A need for globally consistent textiles terminology

An engaging new book about a legendary portrait by Gentile Bellini prompts renewed awareness of the need for globally consistent textile terminology.

From time to time a book will inspire us more than most, or convince us that the direction our own thinking has recently taken is worthwhile, or simply engage us in a thought-provoking historical story that is very well-told. Elizabeth Rodini, a distinguished art historian based in Rome, has achieved all this and more with her latest book, Gentile Bellini’s Portrait of Sultan Mehmed II: Lives and Afterlives of an Iconic Image (I.B. Tauris, 2020). For more than four centuries, a portrait of the Ottoman Sultan Mehmed II, the ‘Conqueror’ (r. 1444–46, 1451–81), painted by the Venetian artist Gentile Bellini (c. 1429–1507), circulated between Istanbul, Venice and London. (Figure 1). Rodini recounts the painting’s journeys in the form of a meticulously researched biography of an object, bringing the story of the sometimes-controversial portrait into the present with a final chapter set in contemporary Istanbul – or at least pre-pandemic Istanbul. In the process, Rodini considers current concerns in art historical and museum methodology as she traces the painting’s physical journey, and also its reception, appreciative or otherwise, at its various destinations. In the first few pages, she introduces the portrait as an ‘artifact of survival’, and goes on to use the work as a platform from which to address questions about the nature and history of portraiture, conservation and restoration, changing priorities in collecting and display in museums, the emergence of cultural patrimony, and the rights and obligations of individuals in the ownership of works of art.

Gentile Bellini arrived at the Ottoman court in 1479, twenty-six years after Mehmed II conquered Constantinople, the once-great seat of the Byzantine empire. The young sultan transformed the city into Istanbul, an Islamic capital and cosmopolitan cultural centre like no other. Bellini made the journey, along with several assistants, in response to Mehmed II’s request to the Venetian doge, Giovanni Mocenigo, for a painter and a sculptor to join other Italian artists already resident at his court. Bellini painted the sultan’s likeness in 1480, a year before Mehmed II’s death at the age of forty-nine. Beyazid II (1481–1512), his son and successor, was more conventionally religious than his father and disapproved of European art and its depiction of lifelike images. It has therefore been surmised that Beyazid II soon disposed of the Bellini portrait, along with other works from his father’s collection. There followed a long period when the whereabouts of the painting was unknown and it remained as a trusted likeness of the sultan that, in the words of Rodini, ‘existed only in memory’. Then, from 1865 to 1912 after it surfaced in Venice, the portrait hung in the canal-side palazzo of the eminent English archaeologist, Sir Austen Henry Layard (1817–94), who later bequeathed it to the National Gallery, London, where he was a trustee. The work arrived in England in 1916, a few years after the death of Layard’s widow, escaping unsuccessful challenges by the Italian authorities to its export.

Fig. 1: Gentile Bellini, Portrait of Sultan Mehmed II, 1480, oil on canvas, 69.9 x 52.1 cm. The National Gallery, London. The Layard Bequest, 1916.

By mid-1917, the portrait was hanging in the entrance to the National Gallery, a position of prominence that was eventually followed by its removal, along with other works, for safekeeping in Wales for the duration of WWII.  On its return to the National Gallery, the portrait was soon relegated to a basement where it remained more or less unseen, along with other paintings deemed problematic. In 2008, the portrait was moved as a long-term loan to the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) in South Kensington, where it now hangs upstairs in one of the Medieval and Renaissance Galleries dedicated to objects that, through their mobility and trade, convey the cross-cultural nature of the Early-Modern eastern Mediterranean.

Bellini usually painted Venetian aristocrats, and in his portrait of Mehmed II, he positioned the Ottoman sultan in a similar manner – almost in profile, his robe a deeply saturated madder red, his turban softly folded and his fur wrap and beard seemingly painted single hair by single hair with highly skilled brushwork. Mehmed II is seen from the chest up, framed within a decorative arch with a carved marble balustrade in the foreground, thereby obscuring his arms and distancing the viewer from the sitter. Over the balustrade hangs a sumptuous embroidery, again in the manner of Renaissance Venetian portraits that often included an Ottoman carpet as a prestigious and costly accessory. And it’s at this point that Rodini’s book unintentionally joins the ongoing conversation about how textile specialists, art historians and other scholars best describe the cloths, fabrics, and costumes that add such interest and beauty to their research and publications.

