For the CdG 2017 Autumn/Winter season, Rei Kawakubo delivered a collection she described as, 'The Future of the Silhouette'.
What was she on about?
Was she "meditating on the nature of fashion itself, its processes, and where it might go next", as Sarah Mower suggested?
Who really knows...what I do know is how confronting her silhouettes must have been for some people. I can just hear them, "Where would you wear that?!!"
This one..
Silhouette, the dark shape and outline of someone or something visible in restricted light against a brighter background.
One of those images sent over facebook.
Shape is one of the Elements of Design. It is the area defined by the outside edges of an object, the boundaries of a colour, or a line.
When it comes to my field, silhouette is the shape the clothes make when they hang on the human body.
Looking at some CDG collection garments regarding silhouette is an interesting assignment, as Rei Kawakubo believes in challenging our concept of silhouette.
CdG S/S 2018 'Multidimensional Graffiti'
CdG A/W 2012 'The Future in Two Dimensions'
same collection, but this time it's a bit of...
CdG A/W 2015 'The Ceremony of Separation'
same collection, this time...
Now, this one, what would you say...
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| S/S 2017 'Invisible Clothes' |
Box silhouette?
My inspiration from this wonderful garment, a skirt, maybe not as boxy a silhouette, but the hint of it is there.
Cutting silhouette portraits, usually from black card, became popular in the mid 18th century. They were a quick and affordable way for the "common people" to have a portrait made, and were the equivalent of portrait photographs of today. The small size made them portable when mounted in small traveling cases, frames, lockets and brooches.
Isabella Beetham, a leading silhouette artist in Britain, was the first woman to make a living from silhouette artistry. This is one of her works and it states it is Marie-Antionette.
Segue...French finance minister Etienne de Silhouette had his name given to the practice.
An explanation from 'Silhouette: An Alternative Portraiture with a Dark History'- In the 1760s the Finance Minister of Louis XV, Etienne de Silhouette, had crippled the French people with his merciless tax policies. Oblivious to his people’s plight, Etienne was much more interested in his hobby of cutting out paper profiles. He was so despised by the people of France that in protest, the peasants wore only black mimicking his black paper cutouts. The saying went all over France, “We are dressing a la Silhouette. We are shadows, too poor to wear color. We are Silhouettes!”.
A famous 18th century author in silhouette.
You'll realise who through this link
This link provides interesting information about the history of silhouette portraiture in America. 'Black Out: Silhouettes Then and Now', held at the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery in 2018.
And further information via a video explaining the exhibition mentioned above,
Another interesting artist featured in the 'Black Out' exhibition is Kumi Yamashita. Yamashita likes to work with shadows for the nuances they provide. Shadows "reveal this extraordinary dimension where we see no borders, no races, no separation...only the essence of what we are." Interesting analysis.
One of the artists featured in the exhibition is African American artist, Kara Walker, who is famous for her cut-out silhouettes portraying historical narratives expressing sexuality, violence and subjugation.
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| The Jubilant Martyrs of Obsolescence and Ruin, 2015 |
Walker's work enables the viewer to absorb an understanding of a past they might otherwise wish to ignore. The scale of her silhouette art presses the power of her point home. The above piece is 58 foot long.
The quote below is from The New Yorker article, October 8, 2007 written by Hilton Als.
'THE SHADOW ACT Kara Walker's vision'
Walker’s silhouette technique was the result of an intense period of looking. While she was immersing herself in the writings of black feminist critics and novelists, such as bell hooks, Michele Wallace, Toni Morrison, and Octavia Butler, she was also poring over reference books on early American art. One image captured her imagination: a nineteenth-century silhouette of a little black girl in profile. “I had a catharsis looking at early American varieties of silhouette cuttings,” she wrote to me. “What I recognized, besides narrative and historicity and racism, was this very physical displacement: the paradox of removing a form from a blank surface that in turn creates a black hole. I was struck by the irony of so many of my concerns being addressed: blank/black, hole/whole, shadow/substance, etc. (There’s also that great quote from Sojourner Truth: ‘I sell the shadow to support the substance.’)”
This video may help to explain more about Kara Walker's work.
Yamashita spent six months sketching and carving her Wooden Chair (2015) , so that a single light placed in exactly the right spot would create the shadow of a young woman sitting on the chair.
This will take you to images of the work.
This is a silhouette I created for a collection project I worked on years ago. It was all about who was the muse who would wear the clothes I designed. I imagined it like white chalk on a blackboard. It's kinda alter ego stuff!
What about trying your hand at making some silhouettes, or helping a little one get into it, this is a great video for getting the creative fun started.
As I have been conceptualising and researching for this blog, I am reminded of an exhibition I saw at the wonderful V&A in 2005, (it's just seems like yesterday, really, it does!)
'Spectres: When Fashion Turns Back'. There was so much in that exhibition that related to Silhouettes.
It was quite cerebral, as the curator Judith Clarke used quotations from fashion theorist, Caroline Evans text Fashion at the Edge: Spectacle, Modernity and Deathliness (2003) to introduce the various sectional exhibits.
A review of that book, if interested...
The exhibition was about revealing the shadows and experiences that form a fashion memory in contemporary fashion. The curator, Judith Clark, was described as confronting "countless 'ghosts in reverse', as expressed in this quotation "...a pregnant woman described how the little frock hanging up in readiness for her, as yet unborn child seemed like 'a ghost in reverse'." Elizabeth Wilson (fashion historian) Adorned in Dreams, Fashion and Modernity.
