presided over by international creative fashion … · manish arora will direct this unique arts of...

| PERSPECTIVES THEME 2014

SAN FRANCISCO

www.arts-of-fashion.org

THE ARTS OF FASHION

PHOTO LUCIANA VAL & FRANCO MUSSO

| OCT 27-28

| SYMPOSIUMPRESIDED OVER BY INTERNATIONALCREATIVE FASHION DESIGNER MANISH ARORA

FOUNDATION

ARTSOFFASHIONFOUNDATIONTHE ARTS OF FASHION INTERNATIONAL FASHION STUDENT COMPETITION



MANISH ARORA

MASTERCLASS-SERIES | OCT 22-26THE ARTS OF FASHION FOUNDATION 9AM-6PM | STUDIO

FRENCH AMERICANINTERNATIONAL SCHOOLSAN FRANCISCO - CA

MANISH ARORA IS ONE OF TODAY’S MOST INTERNATIONAL AND INFLUENTIAL CREATIVE FASHION DESIGNERS, AND THE FIRST INDIAN MEMBER OF THE FRENCH FEDERATION OF COUTURE, FORMER ARTISTIC DIRECTOR AT PACO RABANNE, AND DEVELOPING HIS EPONYMOUS BRAND IN NEW DELHI.

MANISH ARORA WILL DIRECT THIS UNIQUE ARTS OF FASHION FOUNDATION MASTERCLASS PROGRAM IN SAN FRANCISCO,FROM WED. OCT. 22 THROUGH SUN. OCT. 26, 2014.

THIS PROGRAM IS OPEN TO SELECTED FASHION DESIGN STUDENTS AS WELL AS RECENT GRADUATES, ON REVIEW OF THEIR APPLICATION, MOTIVATION AND RESUME/CV. THIS MASTERCLASS IS TAUGHT IN ENGLISH AND LIMITED TO 15 STUDENTS.

CULTURE RESURRECTION: INFUSING TRADITION IN FASHION

PHOTO YANNI VLAMOS - MANISH ARORA COLLECTION SPRING 2015 - PARIS



EDUCATION& FASHION CAPITAL

IN WHICH FASHION CULTURE & HISTORY OF A CITY INFLUENCE AND INTERACT IN TERMS OF SPECIFICITIES & IDENTITY THE CURRICULUM & UNIQUENESS OF ITS FASHION SCHOOLS

JOANNE ARBUCKLE | USA NEW YORK+ RE-PRODUCTION

LINDA LOPPA | ITALY FLORENCE+ RE-BIRTH

STEPHANE WARGNIER | FRANCEPARIS+ RE-CAPITALISATION

FASHION.EDU-SERIES | OCT 27THE ARTS OF FASHION SPEAKERS 20149AM-11:30AM | AUDITORIUM | VIDEO CONFERENCE

PHOTO COURTESY OF THE ARTS OF FASHION FOUNDATION

THE BENTLY RESERVESAN FRANCISCO - CA

GUEST SPEAKERS FASHION.EDU

ARTSOFFASHIONFOUNDATIONF A S H I O N . E D U - S E R I E S


FASHION CAPITAL VS EDUCATION

NEW YORK + RE-PRODUCTIONJOANNE ARBUCKLE - USA | Dean,School of Art and Design | Fashion Institute of Technology | New York | via Video Conference

Holds a M.A. in Educational Administration in higher education (New York University), and a B.S. in Fashion Design (SUNY, Empire State College). Joanne Arbuckle started at FIT in 1986 and has been the Dean since 2007.

Joanne Arbuckle is an industry professional with more than 30 years of experience. She worked for several companies as a designer and merchandiser before becoming president of the fashion-industry consulting firm Design Integrity from 1994 to 2003. She has served as a consultant and industry expert witness for law firms on matters concerning the industry, and has participated in interviews for numerous media reports on subjects such as swimwear, children’s wear, school uniforms, and the New York City fashion industry.Joanne Arbuckle co-authored the book, Historical Dictionary of Fashion, and also contributed to the book, Encyclopedia of Clothing Fashion.

FLORENCE + RE-BIRTHLINDA LOPPA - ITALY | Director, International Institute of Fashion, Design and Marketing | Polimoda | Florence | via Video Conference Holds a B.F.A. in Fashion Design (Royal Academy of Fine Arts of Antwerp, 1971) Born in Antwerp - Belgium, daughter a an Italian tailor, Linda Loppa is today one of the most influencial faces of international fashion education. A pioneer in Belgium fashion, Linda Loppa took by storm the direction of the Fashion Department of her mater school in Antwerp (1981). Mentoring the different waves of emerging illustrious Belgium designers of today - that will definitively re-vision fashion - she also branded the city of Antwerp as an international fashion capital, contributing to the founding of the Flanders Fashion Institute and ModeNatie (1996). The consecration happened in 2002 when she became the director of the new MoMu - Museum of Fashion in Antwerp. Her spectacular accomplishment to the advancement of the fields of Fashion and Education did not get unnoticed by the Italian Industry. Ready for new challenges, she accepted the invitation of the President Ferruccio Ferragamo to rebrush Polimoda in Florence (2007).

PARIS + RE-CAPITALISATIONSTEPHANE WARGNIER - FRANCE | Course Director,Ecole de la Chambre Syndicale de la Couture Parisienne | Paris | via Video Conference Holds a M.Sc (Ecole Superieure de Commerce of Lyon - EM Lyon, 1984)On July 1, 2014, Stéphane Wargnier was appointed as the new Executive President of the French Fashion Federation, Haute Couture, Ready-To-Wear and Designers.Stephane Wargnier started teaching at the Institut Français de la Mode (1987) and was the Head of the Marketing/Management department. A decade later (1997) Jean-Louis Dumas hired him as Head of Communication Strategy at Hermes where he soon became Communication Director of the Group from 2000 to 2008. Since then, he has developed a successful communication consultancy activity (SW+) for the luxury and fashion industry including a large client range from Chanel, Comme des Garcons, to Petit Bateau. He is also the 4th-year Course Director at the School of the Chambre Syndicale (2011) and continues to be the editor-in-chief of the prestigious bi-annual magazine the Monde d’ Hermes.

Joanne Arbuckle will discuss the impact of the fashion business on the city of New York - not only historically from the tension between originality and reproduction but also regarding a culture of consumption encouraged by the 7th Avenue, department stores and press - on the development of New York’s fashion education institutions.