Like many historians, perhaps unfamiliar with the materiality and technique of historic textiles, Rodini refers to the draped embroidery as a ‘tapestry’. She does so from the outset, although she first refers to the cloth as a ‘tapestry, embroidered and studded with gems’ and thereafter it is a ‘tapestry’. This is really a minor quibble because, in general usage, the term ‘tapestry’ has many meanings. It may refer to a technique used to achieve pictorial or geometric patterning; or to the patterning itself; or to any patterned fabric, regardless of technique that is hung, draped, framed, used as upholstery, or fashioned into shoes, bags or clothing. Within this broad definition lies the renowned Bayeux Tapestry of the eleventh century which is technically an embroidery. It is worked in wool, in stem stitch and laid-and-couched stitches on a linen foundation made up of a number of panels stitched together for a length of 70 metres. Surely only the most pedantic textile scholars would now insist it be renamed the Bayeux Embroidery.

Tapestry is a weft-faced weave that uses discontinuous coloured wefts woven on a loom across plain warps to build up blocks of design to make a pattern or a picture, in the same way that mosaics are composed of segments of coloured glass or ceramics. Tapestry weave is one of the rare examples of woven cloth in which all the warp threads are hidden by the wefts. Early fragments of tapestry date back to the second millennium B.C. in Egypt and archaeological evidence suggests tapestry-woven textiles were used at Çatal Höyük, near Konya in present-day Turkey at least as far back as the eighth millennium BCE. Historic pictorial tapestries at European courts, from the Middle Ages onwards, were significant status symbols as well as being luxurious, mobile and decorative. Therefore, it is understandable that the term often conveys a level of prestige and is applied as a catch-all description in otherwise authoritative books such as Rodini’s, or in exhibition catalogues and the occasional scholarly lecture.

This is because, despite a strong movement beginning in the late-1960s that urged specialists and curators to use globally consistent textile terminology, there is still no such resource which completely addresses the required level of detail and accuracy. Irene Emery’s The Primary Structure of Fabrics: An Illustrated Classification (first edn. Textile Museum, Washington, D.C.,1966, revised 1980, third edn. Thames and Hudson, 2009), remains the benchmark in English-language publications. In her foreword, Emery wrote that her aim was to counteract ‘the bewildering inconsistencies and incongruities encountered in museum records and labels, and in published descriptions and discussions.’  Agnes Geijer made another major contribution with her A History of Textile Art (Pasold Research Fund and Sotheby Parke Bernet, London,1979). And in the mid-1990s, Anne Rowe’s paper ‘In Search of a Classification of Textile Techniques’, CIETA Bulletin 73 (1995–96): 123–39, reminded us that the issue remained largely unresolved. It continues to be so. Despite this, textile specialists hope that historians and curators will nevertheless aim to use correct and consistent terms when describing their subject matter and, where possible, accurately describe the technical details of the fabric in question. These details can assist in our shared understanding of places of origin and dating of many historic textiles and also help identify new typologies, lost fragments, replaced linings and the like, as well as the migration of design motifs, designers and makers.

Fig. 2: Ottoman throne cover, embroidered with gold plaques, gemstones, and silk. Istanbul, late 16th–early 17th century. Topkapi Palace Museum, Istanbul. Louise Mackie, Symbols of Power, 280, fig. 8.2.

The embroidery, so realistically depicted in Bellini’s painting, is a smaller version of a type of luxury textile used from the fifteenth century onwards at the Ottoman court to cover a dais or low throne-like seating platform. The textile type is well documented, described by textile scholar, Louise Mackie, as ‘embroidered with gold plaques, gemstones and silk’, and a late sixteenth–early eighteenth-century example is illustrated in her Symbols of Power: Luxury Textiles from Islamic Lands, 7th–21st Century (Yale University Press, 2015). (Figure 2). The textile in Mehmed's portrait is the same kind of jewelled embroidery, but a smaller version, possibly designed to be a bolster cover like the one Lady Layard described in her diary in 1877 when Sir Henry was an ambassador to the Ottoman court of Sultan Abdül Hamid II (1876–1909). Rodini quotes her as describing the Treasury in the Topkapi Palace’s secluded Third Court as being ‘full of beautiful things’, including a kind of ‘platform on legs’ with ' a gold cushion embroidered with pearls.' The portrait embroidery clearly shows a crown motif positioned so that it would not work with the horizontal mode of display of a cushion or bolster, but this is likely Bellini’s artistic addition as it echoes the symbolic three-crown motif he has painted on either side of the archway that frames the sultan, and which appears on the reverse of a bronze portrait medallion Bellini designed for the sultan the same year as the portrait.

