculptural hanger. Alone, in front of the mirror, we evaluate this new image of ourselves. The mirror is a witness to first appearances in a formation process: even before the mannequin, the pedestal or the photograph, the mirror consists in the first reference to the museum. It is in this environment, where we judge ourselves, that the first exhibition of the self takes place.
Looking at yourselves in the mirror, you are called upon to become an integral part of the exhibition through the reflection of your ephemeral image.
A series of unpublished videos produced for Pitti Immagine complete the installation. In black and white, mannequins and models describe out of memory the emblematic garments of some of the greatest figures in the world. With precise words and gestures, they bring back to life the archetypes of a wardrobe that has disappeared before our eyes.
4 - VETEMENT ABANDONÉ
THE GUIDE STANDS ON THE SIDE OF THE FOURTH STATION:
As owners of the garment, we also become curators of its exhibition as soon as we undress. Tossed on the hanger, even clumsily, the jacket or coat worn just a moment ago retains the memory of our absent body. Abandoned on a sofa, on the backrest of a chair, or even slumped at the foot of the bed, our clothes take on the anthropomorphic character of ourselves in an ambiguous relationship between presence and absence. They are our tired doubles. It takes so little for yet another improvised and ephemeral museum to open. It is as if every garment then transforms the most humble and neglected of spaces into a place of exhibition. Each piece of clothing not only changes our nature: it alters the texture of the space and time it inhabits.
On display are the dress by Katherine Roberts-Wood, British finalist of ITS Contest 2014, inspired by the experience of sinking into a dreamy drowsiness that enters and exits reality, and the dress by Brais Albor, Spanish finalist of ITS Contest 2022, which tells of a new fluid, strong, and revolutionary masculinity.
2015 Katherine Roberts-Wood
2015 KATHERINE ROBERTS-WOOD
United Kingdom
DIGITALIS
In this collection, designer Katherine Roberts-Wood draws inspiration from the dark and unusual aspects of floral and botanical structures and compounds, particularly the fascinating characteristics of plants that can be hallucinogenic, soporific, psychoactive or poisonous. The aim was to represent the experience of sinking into a dreamy torpor, descending and rising within and outside of reality; an emotional and physical state of intoxication. Construction techniques use color and transparency to create a curious and atmospheric effect, suggesting hallucinations or holograms, projected images that could be real or imagined. The intensity of color pulsates and fades beneath translucent skin. Roberts-Wood explores a fundamental desire to immerse oneself in nature and our struggle with this fragile connection and disconnection.
2022 Brais Albor
2022 BRAIS ALBOR
Spain
DESCENT OF HUMAN, AND NATURAL SELECTION IN RELATION TO LOVE
A collection to feel powerful, in shape, strong like the clothes we wear. Brais has developed a language that stages opposites, connecting the track through desire. A new, fluid masculinity, smoothing its edges into a pleasant collective project focused on love. Brais creates a uniform for a "strong and revolutionary human being", capable of being part of a change, ready to fight for a loving revolution. Thus, a new identity is born, a masculine menswear, created in the least masculine way possible.
5 - ROBE INCARNEE
THE GUIDE STANDS NEXT TO THE FIFTH STATION:
We are now in front of the station dedicated to the embodied garment.
"A garment is finished when it leaves the workshop, but it can be considered finished only when it fits the shoulders of a woman."
This observation by the great Japanese designer Issey Miyake is upheld by museum curators and fetish collectors alike. In cultural heritage collections, preference is given to garments that attest to a sense of belonging and represent the trace of a life lived; when some of them come from Marlene Dietrich's wardrobe, for example, the preserved garment transitions from being a simple embroidered jacket to being a relic. As if due to a process of radioactivity, the lives of the bodies that inhabited them are transmitted and deposited in the garments that exposed those bodies to the city's gaze. This radioactive life adheres to the garments, never leaving them: that's why looking at a garment means glimpsing the gestures and episodes of the personalities who wore them.
The wardrobe doubles of Charlotte Rampling and Tilda Swinton are displayed in two traditional museum showcases. Arranged as if they had just been freed, the trousers, shirts, and jackets have anticipated their gestures and movements. Under the transparency of the enclosing and protecting glass, the garments no longer signify just the label and the artist who made them, but above all the phenomenon of embodiment that is paramount in this exhibition.