Linda Loppa will discuss the influence of the cultural mood surrounding fashion in the city of Florence - from the Renaissance up to today’s still vivid commerce and trade activities - and how this affects the direction and perspectives she is instilling at Polimoda.

Stephane Wargnier will discuss the weight that fashion history has in the city of Paris - not only in terms of know-how, technique and craft but also as an international hub for any artist and creative mind - and its affect on the fashion school’s diversity.



THE ARTS OF FASHION FOUNDATION, A 501(C) (3), PUBLIC, SAN FRANCISCO BASED,

NONPROFIT ORGANIZATION, LINKING BOTH ACADEMICS & PROFESSIONALS ALIKE & IS DEDICATED IN FOSTERING INTERNATIONAL CULTURAL EXCHANGE THROUGH THE CREATION OF A VARIETY OF EDUCATIONAL PROGRAMS

& EVENTS MEANT TO FACILITATE CRITICAL THINKING AMONG ARTISTS, DESIGNERS, SCHOLARS & STUDENTS.

MONDAY OCT 27, 2014 FASHION SEMINAR

@ The Bently Reserve | San Francisco, CA

9AM-12PM : FASHION.EDU–SERIES FASHION CAPITAL & EDUCATION

NEW YORK FLORENCE

PARIS

@ Stanford Bishop Auditorium| Palo Alto, CA

5-8PM : TANDEM–SERIES THE KNOW-HOW OF THE

LUXURY FASHION BUSINESSDESIGNER CALLING HAUTE COUTURE

LUXURY CALLING KNOW-HOWSILICON VALLEY CALLING DESIGN

8-10PM : CINETOILE-SERIESDIOR AND I

TUESDAY OCT 28, 2014AOF COMPETITION

@ The Bently Reserve

| San Francisco, CA9AM-12PM : PORTFOLIO

STUDENT & SCHOOL 2-4PM : JURY SESSION

AOF COMPETITON4-5PM : JURY SHOW

CANDIDATES RUNWAY5-6PM : JURY SESSION

DELIBERATION & RESULTS6-7PM : VIP RECEPTION

EXHIBITION7-10PM : FASHION SHOW

AWARD CEREMONY

FASHION SEMINAR

INTERNATIONAL

| OCT 28

PHOTO LUCIANA VAL & FRANCO MUSSO

| OCT 27

WED OCT 22 - SUN OCT 26, 2014 FASHION MASTERCLASS

@ The French American International School | San Francisco, CA

9AM-6PM : MASTERCLASS DIRECTED BY

MANISH ARORA

MASTERCLASS | OCT 22-26

COMPETITIONFASHION STUDENT



FASHION BUSINESSOF THE LUXURYTHE KNOW-HOW

FASHION, FINALLY RECOGNIZED AS A TRUE MEANS OF EXPRESSION, IS LEADING THE PATH NOT ONLY IN CREATIVE INDUSTRY BUT ALSO INNOVATIVE INDUSTRIES

MANISH ARORA | FASHION CREATIVE DESIGNER NEW DELHI + DESIGNER CALLING HAUTE COUTURE

NADINE DUFAT | CEO LEMARIE - LOGNON - GUILLET AT CHANELPARIS + LUXURY CALLING THE KNOW-HOW

JOHN MAEDA | DESIGN PARTNER AT KLEINER PERKINS CAUFIELD & BYERS MENLO PARK+SILICON VALLEY CALLING DESIGN

JONATHAN CHEUNG | SVP OF DESIGN AT LEVI STRAUSS & CO TO MODERATE THE DISCUSSIONS

TANDEM-SERIES| OCT 27THE ARTS OF FASHION SPEAKERS 20145PM-8PM | BISHOP AUDITORIUM

PHOTO - DEFILE CHANEL SPRING - SUMMER 2013 - GRAND PALAIS - PARIS

STANFORD BISHOP AUDITORIUM PALO ALTO - CA

GUEST SPEAKERS TANDEM

ARTSOFFASHIONFOUNDATIONT A N D E M - S E R I E S


KNOW-HOW OF THE LUXURY FASHION BUSINESS

+ DESIGNER CALLING HAUTE COUTUREMANIH ARORA - INDIA | Fashion Creative Designer Manish ARORA | New Delhi

Holds a BFA in Fashion Design (National Institute of Fashion Technology , 1994)

Manish Arora showed his first collection in New Delhi in 1997. Three years later he represented India at the Hong Kong Fashion Week and participated in the first ever India Fashion Week held in New Delhi (2004). His successful debut at the London Fashion Week (2005), lead him to receive an overwhelming response from buyers as well as from the press. Mixing his cultural heritage with craftsmanship in an innovative way, he was invited by the French Federation of Couture to shown his Spring-Summer 2008 collection for the first time at Paris and continues to show each season. Appointed the creative Art Director at the iconic brand Paco Rabanne for Puig (2011), he has since then returned to India to grow his successful fashion business adding another fruitful joint venture label: Indian by Manish Arora.

+ LUXURY CALLING THE KNOW-HOWNADINE DUFAT - FR | CEOLemarie - Guillet - Lognon at CHANEL | Paris Holds a M.Sc in Business (Ecole Superieure de Commerce of Paris - ESCP, 1976)

Nadine Dufat has always been involved in the management of business in luxury goods. Her core competencies are developing lines of luxury items and detecting opportunities involving international business. Starting her career in management as a jewelry developer at Arthus-Bertrand - a maker of medals and decorations, founded in 1803 - she joined as CEO, at Poiray - one of a kind Place Vendôme jeweller. In 2008, she has been hired to manage and develop the business at Maison Lemarie - a highly specialised atelier of feathers founded in 1880 - which was bought by Chanel in 2002. Soon after, Guillet (flower maker of the Chanel camelia) and more recently Lognon (couture pleating) were added to her role and responsibilities. As such, she works on safeguarding and promoting the very specific know-how on an international scale. Renowned for their exceptional craftsmanship, Lemarie, Guillet and Lognon enjoy the confidence of and collaboration with some of the greatest names in the fashion and luxury businesses of today.