In mid-2019, the last time I was in the Topkapi Palace Museum, there was a comparable rectangular embroidered cover on display in one of the palace pavilions known as the Chamber of Petitions. The ground cloth was a deep red silk velvet embroidered with gold plaques, various unidentified precious stones, pearls and laid-and-couched silk and gold-covered thread. It was dated as early eighteenth century. A detail of a very similar example may be seen in figure 3. Few of its type are extant, yet this style of embroidery was also known elsewhere in the Islamic world and in parts of Europe centuries earlier. It survives in the magnificent so-called ‘coronation’ robe linked to the multicultural court of Roger II in Sicily in the twelfth century – a medieval textile masterpiece now permanently displayed in the Imperial Treasury at the Hofburg Palace, Vienna.

Fig. 3: Detail, Ottoman cover, early 18th-century, silk velvet embroidered with gold plaques, laid-and-couched gold-covered thread, diamonds, emeralds and pearls. Topkapi Palace Museum, Istanbul. Photo: Alamy stock.  

Like Bellini’s portrait of Mehmed II, this powerfully graphic embroidered garment does not enjoy pride of place in its dimly lit corner of the museum. As with Bellini’s portrait, it too may be described as an ‘artifact of survival’, reminding us of the mobility of objects and accompanying ideas in the Middle Ages and Early Modern era that Rodini’s book probes so well. Bellini’s majestic portrait of Mehmed II with its prominently displayed, bejewelled embroidery now sits in Room 63 of the V&A in comfortable dialogue with other textiles that likely share comparable historic encounters – a sixteenth-century, so-called ‘Lotto’ knotted pile carpet, a sixteenth century French embroidered panel, and two exquisite fragments of green, Italian figured velvet, dated to the late fifteenth century, with designs of stylised roses, leaves and vines that, like Sultan Mehmed II once did, look equally east to Asia and west to Europe for artistic inspiration.

Reflections on a symposium dedicated to textile arts of the East

By Susan Scollay

Blog musing – 7 July 2020

Reflecting on the past months of enforced isolation and the disruption to our usual work patterns, some of us will agree with claims that many scholars have used their time in seclusion productively — researching articles and writing books that will begin to emerge by the end of the year. Writing in The Art Newspaper on 4 May 2020, Bendor Grosvenor argued that being an art historian is easier now and is a more productive pursuit than ever before.  ‘Previous generations,’ he wrote, ‘would take weeks to gather in multiple libraries and archives, what now can be easily accessed’ from remote places throughout the world. Of course, art historians need to SEE art on a regular basis, but this was now taken care of, claimed Grosvenor, by the proliferation of collections on-line. Agreed — but perhaps what some of us have most missed are the opportunities to get together in person for reading groups and seminars — as well as the kind of major conferences that have been cancelled for the time being and maybe longer.   By that I mean the kind of conferences that draw international scholars because of the quality of their academic programmes and which are accompanied by special exhibitions, as well as opportunities to see works of art that are usually out of bounds to the general public. These latter can lead to multi-faceted connections and possibly to articles and books comparable to those that we can look forward to at the end of these unprecedented months of 2020.

Exactly a year ago, the Courtauld Institute and the National Gallery in London hosted a two-day symposium dedicated to the textile arts of the East. The two major themes were new research on textiles, costume and carpets produced between 1400 and 1700 and a whole day devoted to ‘making the past present’ – collecting and collections of textiles. Several speakers touched on the ever-evolving topic of oriental carpets in European paintings, a genre of which the National Gallery holds an impressive number of outstanding works. The academic presentations included excellent papers from Dr Moya Carey, of the Chester Beatty Library, Dublin, exploring the relationship between the politics, architecture and textiles of the Safavid Dynasty in Iran (1501–1736); University of Oxford doctoral candidate, Fuchsia Hart, presenting an exquisite and previously unknown seventeenth century, twelve-sided carpet from the mausoleum of Shah Abbas II (r. 1642–66) in Qom, Iran; and Dr Jon Thompson, the former May Beattie fellow at the Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford, on the perception of colour in textiles. Elegantly formulated, as ever, this presentation was likely Dr Thompson’s last major conference before his death early this year.  Anna Beselin, senior conservator at the Museum for Islamic Art in Berlin, highlighted new developments in textile analysis and conservation that assist in pin-pointing the origins of some of the puzzling historic textiles that have continued to elude scholarly classification.     