The exhibition started with this image, a cotton dress and blouse of Veronique Branquinho and a cotton baptismal robe. They are a mirror image and together become a ghostly reflection.
I find this an interesting image, as Rei Kawakubo has created such outfits in her collections i.e. a garment on a garment.
A CdG Play t-shirt I purchased at Dover Street Market, once home discovered the Japanese L size was still a tad small for a western woman like moi, so attached it to a t-shirt more size suited, added some black safety pins and away I go, my CdG Play t-shirt is comfortably wearable ala a CdG style.
One of the giant wooden Ruben Toledo figures in the exhibition.
The Spectres exhibition was set up as a series of 7 different fairground attractions 1. Reappearances: Getting things Back, 2. Nostalgia, 3. Locking In and Out, 4. A New Distress, 5. Remixing It: The Past in Pieces, 6. Phantasmagoria: The Amazing Lost and Found, 7. Curiouser and curiouser!
The 'Nostalgia' section questioned whether nostalgia is hoping for a forgotten past, or longing for impossible futures. Moments in fashion were presented in giant wooden figures, taken from Cuban-Amarican artist, Ruben Toledo's drawings 'The Avenues of Silhouettes'.
In one of the other sections, 'Phantasmagoria: The Amazing Lost and Found', a shadow lantern threw out shape-shifting silhouettes,
This section began with the Evans quote, "The term 'phantasmagoria' was first used in 1802 to describe another form of popular spectacle...a magic lantern show in which skeletons, ghosts and other fantastical figures were made to rapidly increase and decrease in size...metaphorically it came to connote some form of dramatic visual deception or display, in which shadowy and unreal figures appear..."
This is an interesting link relating to the 'Phantasmagoria' chapter in Evans' book. It's thought provoking.
A magic lantern is mentioned above, check out this video for a short history of the magic lantern.
The image on the cover of this edition is the final silhouette scene of his wonderful 1957 film, 'The Seventh Seal'.
A magic lantern became a treasured possession for Bergman after he had traded his tin soldiers for it. Its wonder was both "an inspiration and a dream" and Bergman visually expressed this memory in his 1982 film, "Fanny and Alexander'.
See some of that visual memory via this vimeo link. It captures that opposing world between child and adult, which we have all experienced at some time in our lives.
And read this for an interesting review of Bergman's autobiography.
Here's a good word, 'Chiaroscuro', the effect of contrasted light and shadow. Caroline Broadhead, I am not sure how to describe her...Jeweler...Clothes designer/maker...Performance artist...She says, for 45 years she's been "concerned with objects that come into contact with and interact with the body." For this particular blog, I am interested in her work connecting with light and shadows.
In 1994 Broadhead began experimenting with shadows, which she saw as having a life of their own, separate "from any relationship to the object from which it emanates. It can be blurry at the edges or focused, it can faithfully follow a form, or it can loom larger than the object casting it, giving a distorted or unrecognisable form".
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| Over my shoulder III, 1996 |
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| Distortion to proportion, 1997 |
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| Dress with lace, 1998 |
My piece, in homage to Caroline Broadhead. It came out of a workshop...
at an exhibition of her work I attended in Burnley.
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| Sheath Shadow Dress |
I am trying to capture the delicate, will o the wisp nature of the shadow dress in these two shots.
Darkness was evident, almost as if RK was confronting "the fears and dreads" of the time. Adrian Joffe (Rei Kawakubo's husband) said, "She reads the news, she knows what's happening." Donald Trump was in the White House, and maybe it was the time when he was using phrases like we're "locked and loaded' in regard to North Korea's Kim Jong-un! Covid-19 may have been rearing rearing its ugly head, but not quite taken hold. Shadows with great silhouettes. The first image is an extended sheath dress silhouette.
Highly effective shadows behind each model, dressed in wonderful silhouettes.
This link connects you to an exhibition at Barcelona Design Museum, which looked back at the history of fashion over the last 500 years, not just chronologically, but also thematically. It's a very informative site referencing the various ways the body silhouette is highlighted in clothing.
Fashion, clothing and the body are the three threads running through this exhibition. How clothing has modified the body during various periods of history. The body is the support for clothing which creates artificial silhouettes relating to changing fashion trends.
Three different types of silhouettes have recurred with variations over the centuries:
- the rectilinear silhouette (the straight form)
- the geometrical silhouette (triangular, rectangular and round forms)
- anatomical silhouette (reflect/respect shape of the body)
And, here's some classic history in this fashion silhouette site...Christian Dior's Most Famous Silhouettes in Vogue from 1947 until his death in 1957. The New Look et al.
I have this delightful book 
I've made a matchup with CdG sihouettes, and I have never thought of them as silly, astounding, yes, silly, never!
and it has a fun creative section 'Let's make silly silhouettes'
Just want to touch base with Ruben Toledo again. I love his work, very distinctive style.
Two fabulous silhouettes, sort of Dali 'ish, plus...
his wonderful silhouetted illustrations for the cover of a Pride and Prejudice edition.
A student of mine, testing a t-shirt idea atop a skirt with an interesting silhouette. Together, it's a cool look.
Silhouettes and shadows, do make for an interesting story.
Last word goes to William...
SLTSLTBsigning off.