6 - VETEMENT A LA MODE
THE GUIDE STANDS CLOSE TO THE SIXTH STATION:
From Elsa Schiaparelli onwards, creative or fashion clothing has become an exhibition, a showcase, an advertising subject. By adding extravagant embroideries and irreverent or surrealist motifs to the surface of garments, the 1930s designer transformed the creative expression of fashion into a visible force, a stylistic signature easily attributable to its creator, much like a piece by Comme des Garçons or Martin Margiela, a painting by Van Gogh or a sculpture by Arnaldo Pomodoro. Fashion clothing seems to be more oriented towards displaying, rather than experimenting or appreciating. Due to its excessive stylistic demands, it often refuses to enter intimate spaces. It is as if fashion, instead of exposing the body, exposes only itself and its uncompromising, stubborn opacity. By leaning, as we sometimes do in front of a mirror, rather than by being worn and adapted to the mannequin, any dress only shows what it is: it has stopped trying to convince those who will wear it in ordinary daily life.
The exhibited dress is by Mayako Kano, New Zealander fashion finalist in ITS Contest 2016. It represents a contemporary dialogue between preservation and semi-transparent layering, a surreal limbo between an old world and a new one.
2016 Mayako Kano
2016 MAYAKO KANO
New Zealand
REVERSE FADE
Mayako Kano's collection creates a sensation of being trapped in a limbo between an "old" and a "new" world, simultaneously united and subverted, creating something surreal. She brings the decaying, burnt, and faded nature of past objects into her collection, creating a contemporary dialogue between preservation and semi-transparent layering. While the collection may appear deconstructed at first glance, the dress's form is precisely defined by the use of two layers, one of which, transparent, represents preservation. Inspired by clothing-cutting techniques from the 1930s and 1940s, the collection uses embroidery as a means of connection between different elements.
7 - VETEMENT AIMEE
THE GUIDE STOPS BY THE SEVENTH STATION:
The beloved garment doesn't concern itself with labels and logos. It is not the most beautiful or the most refined. The beloved garment stands in contrast to the fashionable one, which is often too arrogant even though it may emanate an aura from it. The beloved garment is a collection of circumstances and situations, providing memory with the virtues of an embroidery finer than a gold thread. It can be ours, of a family relative or of a loved one; we preserve it or pass it on to others. Clothes represent this as well: showcases and hieroglyphics of love for our own and others' bodies, displayed in plain sight.
Under a museum case, the citizens of Trieste are invited to exhibit the garment with which they have an emotional connection. An object of memory that the fashion industry denies, each person's garment returns the lasting poetry that binds the garment to its owner, beyond trends, beyond brands, beyond tastes.
Currently on display is the wedding dress of Alda Balestra Stauffenberg, renowned Italian model born in Trieste. Alda Balestra was chosen as Miss Italy in 1970. After graduating from university, she decided to pursue a professional career in modeling, which led her to become internationally recognized, working for the most famous designers of the time and appearing in editorials for the most important magazines.
In addition to celebrating the love of her life, this wedding dress marked the farewell to the grand fashion shows, after 15 years working with the greatest creators. The designer Valentino Garavani, who had Alda as a model, personally offered her a Couture dress, inviting her to choose from his archive. Alda chose a piece from his 1989 collection dedicated to the Viennese architect Joseph Hoffmann, which marked Valentino's farewell to the Roman haute couture shows. Therefore, it is a dress loaded with strong meanings not only for Alda but also for Valentino himself.
It was hand-delivered by Valentino's assistant along with a handwritten note from him, dated June 15th, 1990, in which he expressed confidence that the dress would bring luck and happiness into Alda's life.
8 - VETEMENT ENDOMMAGE
THE GUIDE STANDS BY THE EIGHTH STATION:
We are now in front of the station dedicated to damaged garments. Subjected to the sun, dust and susceptible to dangers and tears, even clothing undergoes the humiliations of time. In turn, a garment is either praised by the latest fashion or cast into the purgatory of abandonment. Fragile and vulnerable, it is overexposed, worn, and destined to disappear. Its textile casing cracks in the face of the insults of dust and use. A paradoxical object, this ephemeral second skin can claim eternity, provided it is preserved in museum warehouses, sheltered from light and devastating dust. The clothes of La Duse and Sarah Bernhardt still shine today, owned by Palazzo Pitti and Palais Galliera, even though their illustrious owners have long since passed away.
Laid delicately on beds of paper, three torn haute couture dresses, without a future and not even suitable for display, show this fate that hesitates between resistance and alteration. The exposure to the stigmata of use serves not only to denounce the fragility of fabrics: smooth threads, holes in the textile are rather the sign of the instinct that seems to bring every garment to life until it disappears in the gesture that animates it.
9 - INVENTAIRE
THE GUIDE GETS CLOSE TO THE NINTH STATION:
Garment inventory is an exercise consisting of describing the shapes, materials, techniques and colours of the pieces from a selected wardrobe donated to a museum. The curator applies himself to this task using a descriptive, factual, and investigative style. The inventory is the written snapshot of a collection, recording their presence in the warehouses.