For the rest of the week, which was organised in honour of the 40-year anniversary of HALI and its issue number 200, conference delegates enjoyed a series of workshops, films, exhibitions and visits to collections of rarely-seen textiles. These included some fine examples in private hands as well as the wonders of the textile store-rooms of the Victoria and Albert Museum – in the process of moving from the historic Clothworkers’ Centre, Blythe House, in Kensington to purpose-built accommodation constructed on the site of the 2012 Olympics in north-east London.  

On a personal level, I was privileged to be part of a small group able to view the renowned, but rarely-seen, ‘Girdlers' Carpet’, sometimes described as the ‘Bell Carpet.’ This significant example of seventeenth century woven art is part of the collection of a medieval livery company, the Worshipful Company of Girdlers (belt makers) and hangs under glass in the Livery Hall at their elegant premises in East London. It is the only known classical Indian carpet whose place and date of manufacture is securely documented – a rarity in the corpus of historic carpets woven in the Islamic world. Commissioned in 1630 in the imperial city of Lahore, during the era of the Mughal Emperor Shah Jahan (r. 1628–58), the carpet was delivered to the Girdlers’ on the 12th August, 1634. The donor was Robert Bell (1564–1637), a past Master of the Girdlers’ and a prominent member of the East India Company, founded in 1604.  

 The technical details of the Girdlers’ Carpet noted before it was mounted under glass for hanging, are very similar to those of the Trinitarias Carpet, in the collection of the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV), in Melbourne. The Trinitarias is a magnificent work — measuring 10.44 x 3.36 metres, with a bold design and superb, saturated colour. It was purchased by the NGV in 1958 with funds from the Felton Bequest, and was understood at the time to be a work of sixteenth or seventeenth century Persian origin. Since its acquisition, the Trinitarias has mostly remained in storage and has been seldom exhibited.  In 2010, after technical analysis, chemical testing of its dyes and carbon-14 dating, the NGV confirmed its date of production as the first half of the seventeenth century, and reattributed the carpet to northern India under Mughal rule, with its likely city of origin as Lahore. This reattribution brought the NGV in line with international institutions such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art (MMA), New York, who have recently carried out similar rigorous reappraisals of textiles and carpets in their collections.      

Image 1. Detail: The Trinitarias Carpet, wool and cotton, 10.44 x 3.36 m. India, first half 17th century, National Gallery of Victoria, Felton Bequest. Photo: courtesy NGV.  

Image 2. Detail: showing flower cluster motif characteristic of Lahore carpets, The Trinitarias Carpet, wool and cotton, 10.44 x 3.36 m. India, first half 17th century, NGV, Felton Bequest. Photo: Susan Scollay. 

The attribution to Lahore for both the Girdlers’ Carpet and the Trinitarias is based on a number of technical details and design characteristics previously mentioned in publications by the late John Irwin of the Victoria and Albert Museum, London (V&A) and Daniel Walker, a former curator at the MMA.  On close inspection, a noticeable feature of the Girdlers’ Carpet is a delicate motif, repeated throughout, that resembles a stylised flower cluster, a raceme – in this case rather like a wisteria bloom. It is, according to the late John Irwin, writing in 1962, ‘a lanceolate-leaf, here made to resemble a Wistaria (sic) flower’ and ‘borrowed from long-established Persian carpet tradition.’ Irwin argued that Mughal designers and weavers would not have conceived of the true origin of the motif in its traditional, stylised Persian form and, being interested in natural flower drawings, they adapted it accordingly. Whatever its origins, according to John Irwin, Daniel Walker and Dr Steven Cohen, who accompanied the group to the view the Girdlers’ Carpet, the flower cluster motif is an acknowledged characteristic of historic Lahore weaving. The Trinitarias is replete with the intriguing wisteria-like, flower cluster linked to Lahore, but any comparison with the Girdlers’ Carpet has not been previously mentioned in relation to the likely origins of the Trinitarias.

