In an early CdG collection, S/S 2003, 'Extreme Embellishment', Rei Kawakubo's challenge was to decorate the clothes without using any external embellishment. Instead, the fabric of the cotton garments was extended by metres, tying and braiding the extra cloth to form bouncy plaits and rosettes.
In her 2010/11 A/W collection, Kawakubo was working with a similar theme. This time, 'Inside Decoration'. Sarah Mower described the collection as "an exercise in pure form", with padding on the inside poking through an open seam. Interesting.
One of my own applied decorations, I call it 'avant-garde Scottish Highlands sash sweater'
Decorating/Adorning/Ornamenting are one and the same.
Human beings love to adorn themselves.
Body adornment is a language of self-expression, helping us to send signals about our personality and our cultural group.
Stephen J.Davis, University of Auckland, states in his pdf 'Analyzing Human Adornment',
"To adorn something is
1) (a) to intend to make it aesthetically special
(b) by making it (more) beautiful or sublime
(c) to succeed in this to some degree, and
(d) to receive audience uptake of the attempt and of the success
OR is
2) (e) to follow a conventionalised socially accepted practice
(f) that originated in 1) type adornment."
If you want to read the pdf, try this link https://cdn.ymaws.com/aesthetics-online.org/resource/resmgr/articles/DaviesSummer18.pdf
Enhancing our physical appearance.
We have pursued this goal since the time when we stood up on 2 legs and became aware of physical appearance.
Female figurines, like Venus of Willendorf ca. 28,000 - 25,000 BCE, show evidence of hair braiding or some type of headdress.
Running Horned Woman, Algeria ca 6,000 - 4,000 BCE, an early rock painting shows a running woman with body paint, raffia skirt and horned headgear.
Hair can be shaped, cut, curled, plaited, beaded, dyed, shaven, extended.
I think just about every cultural group has amazing things going with their hair.
What about this image of crowning glory...
Inuit woman, Nowadluk Ootenna, in an early 20th century photo.
What glorious hair! Such strong, long, shiny looking hair might have been the result of her high Omega-3 fatty diet.
Nowadluk has adorned her luxurious hair with a lovely bead headband.
Long dark hair has great meaning to Native Americans and the various tribal groups had their own unique way of styling their hair.
Braids/Plaits were a most common hairstyle for Native American women and men.
For images of some of the most typical Native American hair adornment, check out this site
Female Hopi hairstyle has always intrigued me. This image was photographed by Edward S. Curtis.
The style was an indication of a young woman's unmarried status. Her Mum wound the hair around a curved piece of wood, then it was removed and this wonderful shape was the result.
Click on this site for beautiful photos of young Hopi women in their tradition hair style.
Edward S. Curtis shot many evocative images of Native Americans. He was there at the right time, with the desire to capture the passing of an indigenous way of life.
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| This image is based on a drawing by Augustus Earle, made during an 1827-28 journey around northern North Island. The hair of the two women on the left shows the influence of European styles. They are also wearing necklaces and ribbons in their ears, another sign of increasing influence of European arrival. The younger woman on the right, was a young slave, Hepee. She has no body adornments indicating her lower social status. |
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| Elaborate hairstyles seen on Maori men, especially the topknots, illustrated by Louis de Sainson, 1826. |
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| Wings and feathers adorning the hair of these two people |
Interpreting Japanese Geisha hairstyles is a pretty study.
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| Warenshinobu, worn during the first part of geisha training. This style is meant to draw attention to the youth and beauty of an apprentice. |
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| Ofuku, worn after a geisha apprentice gets her first 'danna' (patron0. It has a history of the geisha losing her virginity. |
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| Sakko, marks the end of the geisha apprenticeship. It is worn for a month. |
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| Yakko-Shimada, worn for special occasions and the new year. |
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| Katsuyama, worn for the Gion festival held in July. |
Hair played a major cultural function in Pre and Post Colonial Africa. It expressed so much about a person: marital status, prosperity, even fertility plus the joy and vitality found in creating something beautiful for another person.
This is an interesting site, lots of information about the history of African hair adornment.
The Comme des Garcons S/S 2008 collection featured coats, tops and dresses printed with African hairstyles.