+ SILICON VALLEY CALLING DESIGNJOHN MAEDA - USA | Design PartnerKLEINER PERKINS CAUFIELD & BYERS | Menlo Park Holds a M.Sc in Computer Sciences (Massachusetts Institute of Technology - MIT, 1988) and a PhD in Design (Tsukuba University, 1992)

John Maeda is a renowned leading designer, academic and author of the acclaimed Laws of Simplicity (2006) based on a research project to find ways for people to simplify their life in the face of growing complexity. He is a passionate advocate for the role of design in technology - believing that art and design are poised to transform world economies in the 21st century, just as science and technology did in the 20th century. President of the prestigious Rhode Island School of Design (2008), he recently left his position to join one of the most symbolic investment firm of the Silicon Valley: KPCB (1972), whose focus is on digital, green tech and life sciences, as a design partner.



THE ARTS OF FASHION SCREENING 20148PM-10PM | BISHOP AUDITORIUM

CINETOILE-SERIES| OCT 27

DIOR AND IFREDERIC TCHENG DIRECTOR

‘WHAT ELSE ARE MOVIES, IF NOT APPARITIONS OF GHOSTS LONG PASSED AWAY? IN HAUTE COUTURE, THE FIRST MOCK-UPS OF DRESSES ARE CALLED TOILES—WHICH, IN FRENCH, IS ALSO THE COLLOQUIAL WORD FOR MOVIE SCREEN. IN ORDER TO CONJURE THE PERSISTENCE OF DIOR’S DESIGNS, I DECIDED TO LITERALLY MAKE THEM APPEAR ON THE TOILES. AT NIGHT, SHADOWS OF ITS HERITAGE COME TO HAUNT THE HOUSE.’

RAF SIMONSDIOR DESIGNER

RAF SIMONS LOOKS AT A VINTAGE DIOR DRESS FROM THE DOCUMENTARY DIOR AND I

PHOTO - COURTESY OF CIM PRODUCTIONS - RAF SIMONS

STANFORD BISHOP AUDITORIUM PALO ALTO - CA

CINETOILE

ARTSOFFASHIONFOUNDATIONC I N E T O I L E - S E R I E S


STATEMENT + FILM DIRECTORFREDERIC TCHENG - FR | Paris, Brooklyn - March 1, 2014

When I sat down with Raf Simons to discuss the project for the first time, I was struck by his palpable reticence. It’s understandable that anyone might be reluctant to let a camera crew shadow them relentlessly for three months, but Raf ’s concern seemed to run deeper. I sensed that the vulnerability he was showing would become central to the film. As Raf got to know me better, he became less intimidated by the presence of the camera, but I knew that he remained quite apprehensive about the level of publicity that would come with his first Dior show.... ...What else are movies, if not apparitions of ghosts long passed away? In haute couture, the first mock-ups of dresses are called toiles—which, in French, is also the colloquial word for movie screen. In order to conjure the persistence of Dior’s designs, I decided to literally make them appear on the toiles. At night, shadows of its heritage come to haunt the house......The house of Dior is a storied world where managers, artists, and workers collaborate on a daily basis to create a vision and I consider the film to be an ensemble piece. Through immersing the viewer in the world of Dior and revealing the extraordinary effort required to produce a collection, I hoped the film would ultimately reveal a cross section of Parisian life, in the tradition of great French social realists like Renoir and Zola.

Who is the “I,” in the title Dior and I? I strived to keep the answer open to many possibilities.

DIOR AND I

SYNOPSIS + FEATURE LENGTH DOCUMENTARYDIOR AND I - FR | 2014 - 89 minutes, CIM Productions Dior and I brings the viewer inside the storied world of the Christian Dior fashion house with a privileged, behind-the-scenes look at the creation of Raf Simons’ first haute couture collection as its new artistic director—a true labor of love created by a dedicated group of collaborators. Melding the everyday, pressure-filled components of fashion with mysterious echoes from the iconic brand’s past, the film is also a colorful homage to the seamstresses who serve Simons’ vision.

ABOUT + FILMMAKER FREDERIC TCHENG - FR | Paris Director | Writer | Producer

Holds a M.F.A. . in Film (Colombia University, 2007) Born in France - Currently developing a fictional screenplay. Originally trained in civil engineering, Frederic Tcheng moved to New York City in 2002 to attend Columbia University’s film school. He co-produced, co-edited and shot Valentino: The Last Emperor (directed by Matt Tyrnauer), the 2009 hit documentary shortlisted for the Oscar for Best Documentary. He is the co-director (with Lisa Immordino Vreeland and Bent- Jorgen Perlmutt) of Diana Vreeland: The Eye Has To Travel, a Samuel Goldwyn release.

His collaborations include such varied personalities as the poet Sarah Riggs and the fashion photographer Mikael Jansson. He works as an editor on commercials for brands such as H&M, Jimmy Choo and Ferragamo.

AND ALSO TO READ BEFORE OCTOBER 27NEW YORK TIME - RAF BY CATHY HORYN September 18, 2005 The damp, persistent chill had ended, and by noon in Westende, a community of high-rise apartment buildings on the coast of Belgium, the temperature had risen to 65 degrees. At cafe tables along the boardwalk, middle-aged women opened the tops of their blouses, while down on the beach, pinkish bodies, plumped by their Lycra casings, lay between the canvas windbreaks.

Raf Simons leaned against the rail of his balcony. He had made the 90-minute drive from Antwerp, where he lives most of the year, in part to satisfy my curiosity to see his place at the beach. When I first spoke to him, by telephone, more than a year ago, he had described the place as ‘’crappy.’’ I don’t know why, but I liked him immediately. Westende was all he said it was. The Germans in World War II built bunkers there, and you can still see their ghastly windows in the dunes, but for the most part, the history of Westende is the history of the past 20 years: concrete pedestrian plazas with shops and restaurants where you can have a beer and eat shrimp croquettes while listening to Europop.

