Holon is about to get a little more stylish. The city’s annual fashion week is
back for its third year, this time with an international twist. Designers,
models, writers and other fashion aficionados will come together in the city
next week, from October 25-28. The event, hosted by The City of Holon and the
Holon Design Museum, hopes to solidify the connection between Israeli and
international fashion and design industries. Leading names in the world fashion
industry will be at the museum, showing their works and hosting classes and
seminars, as well as taking part in panel discussions with their Israeli
counterparts.
The festival with be examining the influence of the digital
age on fashion, design, marketing, production and sales, as well as taking a
look at the tension that is created between a return to tradition and hand-work
and the digital world. It will also take a look at the meeting point of the
world of fashion with different cultures and disciplines in the world of
design.
Events include a conference about the fashion and textile
industry, an “inspiration room” – a recreation of Israeli designer Liora
Targan’s studio – and a “live studio” – two fashion productions by leading
stylists which will take place in the museum and be broadcast simultaneously on
the conference’s website. As well, the Holon Cinematheque will be screening
fashion movies during the festival, several of them award-winning and all of
them being shown for the first time in Israel.
Inga Fraser is among the
festival’s international guests. She is the associate curator of Fashion in Film
at Central Saint Martin’s College of Art and Design, University of the Arts
London. She has co-curated and coordinated major projects including Kinoscope
Parlour (London, 2010) and a “color inventory” installation for Arnhem Mode
Biennale. At the festival, she will be hosting a seminar on fashion in
film.
“I actually trained as an art historian,” Fraser told The Jerusalem
Post. “Fashion in Film was set up as a research project in 2005, looking at the
role of clothing, fashion and styling in the moving image. I suppose it was felt
that the role of fashion in film fell between two camps [of art history and
cinema history]... so nobody took a real look until then.”
Fraser said
the project began with a year of research, and held its first festival in
2006.
“In that festival, we were addressing how fashion was treated in
the moving image – something of an enigma, a contradiction,” she explained.
“Celebrated, but dismissed and something quite frivolous.”
The 2010
Kinoscope Parlour exhibit in London explored what Fraser described as the “most
spectacular [fashion] moments in cinema history, where costume was really put
forward above all other concerns.”
For the seminar she will be hosting in
Israel, Fraser says that she will be drawing on all aspects of her and the
project’s research.
“There will be a couple of films we had looked at
originally in 2006, examining the fashion object, how it was abstracted or
treated differently in film. We’ll be looking at films that use items of
clothing in film as a way to produce sort of uncanny effects – like [Hans
Richter’s 1928 film] Ghosts before Breakfast, which uses bowler hats as a symbol
of bourgeois identity.”
“We’re also looking at costume as a special
effect in cinema. [We are looking at filmmakers] who are very much working in
this kind of early cinema mode but using the most up-to-date technology,” she
said.
“The camera is able to isolate the materiality of clothing and make
it go beyond itself to give us an experience of dress or fashion that is
impossible in our vernacular experience. We see costume and fashion used as
something more than they are.”
She says that the genre will hold appeal
even for those with little prior knowledge of fashion or film.
“The
material really speaks for itself,” she said. “You don’t really need to have
knowledge of cinema history.
These films have a kind of emotional impact
– they’re all about the change of colors on screen. They have universal appeal –
they use texture and touch instead of relying on narrative.”
Fashion in
Film has, until now, been based on western European film, but Fraser says that
she hopes this will change.
“We’re beginning to open up – desperate to
open up,” she said. “We want to come back to Tel Aviv and look at Israeli
archives.”
Other international personalities that will be at the festival
include noted designer Zac Posen, fashion writer and editor Stephanie LaCava and
Mark Worth, who is one of the world’s experts on the connection between fashion
and digital media, and the creator of the leading design website
Stylus.
For more info on the festival visit www.dmh.org.il
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