They have been subjected to various forms of decorative modification, by way of incising, filing, chipping and extracting. 
Lip plates
The South African Ndebele women also wear neck rings. They are considered a symbol of faithfulness, and a woman is not meant to remove it until her husband dies. Status is also an aspect, as they indicate wealth and prestige.
Alexander McQueen seemed inspired by the Ndebele rings in one of his collections.
I think it was his 'It's a Jungle Out There' 1997/98 collection, and the Ndebele neckwear was by Shaun Leane.
For further information about this incredible garment, check this out, but sadly, the videos don't seem to work.
especially the necklace.
Filing teeth sounds quite extreme to me.
I guess in the western world, it's braces.
The Mursi African tribe, where 15/16 year old girls had their lips cut, by their mothers, and small clay plates were inserted into the lip. It is said it is a symbol of beauty and identity, but there is also a theory that the practice was designed to make women look less appealing to slave raiders.
Africa is not the only country to practice this. It was also practised in the Americas.
Further information on this practice https://www.jaynemclean.com/blog/surma-suri-mursi-tribes-of-ethiopia-lip-plates
On the African continent we see fabulous neck adornment
Excellent explanation regarding South African cultural adornment is provided in this site,
The Kayan and Padaung tribes of Myanmar, use rings to create the image of a beautiful long neck on a woman. Girls of 5 years of age are fitted with their first ring.
Further information found here https://historydaily.org/what-you-didnt-know-about-the-practice-of-neck-elongation. It is interesting to note what is actually happening to the physical body, which makes the neck seem longer.
The collection referenced the H.G.Wells novel 'The Island of Dr Moreau', which is about a vivisectionist who creates humanoids out of animals. (Only McQueen!)
The coil collar went on to inspire Leane's Coil Corset in McQueen's F/W 1999 collection 'The Overlook'.
https://www.vam.ac.uk/museumofsavagebeauty/mcq/coiled-corset/
Many a designer is inspired by cultural adornment.
Junya Watanabe presented some cool ornamentation in his S/S 2005 collection. Using zips and domes for the decoration, which created wonderful effects,
At the time I was working on an Issey Miyake shirt, and I was given a whole lot of wooden buttons, so I adorned the collar with them, inspiration Junya W.
The models faces were made up to reflect tribal scarification.
Scarification is an African body adornment. It marks a person's rank in family and tribe. It can also be a puberty rite, and an indicator of an individual's personal courage and strength. It was popular in Africa as scarring was more visible on darker skinned people than tattoos.
For more information https://hadithi.africa/the-history-of-scarification-in-africa/ (There is a photo I do find distressing)
A number of years ago a student of mine used scarification as the inspiration for the outfit she designed and created for the fashion show her Fab.Tech. class were organising.
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She looked great coming out on the catwalk, ornamenting her creative attire with a spear, which happened to be parked up against the drama room wall!
Just like one of the models in Junya Watanabe's S/S 2016 menswear collection "Faraway", which had a West & Central African connection.
So much wonderful body adornment comes out of the African continent. Is it because, pre-colonisation, clothing was not a major aspect of their attirement?
Body painting, for example,
They could be wearing body suits, like these guys,
Body painting is a wonderful form of self expression
A lot of interesting information can be read in this site.
Marjorie Schick's (1941-2017) jewellery also reflected "cultural forms of body adornment, especially African because of the forms, their size, and the choice to wear multiple pieces." (Art Jewellery Forum
I like this artist and can connect with her story.
http://guity-novin.blogspot.com/2012/01/chapter-51-art-of-of-body-painting.html
The corsets are sewn in place at puberty, and indicate a man's position in an age-set system of the tribe he lives in.
There is one other fascination body adornment to be found in the Africa, The Dinka people of Southern Sudan. Along with other tribes in Sudan, the Dinka people formed the ancient Nubian Kingdom.
The wearing of beautiful corsets, known as "mulual" is a male tradition.
Dinka women tended to wear necklace type vests, just as beautiful.
Leaving the last image of African adornment with this fabulous young woman. She expresses much that relates to accessories, body modification and adornment.
Just one more, a postcard from a friend who visited Africa many years ago. Love this image, all the glorious adornment, plus the RayBans. Very cool!