Simons’s apartment is on the top floor of a 1970’s building. It has a small living room and kitchenette, with two bedrooms and a bath on the second floor. There is a wood stove, a section of a black sectional sofa and one wall papered in a blue-cloud pattern, left over from the previous owner. Simons dragged the sectional piece out to the terrace and then opened a bag of Doritos and the liter of Diet Coke that he had brought with him in a plastic shopping sack. Later we went down to the boardwalk. It was crowded with young families and old people who, from the look of their clothes, were middle-class Belgians. At the end of the boardwalk we came to the dunes. ‘’Will you be all right in those shoes?’’ Simons asked. I took off my sandals, and we crossed the dunes until we were on the flat, hard beach. The shimmer on the North Sea had turned to a pale mauve, and the air was sweet and sticky with the approach of evening. I looked back at the boardwalk. It was physically ugly, but there was something moving in all that collective effort to reach the sea -- to be able to raise your glass of beer. We climbed the last of the breakers that jutted into the water and returned to the apartment, where Simons gathered up his plastic bag. Then we got into his Volvo wagon and headed toward Antwerp, past the German bunkers and the tram lines, until the brown coast turned into the familiar deep green of Belgium in the late spring.

Simons is probably the most influential men’s-wear designer of the last decade. ‘’He did everything before anyone else, and everybody has copied him,’’ Marie-Amelie Sauve, the stylist for Balenciaga, said. Although Simons is virtually unknown outside the small world of European men’s fashion (he shows in Paris), his effect on the way young men dress cannot be overstated. Only with training, genius, intoxicating amounts of culture and possibly a discreet drug habit have a handful of designers been able to change the shape of clothes. Simons, without any of these advantages, has done it three times. The first time was in the mid-1990’s, at the beginning of his career, when he came out with suits that were cut unusually small in the shoulders. The skinny black suit was not a new idea; it had been in existence since the late 50’s, pleasing playboys and punks until Helmut Lang picked it up. But by putting his suits on sapling-thin Belgian boys who were not agency models, Simons introduced the idea that a young man’s physical size was not at variance with his sense of isolation, a feeling that would have been ordinary to anyone who had grown up in Antwerp -- or Rotterdam or Manchester -- in isolated apartment towers built since the war, and who had spent a lot of time listening to bands like Joy Division and Kraftwerk, whose 22-minute song, ‘’Autobahn,’’ managed to convey the monotony of riding on the German superhighway. If Gucci’s caftans and Jean Paul Gaultier’s cowboy chaps didn’t represent the same emotional trip to this generation, Simons’s minimalist suits did. They became the dominant silhouette of the late 90’s. I once asked him what made him think of that shape. As usual, he had a straightforward explanation. ‘’It was just because we were so small,’’ he said.

DIOR AND I

AND ALSO TO READ BEFORE OCTOBER 27NEW YORK TIME - RAF BY CATHY HORYN September 18, 2005

The second time was in 2001, with two collections that played host to the layered, hooded, sinister image of the urban guerrilla. Although these shows were later seen as eerily anticipating the reality of 9/11, and were meant, according to Peter De Potter, a writer who collaborates with Simons, to express more mundane concerns like a fear of globalization, their chief effect was to start the trend for oversize layers. The third time was last January, when Simons brought out wide, high-waisted trousers with Eisenhower jackets. He felt that the basic element of men’s design, proportion, had become secondary to postmodern abstractions. ‘’I was so fed up with how all these people were tweaking the silhouette,’’ he said. ‘’Very few were working on shape. It was all about two pleats, then three, then six. And in the end you get 250,000 pleats. And embroidery. I thought, No, we have to strip it off.’’

Simons also looked at the influence of skateboarding as early as 1996 in a charming video presentation called ‘’16, 17, How to Talk to Your Teen,’’ and at more pessimistic currents, like Gabba, a working-class youth culture confined to the Netherlands that led him, in 2000, to produce ‘’Isolated Heroes,’’ a book of portraits with the photographer David Sims. Whereas most designers build their collections around a theme -- say, Capri in the 60’s -- Simons has built his entire career around the ideas and attitudes of a generation of men. His 22 shows and video presentations, and his photographic and curatorial projects, like ‘’The Fourth Sex,’’ a 2003 exhibition in Florence, are a catalog of youth’s extremes, seen through the single window of Antwerp and told in a quiet voice that lets us know, This is how it actually is.

Not everybody has been paying attention. In May, when Prada announced it had hired Simons to succeed Jil Sander at her label, many editors and retailers drew a blank. Jay Fielden, the editor of the new Men’s Vogue, told me that until he saw Simons in the front row at the Sander men’s show in June, he didn’t know what the 37-year-old designer looked like. Simons’s anonymity in a world he influences can be explained by the fact that the men’s business doesn’t produce stars the way the women’s side does. But even if this were not so, even if he did not live in Antwerp -- where, as the designer Walter Van Beirendonck said, ‘’you present yourself mainly through your work and a little bit outside the fashion world’’ -- even then, he would discourage interest. He possesses none of those small deceptive tricks of personality that the fashion world relies on and are commonly called guile. He is, almost ideally, a blank -- a person without surface in a superficial world. In 10 years, he has agreed only once to pose for a portrait (he thought portraits were just downright embarrassing). In a sense, the person who represents Raf Simons, and whose face appears on the cover of his recent retrospective catalog, is not Simons but a much-tattooed, 28-year-old model named Robbie Snelders, who functions as his alter ego and also runs his office.

Simons is a fashion mystery, and maybe the most mysterious thing about him is that he just shows up. A few years ago, hearing that he was to give a show at a club in Lower Manhattan, Julie Gilhart, the fashion director of Barneys New York, decided that she would go and introduce herself. But after searching the crowded club for an hour, she left. ‘’All I could see were men in hoods,’’ she said. Then last March, Gilhart was in Paris, waiting to take her seat at the Alexander McQueen show. ‘’Somebody was being interviewed by a TV crew, so I was just standing there, kind of lost in my thoughts,’’ she said. ‘’I felt this tap on my arm, and my first thought was, Oh, please don’t let it be a designer with a collection he wants to show me. It was really late. I turned around, and there was this good-looking guy in a trench coat. He said, ‘Are you Julie Gilhart?’ I said, ‘Yes.’ And he said, ‘I’m Raf.’’’

Although a Simons show can look intimidatingly cool, he himself is warm, gentle, forthright. With people he likes, he can quickly establish an intimacy that confuses both sexes.