For several years, Olivier Saillard has compiled an inventory of his own past wardrobe in the form of samples cut from the garments themselves. From the T-shirts he wore when he was 18, to the jackets he wore when he was 30 and the pants he just recently started wearing, he wanted to extract a fragile memory that would one day become a book, published in three copies. The fabric pages taken from the shirts and outfits worn in the past are the compendium of a lifetime of clothing, to which the author has chosen to link one or two memories that take precedence based on colour or associated material. Cut with scissors until they reach the size of a pocket book page, the resulting fabric sheets are also a manifesto in which the curator and director, with a definitive and fatal gesture, within his private collection, transgresses and checkmates the very methods of conservation.
10 - VETEMENT EXPOSE
THE GUIDE NOW GOES BY THE TENTH STATION:
Clothing items exhibited in museums or in dedicated exhibitions are displayed with or without showcases, in controlled climatic conditions, and with lighting that must not exceed 50 lux in intensity, according to current conservation standards. The garment depends on the viewer's gaze and cannot be touched or approached. It is believed that a garment exhibited for a period of three months should be left to rest for 3 or 4 years, depending on its original fragility. In the exhibition, more attention is paid to its plastic form and the expressiveness of its creator than its pedigree and the history it may have had, with a body that here is made of plastic, wood or papier-mâché.
The dress is by Indonesian designer Heaven Tanudiredja, a finalist of ITS Contest 2007. It is a tribute to his sister, drawing inspiration from the costume of the matador, the installations of Christo and Jeanne-Claude and the work of Elsa Schiaparelli.
2007 Heaven Tanudiredja
2007 HEAVEN TANUDIREDJA
Indonesia
THE POETRY OF MEMORY
A nostalgic woman in search of her lost childhood, the place from which she has been exiled. She does not idealize the past; her desire is to find her homeland wherever she goes, the place where life began. She seeks a new beginning. She is a woman who confronts destiny as a matador confronts a bull. She would like to escape her attachment to the past, but the past always returns, and she is always drawn to it. Heaven's collection is a tribute to his sister and is inspired by the costume of the matador, the installations of Christo and Jeanne-Claude, and the work of Elsa Schiaparelli.
Indonesia THE POETRY OF MEMORY
2007 Heaven Tanudiredja
Images
11 - VETEMENT EVOQUES LITERATURE
THE GUIDE WALKS TO THE ELEVENTH STATION:
In fashion magazines clothing is detailed in the form of descriptions which Roland Barthes analyzed in his famous work "The Fashion System". Except for these synthetic and utilitarian descriptions, characterised by condensed and hierarchical content, written traces dedicated to clothing are found in the documents accompanying the presentation of a fashion collection or in press articles commenting and analyzing the fashion shows of the day. Stéphane Mallarmé combined literature and fashion chronicles in an essay that has gone down in history as "La Dernière Mode" (The Latest Fashion, 1874). In literature, clothing is the costume of the protagonists that serves to narrate the characters themselves, just as in theater. According to Virginia Woolf, Curzio Malaparte, Sylvia Plath and Jean Genet, clothing is above all the faded memory of our being, the tired double of each of us. It has suggested the most beautiful pages to the greatest authors in the history of literature. Unlike what Barthes thought, however, there is no hierarchy between the fabric dress, the photographed dress and the described one. Unlike what happens in other forms of art, the description of a dress is not necessarily less relevant than the real piece. On the contrary, it is as if the words represent a second body, a glorious body in which fashion can exist as a pure memory or pure premonition of a happiness that is no longer measured by calendar time. In other words, clothes become the glory of our life.
This is why we are presenting you with a selection of pages that Olivier Saillard has collected on his Instagram profile. Alongside them, we present the first fashion show without clothes. "Salon de Couture" is a performance acted and read by Olivier Saillard in which imaginary and poetic descriptions have replaced clothes melting in the sun.
12 - VETEMENT PERDU
THE GUIDE CONCLUDES BY THE TWELFTH STATION:
This station is dedicated to clothing in vintage warehouses and shops. Abandoned clothes may have hope for a second chance. They can be recycled in large containers placed on the outskirts of cities. They can also be distributed through charities when not simply thrown away with disdain. Some of them, however, may escape the hope of a new life. On the streets, flattened on tarmac, crushed by passers-by or car wheels, stranded on public benches, these clothes are lost. Thus neglected, they are also a clear sign of a change in attitude towards them. Once cherished, mass consumption condemns them to obsolescence. At the other end of the world, piled up in tons inside open-air textile landfills, they form worrying mountains that threaten the environment.
This heartbreaking purgatory that opens up in the most disparate latitudes, unable to hide itself, is also a form of museum, a randomly spread-out exhibition. An abandoned garment is not just a discarded commodity; it isn’t even just coloured material refusing to be reused. It is also, and above all, a limbo in which forms of life that we no longer recognize as our own remain suspended between the paradise of memories and the hell of oblivion.
We can now proceed to the Wunderkammer!