Accordingly, my isolation weeks’ article, ‘New Perspectives on the Trinitarias Carpet in the collection of the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne’ will be published in the September issue of The Asian Arts Society of Australia (TAASA) Review. Professor Samer Akkach of the University of Adelaide is the guest editor of this special issue, dedicated to the Arts of Islam. 

Rone - 'Empire' at Burnham Beeches

The Sun Room (Photo: Laura Jocic)

The drive from Melbourne to Burnham Beeches takes you along the winding roads of the Dandenong Ranges. As you exit the sweep of the property's shady driveway the cream curving lines of the Art Moderne style house come into view. There is a sense of arrival. By the time you cross the central lawn and stand under the cantilevered entrance you have already moved into a space that is other-worldly.

Burnham Beeches, 1931-1933 (Photo: Laura Jocic)

Designed in the early 1930s by Melbourne architect Harry Norris for the wealthy businessman Alfred Nicholas, Burnham Beeches is the setting for an extraordinary work titled Empire. Step across the threshold and through the heavy draped red velvet curtain and you enter a world of the imagination. The abandoned interior has been taken over by an immersive project conceived by Melbourne-based artist Rone (Tyrone Wright) and collaborators. A year in the making, Empire is open to the public for only six weeks (from 6 March to 22 April 2019) by timed ticketing. It quickly sold out and I'm not surprised.

Rone is known for his monumental stylised portraits, most commonly of attractive young women, that fill walls and urban facades from Melbourne to London, Paris, Havana and Detroit. Scale plays a vital role. Beautiful and flawless, these billboard sized painted images are quite simply arresting.

The Lounge (Photo: Laura Jocic)

The title Empire alludes to past grandeur; an imagined time when a house such as Burnham Beeches was in its heyday. It suggests an opulent lifestyle that has long gone. What we witness now are the hints, the vestiges of these imagined lives, which have left their mark on the now abandoned and decaying interior of the house. Sagging chairs and overstuffed couches with heavy curving arms show their age. A bed is dressed with a fine eiderdown quilt tuned down as if someone has just quit the room, but the pall of dust indicates how long ago that was. There's a grand piano, billiard table and a champagne glass stack that could have come straight out of The Great Gatsby. Everything is covered by the organic and transformative encroachment of dust, leaves, mould and cobwebs.

Her Room (Photo: Laura Jocic)

Looming above the details of each room is the face of the same beautiful, wistful-looking young woman, whose monochrome features are writ large on the walls. Who is she? What happened here? Her eyes never engage the viewer. She is preoccupied, lost in thought, captured for a moment as she turns her head. In the waiting room she looks down at the telephone that sits on the chaise longue. It's been left off the hook. Was this an abruptly ended conversation? But with who? What was said? How did it end? There's an air of the unfinished. The image that gazes down resembles a film cut to a close-up of her expression, fleeting and ephemeral. These are the narratives that are only gestured to; that leave the visitor space to ponder, to imagine for themselves.

The Waiting Room (Photo: Laura Jocic)

The visitor moves through the corridors and rooms like a tracking shot in a film. Turn a corner and another scene unfolds. Fine details of texture are brought into focus in the peeling wallpaper, the ragged-edged sheer curtains which hang limp, walls and ceilings that exhibit mould marks which have spread throughout the building and all the while the soundtrack, composed by Nick Batterham, plays the background score. Filtered sunlight, muted by the tree canopy outside washes across the rooms.

The Scarlet Room (Photo: Laura Jocic)

The Games Room (Photo: Laura Jocic)

But look closely and you will discover that the already dilapidated, cavernous interior has been subjected to artistic breaking down and distressing. It's a visual conceit. The wallpaper has been added, distressed and peeled back in places. The discolouration created by mould on the walls and across the ceilings is painted. This is set decorating on an extensive scale and it acts as a metaphor for the narrative of beauty, loss and decay.

The Music Room (Photo: Laura Jocic)

Rone worked with interior stylist, Carly Spooner, who has sourced Art Deco furniture and props that fit with the era of the house. The organic installations of leaves and branches, grasses and soil were created by Wana Bae and Charlie Lawler of Loose Leaf, a Melbourne-based design studio who describe themselves as specialising in experiential art installations using natural materials. In the upstairs hallway there's a thicket of branches that has been shaped into a tunnel. Is this Alice going down the rabbit hole to her own Wonderland? Downstairs, the long dining room is decked out with two large dining tables. The cobwebbed detritus of the table settings, where empty oyster shells spill over the edges of abandoned plates, lend a tragic Miss Havisham air to the room.