An American writer I know in Paris, a married man, insisted that Simons was gay on the basis of a firm hug that Simons had once given him after a show, while a woman who has known him many years said with an assured smile, when I returned from Antwerp in May, ‘’He’s complicated, isn’t he?’’ I don’t know. A guy who will go to the beach with only a bag of Doritos and a bottle of Coke can’t be that complicated. While we were on the terrace,

Simons got a call from Marc Foxx, a Los Angeles gallery owner, informing him that he had lost out on a Brian Calvin painting that he wanted. Simons has been collecting contemporary art for years and has works by, among others, Katy Grannan and Evan Holloway. But I also recall that he had a half-dozen boxes of Marlboro Lights stuffed in the door pockets of his car, all of them empty.’

Simons is extremely sensitive -- you can make him cry -- and extremely masculine. When I saw him a month later, in Vienna, where he was finishing a five-year stint as visiting fashion professor at the University of Applied Arts, he said that, with people with whom he is close: ‘’I really like that it becomes very romantic. Not only in a relationship but also in the friendships.’’

He went on: ‘’People who don’t know me look at my world as something very hard-core, and I don’t feel it that way. It’s not what attracts me. We go to the sea, five or six of us, and we’re all in pajamas with candles around and watching movies. O.K., maybe we’re watching a good movie, but we also watch trash movies. We’ve never really been that kind of group that goes to the scenes where all the cool people hang out.’’

The Belgian designer Veronique Branquinho, who was Simons’s girlfriend between 1995 and 2000, agreed: ‘’In a way, he’s very much a family man. He likes to be at home. He’s very cozy about his family.’’

Branquinho first met Simons as she was riding her bike past a cafe in Antwerp where Simons was sitting with Olivier Rizzo, a stylist who, like De Potter, had gone to the Royal Academy of Fine Arts, which had produced the Antwerp Six, a seminal group of designers that includes Dries Van Noten. Simons, who comes from a rural town near the Dutch and German borders and is the only child of a career soldier and a housecleaner, had studied industrial design at a university in Genk. Like a lot of Belgian teenagers in the 80’s, he watched ‘’Top Pop,’’ a weekly Dutch television show that featured stars like David Bowie and Blondie, and he went through a goth phase, a problem at his Catholic school. ‘’It was very hard-core,’’ he said. ‘’Priests, priests, priests. If one or two of your friends dressed differently, which of course in the 80’s was black, you couldn’t stand together on the playing field.’’ (Significantly, a number of Simons’s collections have alluded to school uniforms and priests, and the casting of many of the same models reflects an early obsession with repetition.) But his childhood was unrebellious, even wholesome, and it wasn’t until the late 80’s -- when he started going more to Antwerp and did an internship with Van Beirendonck and met Rizzo -- that he thought about becoming a designer.

De Potter says that Simons was intimidated by the Antwerp academy crowd: ‘’He was scared to death of us.’’ Simons says he was especially unnerved by Branquinho, whom he used to see around Antwerp but never spoke to until that day she rode past the cafe. ‘’Veronique was one of those girls that I was just, you know, always attracted to but was very far away, and it was unreachable,’’ he told me. He asked Branquinho if she would be in an eight-millimeter movie he was making of his second collection, with just some friends hanging out in a house and Rizzo holding a cheap light; and it was on that night that Simons and Branquinho began their relationship, sharing a bed with Rizzo and another boy, because it was too late to drive back home.

‘’He was a very serious guy compared to me,’’ Branquinho said. ‘’I was a girl who was going off a lot -- rock ‘n’ roll, a wild life. This was not his world. He was very intrigued by it, so he surrounded himself always with people who were connected to it. But it was never his world.’’

CINETOILE


AOF JURY SESSION | 04-22 FASHION.EDU-SERIES | 04-23

DIOR AND I

AND ALSO TO READ BEFORE OCTOBER 27NEW YORK TIME - RAF BY CATHY HORYN September 18, 2005

Yet it’s remarkable, as she points out, that Simons not only was able to connect with someone like Robbie Snelders but also could see merits that maybe weren’t evident in 1997, when Snelders, then 20, a scruffy kid in ripped army pants, a follower of the Sisters of Mercy, was recruited one day to be in a show. Today, Simons says that Snelders is one of the most important people in his company. ‘’He knows how important it is to have a couple of people around me -- ‘family’ is not the right word -- who are very intimate,’’ Simons said. ‘’At a certain point he said to me, ‘I know you don’t ask me, but as long as you want to work with me, I will be with you.’’’

Simons can be very persistent, even ‘’possessive,’’ according to Linda Loppa, the head of the fashion department at the academy, who was a mentor to Simons. ‘’He wants to know everything from the people around him.’’ Branquinho said: ‘’He’s very demanding. It’s all about love as everything or nothing.’’ Yet the flip side to this devouring nature, Rizzo suggests, is a responsiveness to things that creates intense loyalties. Rizzo recalls the day he graduated, in 1993, from the academy: ‘’I had just done my final show, Gaultier was in the jury and afterward Raf came backstage. He was crying. I was kind of comforting him. Raf is a very emotional person.

He gets touched really deeply by things. He said to me: ‘What you did was really amazing. So fantastic, and I want to be part of this world.’ But, as Rizzo says, Simons’s hammering actually betrays a virtue: ‘’What you felt from Raf was that he was a very social guy but wasn’t someone who got very close to a lot of people, and when he really liked someone he wanted to go to the bottom of it. He has a general interest in people. In that sense he was very into knowing everything.’’

Simons doesn’t present his first collections for Jil Sander until early next year. But while the chance to do both men’s and women’s clothes is exciting and will bring him some long-overdue recognition as well as financial security after years of running his own company rather close to the bone (often with as few as three people), it will not change his basic values and ideas. I once asked him if it bothered him that he wasn’t better known. He answered: ‘’I have done what I believed in. So what is recognition? For me, recognition is about people you have a relation with. Somewhere, in some city in America, someone is wearing my clothes, and I’m happy with that.’’ Simons, who has a three-year contract with Sander, is also approaching the job -- and his relationship with Prada’s chief executive, Patrizio Bertelli -- with the attitude of someone who has nothing to lose; unlike Sander and Helmut Lang, he has not sold his name. ‘’People are not going to judge my work and my label and me as a person if it’s not going to work out,’’ he said. ‘’And that makes it more convincing for me to go for it.’’

