Kaisik Wong

Betty Davis wearing a Kaisik Wong design for her 1974 album They Say I'm Different

Betty Davis wearing a Kaisik Wong design for her 1974 album They Say I'm Different

Jae Jarrell’s radical fashions

ca 1968

Jae Jarrell’s radical fashions use the body as a vessel for protest, resistance, and identity. Her love of fashion was influenced by the legacy of her grandfather, who was a tailor, and her uncle, who ran a haberdashery shop, selling fabric and sewing supplies. She went on to study art and clothing design at Bowling Green State University in Ohio, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and Howard University in Washington, D.C. In 1968, Jae, her husband Wadsworth Jarrell, and fellow artists Jeff Donaldson, Barbara Jones-Hogu, and Gerald Williams founded the collective AFRICOBRA (which stands for African Commune of Bad Relevant Artists). The group formed in response to a lack of positive representation of African and African American people in media and the arts. Their goal was to produce works that conveyed the pride, power, history, and energy of their communities. They worked to develop a uniquely Black aesthetic, with bright “Cool-ade” colors and a lively sense of rhythm. As a fashion designer, Jae embodied those ideals through clothing. Incorporating diverse elements such as brick walls, graffiti, colorful bandoliers, jazz, Scrabble, and African shields, Jae’s work is a celebration of life and individuality, with a strident “Look good, feel powerful” message.
Jae Jarrell (1935, Cleveland, OH) lives and works in Cleveland Ohio. Her work is held in numerous private collections, and in the permanent collection of the Brooklyn Museum of Art, where her garments were included in the exhibition Witness: Art and Civil Rights in the Sixties (2014). In 2015, Jarrell’s work will be featured in the exhibition The Freedom Principle: Experiments in Art and Music, 1965 to Now at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago.

Sonia Delaunay's Fabric and Feminism

— April 14, 2015 —
As Tate Modern open their show celebrating Sonia Delaunay, we look at her often-forgotten work within fashion

Wearing the Pierrot-Éclair costume designed by Sonia Delaunay, on the set of René Le Somptier’s film Le P’tit Parigot, 1926 Courtesy of Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris
Text Olivia Singer

Sonia Delaunay’s creativity profoundly affected 20th century art, however her work in fashion is often forgotten. In fact, her work with fabrics and clothing design has left a legacy as indelible as that of her Orphist paintings; her lectures on women and fashion were progressive for their time and still resonate today. But, as Tate Modern's Director Chris Dercon recently asserted, "Sonia Delaunay has been less recognised for her contribution to the history of modern art and abstraction than she deserves, marginalised by an account of the history of art that has prioritised male artists and, at times, positioned her work as decorative." As an exhibition celebrating her work opens at Tate Modern, we look at the elements that made her fashion and fabric design so brilliant.

Simultaneous Dresses (Three women, Forms, Colours) 1925 Courtesy of Bibliothèque Kandinsky, Centre de Documentation et de Recherche du Mnam-Cci, Paris

Simultaneous design
The aspect of design for which both Sonia and her artist husband Robert Delaunay are best known is their use of colour, which Sonia described as "the skin of the world." Influenced by the brilliant palettes of the Fauves, but with a complete disinterest in decoration, both she and Robert pioneered the abstraction of Orphism. This was an approach which focused on form, colour and rhythm to communicate, and employed the notion of "simultaneity" – seeing colours as having independent lives aquired when liberated from subject matter or combined with other colours. This attitude was seamlessly incorporated into Sonia Delaunay's work with textiles, where she used exactly the same principles and philosophies of colour study as she did in painting, resulting in work that was simultaneously aesthetically engaging and philosophically utopian.

Two fashion models in bathing suits, c.1929 Courtesy of Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris


A feminist freedom
The technical construction of her clothing was designed to suit what Delaunay termed the real-life requirements of women; it allowed one to work, to dance, to play sport. In 1927, during a lecture at the Sorbonne titled The Influence of Painting on the Art of Clothes, she not only explored the rhythmic relationship between colours in her fabrications but also the reasons behind the move towards ready-to-wear during a time where couture was the norm. She explained, “at the present time, fashion is passing through a critical stage which corresponds to a period of revolution. Some time before the first world war it began to free itself from academic couture: it got rid of the corset, the high collar, all those elements of women’s dress demanded by the aesthetic of fashion but which were contrary to hygiene and the freedom of movement.” And, during a time where women were seeing a shift in their roles in the world (it was the year following this lecture that suffrage was extended to all women in Britain), Delaunay’s work in all of its permutations – from painting to fabric design – was an exuberant celebration of liberation.

Two models wearing fur coats designed by Sonia Delaunay, with the car belonging to the journalist Kaplan and painted after one of Sonia Delaunay’s fabrics, International Exposition of Modern Industrial and Decorative Arts, Paris 1925 Courtesy of Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris

Anarchic Aesthet - William Morris

http://stylebubble.co.uk/style_bubble/2015/04/anarchic-aesthete.html

mcqueen, la renta