The Dining Room (Photo: Laura Jocic)

The pièce de résistance is the study. Viewed through the windows on the upstairs balcony, one slowly realises that the chairs, desk, lamp and bookshelves are partially submerged in an inky black water which acts as a perfect mirror. The woman's face, created from the painted spines of hundreds of books, looks down, as if contemplating her own reflection.

The Study (Photo: Laura Jocic)

Many years ago I worked as a costumier in the film industry. Often my call out would be to sets created within the shells of disused buildings - abandoned mental asylums, military barracks and old convents. Corridors and empty rooms contained the flotsam of oddly placed furniture, a chair in a corner, an empty cabinet with a door left open and papers strewn across the floor. These were the echoes of past inhabitants. Empire plays on this abandoned atmosphere, of the sense of past lives, rooms inhabited by people now long gone. Memory, nostalgia and longing haunt the spaces.

Ultimately, the concepts of beauty, ephemerality, loss, the passing of time and inevitable decay are played out in Empire's end game. The work itself will be demolished to make way for the planned refashioning of the house into a luxury retreat.

The Lobby (Photo: Laura Jocic)

Cassie Byrnes, Textile Designer: In Conversation

On Saturday 11 November I had the pleasure of conducting an interview with the textile designer Cassie Byrnes as part of the Duldig Studio's Creative Women in Conversation series running in conjunction with the exhibition Slawa: Modernist Art and Design. https://www.duldig.org.au

Cassie graduated from RMIT's textile design course in 2014 and since then has worked from her home in Melbourne producing designs for local and international clients. Cassie works across textiles, packaging, home wares and fashion. In 2016 she launched her fashion collection Variety Hour on line. The tops, skirts and shift dresses feature her signature bold prints which are inspired by the environment around her, the rich flora of Australia to the landscape of America which she visited on her honeymoon. 

Variety Hour. Image courtesy Cassie Byrnes.

Cassie was born and raised in Mackay, North Queensland. After studying interior design in Brisbane she discovered her passion for textiles and moved to Melbourne to study textile design. Cassie said she was drawn to designing for textiles when she became fascinated with how patterns literally made their way onto the textiles. In her very fresh way, Cassie stated that she was curious about the process, asking 'How did the pattern get there?' This is synonymous with the very active way Cassie works her designs. Nothing is passive; they do not just happen. Cassie spends many hours developing each design, starting with concept notes, selecting colours and hand-painting dozens of small sample cards.

Cassie describes her process as very 'old school'. She starts exploring and developing her designs using the old-fashioned brush, paint and paper. It is not until the final stage that Cassie works up her designs on the computer so that they can be printed digitally. The lengthy time it takes for her to develop a design means Cassie becomes emotionally attached to her work. She states that for about every 100 ideas she produces, about twenty may be of value and ten are taken through into a final product. 

Image courtesy Cassie Byrnes.

Although her works start with well-developed concepts on paper, Cassie is emphatic that she is a designer and not an artist. She states that she is always thinking of the end product and the consumer. The majority of her clients are internationally-based and Cassie has found they discovered her via her website or through other postings on the internet. In a symbiotic way, while her work originates in hard copy, technology leads prospective clients to her door. Cassie has produced package designs for Haagen Dasz icecream, a book cover for Penguin Books and textiles for Linen House, the Philadelphia-based label Anthropologie and for the Australian fashion label Kuwaii.

Cassie describes herself as a 'big print' designer and when working on designs for garments she is very mindful of the placement of the pattern so that it looks good on the body. Considering the scale and bold use of colour in her designs, I wondered whether she found there was ever any tension between colour and the pattern. Cassie whimsically stated that they are 'friends' and that she always conceives of a pattern with specific colours and therefore does not create designs in different colourways.

See more of Cassie's designs at http://www.cassiebyrnes.com

Honeymoon collection, Variety Hour label. Image courtesy Cassie Byrnes.

Fashion-able- a discussion with FDC practitioners on high risk dressing

By Laura Jocic

3 March 2017, RMIT Design Hub, Melbourne

The notion of 'high risk dressing' underpinned Robyn Healy's panel discussion about the Fashion Design Council (FDC), a collective founded in Melbourne in 1983 to support and promote local, alternative fashion design.