But it’s pointless to speculate about whether he’ll get along with Bertelli, who manages, it seems, to tick off everybody, including his wife, the designer Miuccia Prada; once, in a product meeting with her, he reportedly said that he would urinate on her handbags. Simons says that his own dealings with Bertelli have been cordial, but he observed: ‘’I think if he would listen a little bit more, or a little longer, it would be a good difference for him and the people who work with him. I can’t complain, because when I was there he really took his time. But I feel it more with the other people in the room. Those people are all there to help him.’’

Snelders, though, worries for Simons. He worries that the things that have so far been unimportant to Simons will find a way of entering his small, protective world -- maybe change it altogether. ‘’It sounds scary, but he needs to be left alone,’’ Snelders told me. ‘’He spends way too much time on the phone doing interviews, daft stuff. The phone is constantly ringing, like, for nothing. He needs a new mobile phone.’’

The central question about Simons, and the one that has gone unanswered, is: How did he do it? How was someone without training or signs of genius able to project such a remarkably accurate portrait of urban youth? And not only that, but how was he able to give the idea by his choice of music and use of large public spaces that youth was also a monumental event?

Simons was 25 when he settled in Antwerp, too old to get lost in the club scene that had influenced many of his contemporaries. Surrounding himself with people like Snelders certainly helped. (In that sense, Simons, for all his calculated distancing from the fashion world, is a seductive personality -- and he knows it.) But this doesn’t explain everything. Although a number of writers have ascribed Simons’s powers to intellect, he actually embodies a different quality. He looks at everything very simply and directly. This was the quality that Lionel Trilling identified in George Orwell, and that he celebrated in his introduction to Orwell’s ‘’Homage to Catalonia.’’ Trilling argued that Orwell was able to see the Spanish Civil War for what it was by virtue of not being a genius. ‘’We admire geniuses, we love them, but they discourage us,’’ he wrote. ‘’They are great concentrations of intellect and emotion, we feel that they have soaked up all the available power, monopolizing it and leaving none for us. We feel that if we cannot be as they, we can be nothing.’’ In fashion, Karl Lagerfeld and John Galliano are geniuses, but they don’t communicate the sense, as Simons does, that we can understand our world just by looking at it. We feel we have to be as smart and cool as they are. Simons, the coolest of designers, tells us differently.

When I saw Simons in Vienna, I mentioned that I had seen his shows described as many things -- dark, aggressive -- but never romantic. Though a romantic is surely what he is. For a moment there was a look of surprise in his pale blue eyes, and then he said: ‘’Because very few people go into the heart of things. They look at the surface, but I hunger for an ideal world always. Before I came to the city, I had also had the feeling that I grew up in an ideal world. My mom and my dad, what they have together is amazing. Then there’s my village, with the grass fields and the woods and the animals.’’ This has been the perspective all along, from the eight-millimeter movie through to the recent collections -- of someone looking at contemporary life from the vantage of his own humble background and wanting to make it not merely right but better. Not many designers would have the instinct to call a collection History of the World, as Simons did in July 2004, and have the models descend on a pair of huge escalators or print on their invitation the names of people and things that had changed the modern world, as if to suggest that fashion -- or any one of us -- could do the same. How many people would make such a moral claim in a cynical age?

This summer, as I stood with Michael Roberts, the fashion editor of The New Yorker, outside Galliano’s men’s show, he recalled a collection that Simons had presented in 1998, on a series of concrete overpasses that were reflected, like the surrounding Paris neighborhood, in a huge futuristic silver ball. The show opened with ‘’Space Oddity,’’ by David Bowie, and at first, Roberts said, the audience didn’t know where to direct its attention. ‘’We were all sitting there, waiting and wondering, Where are the models going to come from?’’ he said. ‘’I’m looking through the haze of this warm summer evening, and then, in the distance, about three overpasses away, I see this line of boys in black suits walking along, like union workers, one after the other. It dawned on me that this was the show. Then they disappeared and came along the nearer overpass. It was just unbelievable. So eerie and so beautiful.’’

I said that in looking back at all of Simons’s shows, it seemed to me that they didn’t date. The clothes from the 90’s still looked relevant today. Roberts agreed. I wondered how that was possible.

‘’I don’t know,’’ he said. He thought for a moment as we watched people file into the Galliano show, which would feature a New Orleans-style band and many orange-robed Hare Krishnas. Finally, Roberts said, nodding, ‘’Because he was right, and we were all looking away.’’

CINETOILE




THE BENTLY RESERVESAN FRANCISCO - CA

| OCT 28

50 SELECTED FASHION DESIGNERS FROM THE WORLD’S TOP DESIGN SCHOOLS WILL PRESENT THEIR VISION ON THE RUNWAY

PORTFOLIO | 9-11AM + STUDENT & SCHOOL

FASHION SHOW JURY | 4-5PM+ CANDIDATES RUNWAY

VIP RECEPTION | 6-7PM+ EXHIBITION FASHION SHOW | 7-11PM+ AWARD CEREMONY

PERSPECTIVES THEME

INTERNATIONAL

COMPETITIONFASHION STUDENT

THE ARTS OF FASHION COMPETITION 20149AM-11PM | BENTLY RESERVE

PHOTO COURTESY OF THE ARTS OF FASHION FOUNDATION

HISTORY

The Arts of Fashion Foundation Fashion Student Competition was created in December 2001 as the U.S. extension of the world renowned Concours International des Jeunes Créateurs de Mode - an international fashion design student contest sponsored by Air France and the French Federation of Couture. This global contest was introduced in 1982, in Japan, and has grown steadily over 23 years. In 2006, this international student contest stopped to be held in Paris.

Since then, the Arts of Fashion Foundation, a public American nonprofit 501(C)(3), brought this international competition to the United States and has continued to make it a unique and authentic annual fashion rendez-vous for students, schools and fashion professionals from all over the world to celebrate creativity in fashion. The Arts of Fashion Foundation has evolved into an internationally-recognized organization that is completely independent and neutral to the limitations of commercial interest. They have dedicated themselves to encouraging and supporting creative designers by introducing industry professionals and public audiences to their unique work. Through its different programs, the Foundation is committed to advance the work of visionaries and risk-taking creative fashion designers.

This Premier International Student Fashion Competition takes place each Fall during the annual Arts of Fashion Symposium, hosted every year by a different university or school or department.

2014 THEME : PERSPECTIVES2014 is the 13th anniversary of the Arts of Fashion Foundation and the 8th consecutive year that this international competition will be organized and held in the United States.

