On Tuesday morning on route to LFW we visited the SHOWstudio exhibition at Somerset House, it had opened the night before and we were itching to get in and see how the exhibition reflected the website we love so much. We were not disappointed!
The first room you have to walk through to get to the exhibition is a mirror room, (not for the self conscious) it has a mirror covered floor, ceiling and walls so that you can see yourself from every angle. We loved this, and thought it was a fitting introduction to the exhibition, as SHOWstudio reflects a very honest image of fashion. It looks at fashion as art and looks at the idea behind fashion; it interviews artists, models and designers and creates videos with them to portray their inspiration and ideals behind their collections. It strips bare the processes and creation of fashion and encourages you to interact and be part of art.
The exhibition was broken into four areas, PROCESS, PERFORMANCE AND PARTICIPATION and then FASHION FILM.
PROCESS, NAOMI by Daniel Brown, Naomi Campbell & Nick Knight, 2009 was the first exhibition you see after the mirror room, a massive three way pose of Naomi Campbell dominating the room. There are 2 flat screen monitors at each end of the room and you have to draw on the screens which are then projected on to the sculpture, a very interactive way of designing, (although quite difficult to do precisely) but a lot of fun and especially as you can draw Naomi wearing the same clothes as you. By the end we gave up and decided just to scribble various colours on to her instead.
PROCESS, TRANSFORMER: THE BRIDGEGROOM STRIPPED BARE Alexander McQueen, 2002 was a video of the transformation of a model by Alexander McQueen from a groom to a bride by cutting, ripping, taping and painting directly on to the model. It was filmed then fast forwarded and makes a beautiful living piece of art, it was also the first fashion shoot to be broadcast live via web cam and viewers were invited to email questions directly to the people involved in making it. I thought it was incredibly personal and it was great to see a frantic Alexander McQueen as his best, creating, rather than just the end product.
We loved the PERFORMANCE, SLEEP Nick Knight 2001 video where he had set up a hotel room with cameras to film models whilst they slept. He requested models to be made up and styled for a shoot first, so whilst they slept tossing and turning in beds they were fully made up and dressed, we really felt this was a reflection on the models lifestyle, always being in the camera but watching their natural unconscious movements we couldn’t believe how well it showed the movement of the garments and how honest and beautiful they looked.
PERFORMANCE, MORE BEAUTIFUL WOMEN, Nick Knight 2000. A great film that I literally couldn’t stop watching, I couldn’t believe how easy or in some cases how hard the models found it to stare at the camera for 2 minutes each without saying anything. A really moving piece and it allows you see the models alone with no direction and makes you really question the importance of control in a fashion shoot or film.
PARTICIPATION, IN CAMERA David Bailey 2003, Bjork 2003, Tracey Emin 2003, Alexander McQueen 2003, Kate Moss 2003, Peter Saville 2003, Juergen Teller 2004, Vivienne Westwood 2004, Nick Knight 2006. It was great to see these people’s honest, unprepared responses to questions they had no control about in a simple yet effective circumstance. As the forum was live it was personal and there wasn’t an option for editing, which I think adds to the unpredictability and spontaneity of it.
Finally there were loads of different fashion films which are all on the website to see and if you do visit the website you had probably seen before, none the less, if we had more time to spare and some comfy seats, I think we could have quite happily sat there all morning.
If you don’t currently visit www.showstudio.com, make it your new favourite! and if you can get to the exhibition (its on until 20thDecember) make sure you go, we really enjoyed it and left feeling a new enthusiasm for the creation process of fashion, and with wonderful (yet no doubt amateur) ideas of creating fantastic fashion films.
Loz xx
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