In the early 1980s, the idea of 'high risk dressing' was used by the FDC to challenge the state of Australian fashion. Emerging local designers railed against the mainstream fashion industry which, they felt, had nothing innovative to offer.

Healy, who is Head of RMIT's School of Fashion, spoke to FDC-affiliated artist Rosslynd Piggott, FDC designer Victoria Triantafyllou, and Laura Gardner, editor and fashion writer about the FDC and its legacy. 

Piggott reflected on her involvement in the two early parades, Fashion '82 and Fashion '83, mounted by Julie Purvis and Jillian Burt in Melbourne under the banner of Party Architecture. Being more conceptual in nature, these parades provided the springboard for the formation of the FDC. Piggott's two works were directly influenced by art. The first, titled Kabuki, drew from Japanese theatre and the second, which featured skirts with exaggerated panniers, was inspired by the garments depicted in seventeenth century Spanish artist Velazquez's painting titled Las Meninas.

Following these parades, Robert Pearce, Kate Durham and Robert Buckingham, all of whom had been involved, banded together to form the FDC, and the 'newest force in fashion' was launched with a parade held at the Hardware Club in 1984. Both Piggott and Healy remarked on the grass roots origins of the FDC, which was born from an energy generated during the post-punk era.

Taking up this point, Triantafyllou described an environment in which she and other designers began by creating one-off pieces to wear out to clubs. Triantafyllou described the clubs and bars as places where people were seen and where businesses were started. If someone liked what you were wearing, then they engaged you to make something for them.  She described a fluid group of people working across disciplines. Although Triantafyllou was RMIT trained, she observed that quite a number of the FDC practitioners didn't have a technical background in fashion. No matter: everyone was driven by a passion to make clothes, have fun and be seen.

Triantafyllou and Piggott reflected on the vibrancy of the time where, as Triantafyllou described it, 'we all fed off each other'. Studio space in inner city Melbourne was relatively cheap and the studios became creative hubs. One of these was Stalbridge Chambers, a late-nineteenth century office building in the centre of Melbourne. The FDC's office was on the sixth floor and the building attracted an array of like-minded artists and designers, such as Desbina Collins, Martin Grant, Tamasine Dale and Jenny Watson. An interdisciplinary approach to fashion and art was embraced at a time when postmodern thinking was blurring the lines between the two.

Throughout the year, the FDC hosted events at bars and clubs and ran an annual fashion parade. These events were highly performative, and fused art, music, film and fashion. They expressed the ethos of the FDC designers who, although diverse in their styles, were unified in their search for new ways of creating and interpreting fashion.

The FDC archive, now held by the RMIT's Design Archives, houses significant film and print media relating to the FDC's parades, exhibitions and events. Healy highlighted the importance of these FDC publications, noting that the parade books include photos and biographies of the designers. Rather than taking the mainstream fashion path of working as an anonymous designer for a larger well-established label, these independent designers chose, from the beginning, to work under their own distinctive labels. They actively eschewed the mainstream fashion production and created their own works from a studio-based practice. 

Gardner picked up on this idea when she noted that the concept of a 'critical fashion practice' implied a 'pushing back' against something. In today's climate, she posited that the issues of environment and sustainability are foremost among those confronting current fashion practice.

After ten years of guiding and promoting independent Australian fashion design, the FDC folded in 1993. By then many of its designers had established self-sustaining businesses. Christopher Graf and Jenny Bannister ran retail stores in Melbourne's fashionable Chapel Street, Kara Baker still continues her studio-based label in Melbourne, and the 1988 Cointreau Young Designer of the Year, Martin Grant, relocated his business to Paris in 1992 where he remains today.

In closing the session, Healy reflected on the legacy of the FDC and its relevance to current fashion practice, stating that as a forum, it created an awareness of the issues in fashion.

The exhibition High Risk Dressing / Critical Fashion draws on the FDC archive to explore current fashion practice. The exhibition runs to 13 April 2017 and is located on Level 2 of the RMIT Design Hub, corner Victoria and Swanston Streets, Melbourne.