CONCEPT & SELECTION PROCESS

• Everyyearadifferentthemeischosen,andfromOctoberofthepreviousyeartoApril,fashionstudentsregisteronlinetoparticipate. They then have to send sketches and technicalsheets of a ‘mini collection’made up of 3 silhouettes or 3accessoriesdesignedaroundthetheme.In 2014, 358 fashion students registered from 128 schools, universities and colleges of 41 countries.

• AttheendofApril,a jurypanel,composedofnationalandinternationalfashionprofessors,selects50projectillustrationsthat best represent the set theme and reflect creative andinnovativepotential.The50selectedcandidatesarerequiredtomake2outofthe3silhouettestheysubmitted.

•• These 50 projects (100 designs) are judged by a panel of

professionalfashiondesignersandareshownontherunwayforthegrandfinaleof theSymposium.6to7designersareawardedandreceivescholarshipandinternshipopportunitiesincreativeprogramsandfashionhouses.

The spirit of this competition is not to try to find the next Yves Saint Laurent, Alexander McQueen or even rank the designers from best to worst, but to recognize and award the 6 to 7 most creative projects in order for these students to continue their education and training in order to become better designers, by offering them the opportunity to work, study and learn from renowned mentor designers.

ABOUT THE COMPETITION



2014 INTERNATIONAL ACADEMIC REPRESENTATION 50 SELECTED FASHION STUDENTS IN THE 2014 COMPETITION

Miguel Mesa Posada | Medellin - Colegiatura ColombianaJaesun Chung | London - London College of FashionSung Eun Jang | Paris - Esmod Elisa Kaufmann | Basel - FHNW Basel Sun Ke | Wuhan - Hubei Institute of Fine ArtsSe Hyun Park | New York, NY - Fashion Institute of TechnologyKrystsina Sinkevich | New York, NY - Parsons The New School for Design Ana Maria Marchetanu | Timisoara - University of West Timisoara YiWen Lim | New York, NY - Parsons The New School for DesignJiwon Choi | Seoul - Samsung Art and Design InstitutePingSi Zhou | Montreal - LaSalle CollegeAna Raluca Mandita | Bucharest - National University of ArtsYoung Woo Kim | Incheon - Incheon National University Do-Kyeong Lee | Seoul - Samsung Art and Design InstituteMo Ziwei | Hong Kong - Hong Kong Polytechnic University Nawapan Ketmanee | Bangkok - Chanapatana International Design InstituteSe Young Eum | Seoul - Samsung Art and Design InstituteMiluse Gebauerova | Cardiff - University of South WalesJung Seo Kim | Seoul - Samsung Art and Design InstituteTerezia Fenovcikova | Bratislava - Academy of Fine Arts and DesignTing Pan | Montreal - LaSalle CollgeYoun Chan Chung | Seoul - Samsung Art and Design InstituteBinli He | Beijing - Beijing Institute of Fashion Technology Min Kyung Kwon | New York, NY - Fashion Institute of TechnologyQi Ting Mai | Guangzhou - Guangzhou University Yohan Song | Seoul - Myongji UniversitySsuching Lu | Taipei - Shih Chien UniversityRoxana Iozefina Nagy | Timisoara - University of West TimisoaraEun Hae Lee | New York NY - Parsons The New School for Design Min Ho | Seoul - Samsung Art and Design InstituteManruo Tang | Beijing - Beijing Institute of Fashion TechnologyYoo Jin Heo | Seoul - Samsung Art and Design InstituteLexuan Song | Wuhan - Wuhan Textile UniversityWoori Ko | Seoul - Samsung Art and Design InstituteKaterina Hynkova | Pilsen - University of West BohemiaMorgan Childers | Chicago IL - The School of the Art Institute of Chicago Yung Wong | Nottingham - Nottingham Trent UniversityJi Ae Bang | Seoul - Samsung Art and Design InstituteJiwon Kim | Seoul - Samsung Art and Design InstitutePearl Sun | New York, NY - Fashion Institute of TechnologyTsz Yu Clancey Chow | Nottingham - Nottingham Trent UniversityStanislava Malcova | Pilsen - University of West Bohemia Jessica Sambudiono | Jakarta - Bunka School of FashionKu Young Jung | Seoul - Samsung Art and Design InstituteTravis Dean Pereira | New York, NY - Fashion Institute of Technology Sae Mee Kim | Seoul - Samsung Art and Design InstituteDai Le | Los Angeles, CA - Los Angeles Trade Tech College Zhilan Tian | Richmond, VA - Virginia Commonwealth UniversityJe Wook Jang | Seoul - Myongji University

Jaesun Chung | London - London College of Fashion

Elisa Kaufmann | Basel - FHNW Basel

Sun Ke | Wuhan - Hubei Institute of Fine Arts



2014 INTERNATIONAL ACADEMIC REPRESENTATION UNIVERSITIES & SCHOOLS REPRESENTED BY REGISTERED STUDENTS IN THE 2014 COMPETITION

