The Music of Change

Easily, it is argued, dress is an artform reflecting its time as much as do painting, sculpture, and craft. With what are we left when the final romances of Japonisme go to smoke and the circumstances of the world take all the rest with it?

As we have seen, the blocks of color and the asymmetry have been retained, but the outlines are gone, though still perhaps implied. simplicity remains, and one can often still intuit nature's influence, but without question, there has been a change.

What we do know is that cubism is not only a natural when it comes to artistic evolution, but also inevitable in the face of the disintegration of the world as many had known it. We were no longer naive. We were motorized, our visions changed.

WHO AM I?

Who am I?
Where am I from?
I’m Antonin Artaud
And since I speak
As I know
In a moment
You’ll see my present body
Shatter to pieces
And gather itself
In a thousand notorious
Aspects
A fresh body
In which you’ll never
Be able
To forget me.

Antonin Artaud

Things were taken apart and reassembled in ways that were unimaginally new. Along with the other artists, poets followed suit and shattered meaning, then reflected it in a mirror put it back anew. Inspired both by wars and by technological advances, they forced their readers to find the meaningful bits amidst the chaos.

PERMISSION TO LEAVE

I put my cap in the cage
And went out with the bird on my head
So
One no longer salutes
The officer said
No
One no longer salutes
Replied the bird
Oh good
Pardon me I thought that one saluted
The officer said
You are fully excused we all make mistakes
Said the bird

Jacques Prévert

"Things fall apart," said Yeats, revealling the mind-set ofthe pre-post-war generations; "The ceremony of innocence is drowned." Music fractured into jazz. Costume fractured into patched work and spiralled. Componant parts redefined the whole.

THE SECOND COMING

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.

The darkness drops again but now I know
That twenty centuries
of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

William Butler Yeats

Do I, as a number of us have discussed recently, embrace the paintings of this era as I do those of just earlier times? Nope. But fashion, rugs, and other material forms of creativity, recalling Kabuki geometrics, I must admit that I'm crazy for.

The simplicity and the lines learned from the Japanese are still here, only syncopated, a little be-bop in the mix. I can do nothing but shake my head and tap my toes.

translations from here

a gift for issa

POEM
After the Gentle Poet Kobayashi Issa

New Year’s morning—
everything is in blossom!
I feel about average.

A huge frog and I
staring at each other,
neither of us moves.

This moth saw brightness
in a woman’s chamber—
burned to a crisp.

Asked how old he was
the boy in the new kimono
stretched out all five fingers.

Blossoms at night,
like people
moved by music

Napped half the day;
no one
punished me!



Fiftieth birthday:

From now on,
It’s all clear profit,
every sky.

Don’t worry, spiders,
I keep house
casually.

These sea slugs,
they just don’t seem
Japanese.

Hell:

Bright autumn moon;
pond snails crying
in the saucepan.

Robert Hass

“After the Gentle Poet Kobayashi Issa” from Field Guide.
Copyright © 1973 by Robert Hass.
costume museum @ the met
happy anniversary, issa and haiku guy

When the West Reflects the East

PARIS: The dress is spring green, its flat surface ruffled like wind on water. A pebble path and a few drifting leaves add to the zen-like tranquility of the Japanese garden.

This is not cherry blossom time in Kyoto, but a French couture outfit in a Paris museum. The pallid background, the pebbles and the spare setting, are meant to enhance an original take on East meets West, as rising sun embroideries or bare-nape evening coats are displayed beside the traditional kimonos and geisha prints that inspired them.

The result is an exceptional and thought-provoking exhibition called "Japonisme et Mode 1870-1996" (Fashion and Japanese Style) at the Palais Galliéra costume museum until Aug. 4 [1996]. Although the show originated in Kyoto in 1994, the Paris version has a subtly different slant. It needs to explain the essence of the kimono to Europeans and also to show how high fashion from the mid-19th century on has absorbed the pure spirit of the East, just as Claude Monet was drawn to an aesthetic that "evoked a presence by its shadow, the whole by a fragment."

Themes from Japanese culture are isolated and given their fashion reflections: lacquer work as the shimmering geometrically constructed 1920s dress by Madeleine Vionnet, shown beside a Jean Dunand copper vase; symbolic chrysanthemum patterns as spidery gold embroidery on an emerald green silk 1927 coat by Coco Chanel, or as rich panels of Lyonnais silk. Or there are the Japanese designers' own interpretions in Hanae Mori's calligraphy patterns, Issey Miyake's origami of pleats and the paper-cutout dresses from Comme des Garçons.

The exhibition is in itself a marriage of two cultures, represented by Akiko Fukai, curator of the Kyoto Costume Institute and Fabienne Falluel, curator at the Paris museum. Falluel admits that she has altered the Kyoto focus to include playful pieces that show Japanese influence at its most popular, not to say vulgar. That means including a 19th century poster for an exotic Eastern perfume (complete with parasol and lilies) and cartoon printed kimonos from Jean-Charles de Castelbajac's current collection.

The clothing is reinforced with accessories and objects — René Lalique's Art Nouveau decorative hair combs, as well as vases, boxes and screens. One exquisite Edo screen shows folded kimonos; another kitsch 1919 version has a French society beauty against blossom branches.

"My dream was to show fashion along with other objects so that people would realize that we should not think about major and minor works of art," says Falluel. She had a frisson of excitement when she put together a dress by Charles Frederick Worth decorated with the same vivid fish pattern that appeared on a Dunand screen, and when she found a sample of the original butterfly print fabric used for a 1910 Mario Fortuny kimono. Other matches were serendipitous: a chariot-wheel pattern on a Japanese handkerchief and as Comme des Garçon's cutouts, or a Worth cape decorated with samurai helmets as seen in a warrior uniform on display.