Jewellery is a popular form of body adornment.
This is Textile Designer/Maker, Michaela Murrain's African Inspired Conceptual Jewellery
See more of it...kind of connects with CdG's Extreme Embellishment collection.
https://braidsandotherthingss.weebly.com/african-inspired-conceptual-jewellery.htmlInterviews, 04/14/2016, Who's afraid of Marjorie Schick, by Matt Lambert)
She got herself accepted into a university course with these words, "Your work is very ordinary, but we will accept you anyway." (Ibid)
She knew rejection, and her advice was, "have confidence in what you are doing, believe in it, and keep doing it. No matter what obstacles are put in your path. Of course it's easy to lose confidence. This is so in professional sports and, I imagine, in most fields of endeavour. Don't lose heart. Rededicate yourself to your vision. Persist. Resist the naysayers you meet and the ones inside your head." (Ibid)
In the interview 'Who's Afraid of Marjorie Schick', Schick mentions Bernard Rudofsky,
"In the early 1950s, my art-teacher mother’s colleague, Cay Wells, gave me two things: a totally hand-stitched jacket and an article about Bernard Rudofsky from a 1946 issue of Life Magazine. I was amazed that so much could be done by hand; the jacket showed me that one could do anything one set one’s mind to do. The Rudofsky article, “The Human Look: A Designer Finds Fashions Ruin It,” had an even more profound effect on me by initiating my deeper fascination with body decoration. Rudofsky illustrated parallels between cultural and historical fashion, such as bound Chinese feet next to contemporary high heels and African stacked brass neck rings beside a contemporary choker. I have always been inspired by the ways we can connect with other cultures and how we can discover inspiration in the creativity of societies and times quite different from our own."
Bernard Rudofsky (1905 - 1988), was an Austrian American architect, designer, writer, collector, social historian and teacher. In 1944 he curated MoMA's first fashion exhibition 'Are Clothes Modern?' In 1947 his catalogue essay was printed in book form under the same title.
https://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/3159
This will take you through the exhibition and a viewing of the catalogue.
This will take you through the exhibition and a viewing of the catalogue.
In the Christian Dior Fall 2019 Couture collection, artistic director Maria Grazia Chiuri had been inspired by her reading of this essay. The first garment to appear in the collection demonstrates that inspiration.
Want to see the whole of the collection... and as you can imagine it is glorious Dior.
Here's an interesting essay to read relating to the collection and Rudofsky,
A quote from it,
'Pages 120 and 121 boast a jazzy graphic mapping the twenty-four pockets and seventy buttons of a mid-century man fully dressed in a suit and overcoat. “What glass beads are to the savage, buttons and pockets are to the civilized,” Rudofsky writes, intending no disrespect to primitive culture. On the contrary, his analysis flows from the belief that the physical constrictions of Western clothing, like the capitalist contortions required by the system of producing and consuming them, often represents the corruption of ancient desires for bodily decoration.'
I like Rudofsky's image which expresses the aspect concerning the 70 buttons on the ensemble of the mid-century fully dressed western man.
Inspired me to create my own....
Button Man to the Rescue!
For some beautiful contemporary approaches to traditional Maori adornment, take this link. It relates to the wonderful exhibition 'Moana Currents: Dressing Aotearoa'.
Talking Aotearoa, Claire Regnaut begins Chapter 5 in her fabulous book, 'Dressed, Fashion Dress in Aotearoa New Zealand 1840 to 1910', featuring dresses and fashionable accessories (adornments), with this quote, "A bonnet is simply an excuse for a feather, a pretext for a spray of flowers, the support of an aigrette, the fastening for a plume of Russian cock's feathers. It is placed on the head, not to protect it, but that it may seem better. It's great use is to be charming."
I am working on a project 'Redress the Past' and a bonnet is my first piece, a bonnet which definitely serves purpose.
Sun bonnet
Wide brim frames the face from the sun
and a ruffle at the back protects the neck.
I decorated the lining with this script.
One of my Yr.10 students has just completed her dress project. Her creation includes lovely decorative features, like the scarf, the panel and the belt, which is set off perfectly by the buckle. Very good work.
SLTSLTBsigning off.