Argentina | Buenos Aires - Universidad de Palermo Australia | Adelaide - TAFE SA Australia | Brisbane - Queensland University of TechnologyAustralia | North Sydney - Raffles College of Design and Commerce Australia | Melbourne - Melbourne School of Fashion Australia | Melbourne - Whitehouse Institute of DesignAustralia | Perth - Curtin University - curtin.edu.au Australia | Richmond - Kangan InstituteAustralia | Sydney - Whitehouse Institute of DesignBrazil | Curitiba - Centro EuropeuBrazil | Fortaleza - Universidade Federal do CearáBrazil | Sao Paulo - SenacBulgaria | Sofia - National Academy of ArtBulgaria | Varna - Varna Chernorizets Hrabar Free UniversityCanada | Montreal - LaSalle CollgeCanada | Toronto - Ryerson UniversityCanada | Vancouver - Emily Carr University Art+Design Canada | Vancouver - Vancouver Community College China | Beijing - Beijing Institute of Fashion Technology China | Huangshi - Hubei Polytechnic University China | Guangzhou - Guangzhou University China | Shangai - Shanghai University of Engineering ScienceChina | Wuhan - Hubei Institute of Fine Arts China | Wuhan - Wuhan Textile University Colombia | Medellin - Academia Superior de ArtesColombia | Medellin - Colegiatura Colombiana Czech Republic | Pilsen - University of West Bohemia Denmark | Herning - VIA University CollegeEcuador | Cuenca - Universidad del AzuayFinland | Helsinki - Helsinki Metropolia University of Applied Sciences Finland | Lahti - Lahti University of Applied SciencesFrance | Paris - Ecole de la Chambre Syndicale de la Couture ParisienneFrance | Paris - Esmod - esmod.comFrance | Paris - INSEEC Business SchoolFrance | Paris - International Fashion AcademyFrance | Paris - American AcademyGreece | Athens - Pansik Scuelo di Moda - Art & Design Hong Kong | Hong Kong - Hong Kong Polytechnic University Italy | Milano - Politecnico di Milano India | Bangalore - Raffles Millenium International India | Delhi - National Institute of Fashion Technology India | Gandhinagar - National Institute of Fashion Technology India | Jaipur - IIS UniversityIndia | Kolkata - Jadavpur University India | Kolkata - National Institute of Fashion Technology India | Mumbai - National Institute of Fashion TechnologyIndonesia | Jakarta - Bunka School of Fashion Indonesia | Jakarta - LaSalle College International Ireland | Dublin - Sallynoggin College of Further Education Ireland | Limerick - Limerick School of Art & DesignIsrael | Jerusalem - Bezalel Academy of Arts & Design Japan | Osaka - Osaka Mode Gakuen - mode.ac.jp Latvia | Riga - Latvia Academy of Arts - lma.lvMalaysia | Selangor - Limkokwing University of Creative Technology Mexico | Guadalajara - Imaginarte Centro Internacional de Diseño y Moda Mexico | Lomas de Chapultepec - Centro Diseno Cine Television Mexico | Monterrey - Centro de Estudios de Diseno de MonterreyNorway | Oslo - EsmodPhilippines | Diliman - University of the Philippines Philippines | Makati City - Slim’s Fashion & Art School Philippines | Quezon City - Style & Design Academy ManilaPoland | Kracow - Schools of Art and Fashion DesignPoland | Warsaw - International School of Costume and Fashion Design Portugal | Castelo Branco - Instituto Politecnico de Castelo Branco

Portugal | Lisboa - Universidade de Lisboa Romania | Bucharest - National University of ArtsRomania | Timisoara - University of West TimisoaraRussia | Volgograd - Volgograd State Technicak UniversitySingapore | Singapore - Nanyang Academy of Fine ArtsSlovakia | Bratislava - Academy of Fine Artsand DesignSouth Africa | Cape Town - Cape Peninsula Uni. of Technology South Korea | Daegu - Keimyung UniversitySouth Korea | Gyeongsan city - Daegu UniversitySouth Korea | Incheon - Incheon National University South Korea | Incheon - Inha UniversitySouth Korea | Seoul - Esmod South Korea | Seoul - Ewha Womans University South Korea | Seoul - Hongik University South Korea | Seoul - Kookmin University South Korea | Seoul - Myongji University South Korea | Seoul - Samsung Art and Design Institute South Korea | Seoul - Sasada Institute of Design South Korea | Seoul - Seoul National University South Korea | Seoul - Seoul Women Universityr South Korea | Yongi - Dankook UniversitySpain | Madrid - Escuela Universitaria de Diseno, Innovacion y Technologia Sri Lanka | Colombo - Raffles Design Institute Switzerland | Basel - FHNW Basel - Institut Fashion-Design Taiwan | Taipei - Shih Chien University Thailand | Bangkok - Ramkhamhaeng University Thailand | Bangkok - Chanapatana International Design Institute UAE | Dubai - EsmodUK | Bournemouth - Arts University of BournemouthUK | Bristol - University of of the West of EnglandUK | Cardiff - University of South WalesUK | London - London College of Fashion UK | Manchester - University of SalfordUK | Nottingham - Nottingham Trent UniversityUK | Sheffield - Sheffield Hallam UniversityUSA | Ames IA - Iowa State University USA | Baltimore MD - Maryland Institute College of ArtUSA | Chicago IL - Columbia College ChicagoUSA | Chicago IL - The School of the Art Institute of ChicagoUSA | East Lansing MI - Michigan State UniversityUSA | Greensboro NC - University of North Carolina GreensboroUSA | Honolulu HI - University of Hawai at Manoa USA | Houston TX - Art Institutes of Houston USA | Kalamazoo MI - Western Michigan UniversityUSA | Los Angeles CA - Fashion Institute of Design & Merchandising USA | Los Angeles CA - Los Angeles Trade Tech CollegeUSA | Miami FL - Florida International UniversityUSA | Miami FL - Miami International University of Art & DesignUSA | New York NY - Art Institutes of New York USA | New York NY - Fashion Institute of TechnologyUSA | New York NY - Parsons The New School for DesignUSA | Palatine IL - Harper College USA | Philadelphia PA - Drexel University USA | Pullman WA - Washington State UniversityUSA | Raleigh NC - North Carolina State UniversityUSA | Richmond VA - Virginia Commonwealth UniversityUSA | San Francisco CA - Academy of Art USA | San Francisco CA - Apparel ArtsUSA | San Francisco CA - City College USA | San Francisco CA - San Francisco State UniversityUSA | Saratoga CA - West Valley College USA | Savannah GA - Savannah College of Art & DesignUSA | Springfield MO - Missouri State UniversityUSA | Syracuse NY - Syracuse University



SAN FRANCISCOBENTLY RESERVE | OCT 28

ARTSOFFASHIONFOUNDATIONTHE 2014 AOF INTERNATIONAL FASHION STUDENT COMPETITION

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PASSES & TICKETS | ARTS-OF-FASHION.ORG

VIP RECEPTION | 6PM+ EXHIBITION

FASHION SHOW | 7PM+ AWARD CEREMONY

2014 PRESIDENT MANISH ARORA

THANK YOU TO THE CONTINUED SUPPORT OF THE AOF SPONSOR:YKK (U.S.A.) INC.

50 SELECTED FASHION DESIGNERS AMONG 348 APPLICANTS FROM THE WORLD’S TOP DESIGN SCHOOLS WILL PRESENT THEIR PERSPECTIVES & VISION ON THE RUNWAY

CEREMONYSHOW & AWARD FASHION

+ SCHOLARSHIP BENEFIT

presided over by international creative fashion … · manish arora will direct this unique arts of...

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