The exhibition first informs the visitor about the kimono, its symbolism, its structure, its sleeves. Then the opening display shows Western variations on the theme from a crimson velvet Worth coat scooped away at the nape à la geisha, to John Galliano's 1994 mini kimonos — a sexy slither of skirt below the obi-sash.

Western designers are divided into those seduced by Japanese decoration — all the crysanthemum prints or the exotic fabrics used by Paul Poiret, and those who were fascinated by the kimono's geometry, like Vionnet's green dress cut in flat panels and decorated only with wave-seaming.

"Paul Poiret did wonderful things because he was so influenced by motifs, but Vionnet really understood the kimono and took the geometric idea to construct her clothes — and that brought such freedom into European clothes in the 1920s," said Issey Miyake, who was at the opening party.

"Kimono-mania" swept through fashion in the 19th century, when Japan was opened to the West. Kimonos were cut up and used as decorative fabric for Western dresses, or the corseted body was given a new freedom in kimono house robes made for Liberty of London or copied in India.

"When a new culture comes, people first copy surface decoration, then they study the technique and cut," says Jun Kanai, a curator at Kyoto. "Eventually they assimilate and use it for their own creativity, just as Van Gogh did."

Suzy Menkes
TUESDAY, APRIL 23, 1996
(read the rest)

artificial flowers

gotta be one of the strangest pop songs ever. but memorable. couldn't get it out of my head.

THE FLOWER MARKET

In the Royal City spring
is almost over;

Tinkle, tinkle—
the coaches and horsemen pass.
We tell each other
“This is the peony season”;

To follow with the crowd that goes to the Flower Market.
Cheap and dear—
no uniform price;

The cost of the plant depends on the number of blossoms.
To flaming reds,
a hundred on one stalk;

The humble white with
only five flowers
Silk is spread as an awning to protect them;

Around is woven a wattle-fence to screen them
If you sprinkle water and cover the roots with mud,

When they are transplanted, they will not lose their beauty.”
Each household thoughtlessly follows the custom,

Man by man, no one realizing
There happened to be an old farm labourer

Who came by chance that way
He bowed his head and sighed a deep sigh;
But this sigh nobody understood




He was thinking, “A cluster of deep-red flowers
Would pay the taxes of ten poor houses.”

Po Chü-i (772–846) Translated by Arthur Waley (1889–1966)
via The Columbia Granger's World of Poetry

so much of art is like that

in nature, color has no name

where does one color stop and another begin?

The Crazy Years (two reasons i wish i was in paris today)

LEXPRESS.fr du 24/10/2007
Au rythme des Années folles

Héloïse Gray

Le musée Galliera célèbre cette formidable époque de créativité, qui marque l'avènement de la garçonne et d'une mode libérée des corsets.

Le jour, elle roule vers l'hippodrome de Longchamp dans son manteau «100 à l'heure» de chez Dornac; le soir, elle fait danser les franges de perles de sa robe Poiret au Bœuf sur le toit, rue Boissy-d'Anglas... Le musée Galliera nous fait revivre la vie effrénée de la femme des Années folles, à travers l'exposition du même nom. «Nous voulions montrer la richesse des pièces du musée, dont certaines ont été restaurées pour l'occasion. Par ailleurs, les années 1920 sont à la mode: un livre sur Jeanne Lanvin [éd. Rizzoli] et un autre sur Lucien Lelong [éd. Le Promeneur] vont être publiés, et les collections actuelles font écho à cette période aux influences multiples», explique Sophie Grossiord, commissaire de l'exposition.

Mais, au-delà du cliché de la garçonne en robe tubulaire à taille basse et chapeau cloche, Les Années folles veulent montrer en quelque 170 modèles et 200 accessoires la naissance d'une mode libérée de ses corsets. «C'est une époque qui marque l'émancipation de la femme et l'avènement de valeurs comme la jeunesse, la minceur et le sport», poursuit Sophie Grossiord. Les couturiers travaillent donc sur le mouvement en jouant sur les coupes et aussi les matières, à l'instar de Coco Chanel et de Jean Patou, qui ennoblissent la maille.

Un volet est consacré à la garçonne, qui, cheveux courts et clope au bec, emprunte au vestiaire masculin ses sweaters et ses pyjamas... mais revêt le soir une robe à danser. Cette invention résume à elle seule l'esprit de l'époque: mouvement et confort, simplification des lignes et richesse des motifs décoratifs (broderies métalliques, perles, franges, plumes...).

A découvrir également dans ce parcours exhaustif: la richesse des influences artistiques (une veste «simultanée» de Sonia Delaunay), un Orient mythique qui fait rêver les couturiers (la Russie de Paul Poiret, la Grèce de Madeleine Vionnet...). Mais aussi des pièces exceptionnelles de Jeanne Lanvin présentées au Pavillon de l'Elégance de l'Exposition universelle de 1925. Un voyage magique aux origines de la modernité.

Les Années folles. 1919-1929. Musée Galliera, 10, avenue Pierre- Ier- de- Serbie, Paris (XVIe), 01- 56- 52- 86- 00 et [doesn't seem to be working] www.galliera.paris.fr. Jusqu'au 29 février 2008. 1

(and that last photo? well i just found out that mucha designed the entire shop for the jeweler fouquet -- with whom he also made jewelry for sarah bernhardt -- and that the entire thing has been recreated -- long ago but i'm not sure when -- at the musee carnavalet in paris....) 2