Exhibition installation: FDC parade screenings 

Exhibition installation: FDC archives

Louis Kahan: art, theatre fashion

By Laura Jocic

The artist Louis Kahan is well-known in Australia for his portraits, winning the Archibald Prize in 1962 for his painting of the author Patrick White. Lesser known is Kahan's work in theatre and fashion, both prior to and after his arrival in Australia in 1947. The exhibition, Louis Kahan: art, theatre, fashion, at the Town Hall Gallery, Hawthorn in Melbourne (27 August - 23 October 2016) reveals an artistic life which moved between Vienna and Paris between the wars and Australia and Britain in the post-WWII era.            

Born in Vienna in 1905 into a family of master tailors, Kahan's training as a tailor was to have an enduring influence throughout his life. Completing a master diploma of tailoring, Kahan entered his father's business, Kahan Tailors, whose clientele included leading actors, singers and musicians of the day. Amongst these were the actors Max Pallenberg and Konrad Weidt. Moving to the the central Neuer Markt, Wolf Kahan commissioned the modernist architect Adolf Loos to design the interiors for the business' two showrooms. This choice of architect placed the Kahans within a select group of buisnesses which championed Viennese modern design.

Determined to pursue a career as an artist, Kahan left for Paris in 1925 where he attended life classes at La Grande Chaumière, while making a living as a fashion designer and illustrator. Kahan immersed himself in the vibrant cultural life of the city and from 1925 to 1927 he was house designer for the couturier Paul Poiret. Kahan arrived at Maison Paul Poiret just as the designer was fitting out his three lavish barges for the Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes which opened in Paris in April 1925.

Later in the year Kahan was photographed with the staff of Maison Paul Poiret on Saint Catherine's Day, the 25th of November. Dressed in fancy dress, face blackened and wearing a large hat, Kahan sits between Poiret (standing to his right) and the new stage sensation, Jospehine Baker (seated cross-legged on the floor) who astounded audiences with her energetic Charleston dance in La Revue Nègre. Kahan's lively sketch of Baker, mid-performance, has been executed on the back of Maison Paul Poiret letterhead. Baker became one of the highest paid performers of her day and she was a client of Poiret during the time Kahan was house designer.

Through Poiret, who collaborated with many leading artists of the day, Kahan met Matisse, Derain, Dufy and Vlaminck, among others. It was while working at Maison Poiret that Kahan first ventured into theatre design, creating costumes for the historic Théâtre du Gymnase and the Folies Bergère cabaret. In 1926 he created costumes for the silent film La Châtelaine du Liban and for the stage play La Vagabonde, written and performed by the French novelist Colette in 1927, who appeared on stage alongside Poiret.

In 1930 Kahan moved back to Vienna to assist in the family business. Over the following six years he regularly returned to Paris to sketch the fashion collections for Viennese magazines. At the same time Kahan also ran a business, Tessylco, in partnership with the Italian Giuseppe Bianchi, which produced hand-woven silks. In 1936 Kahan returned to live in Paris. With the annexation of Austria by Nazi Germany in March 1938 and the Aryanisation of businesses, Kahan's father was forced to hand over Kahan Tailors to gentile members of his staff. Soon after Kahan's parents and sister fled Austria, settling in Perth, Australia.

When war broke out, Kahan, who was living in Paris, was deemed an enemy alien. An alternative to internment was to join the Foreign Legion. Having done so, Kahan spent the war in Algeria and Morocco. It was during this time that he made the shift to becoming a full-time artist. On his return to Paris in 1945 he became a staff artist for Le Figaro and covered the war trials of Marshal Pétain and ministers of the Vichy government. Separated from his family for almost ten years, Kahan decided to visit Australia, travelling first to America where he met up with his friend, film director and screenwriter, Billy Wilder, who had immigrated to Hollywood in 1933.  Gaining access to the lot of Paramount Pictures, Kahan sketched Dorothy Lamour, Bing Crosby and Bob Hope in costume on the set of Road to Rio, as well as Randolph Scott who was filming the Gunfighters and Ray Milland.

Although Kahan was encouraged to seek work in Hollywood as a designer, reunited with his family in Australia he decided to make Australia his home. Kahan quickly established himself as an artist of note and in 1950 was drawn to Melbourne where he designed the first of many theatrical productions in an industry influenced by the recent emigration of European artists. Kahan's first production, the opera Lucia di Lammermoor, was produced by the Viennese émigré Stefan Haag, who invited Kahan to design the sets and costumes. Staged by the National Theatre's opera company, the production met with critical acclaim. These accolades were repeated the following year for Kahan's designs for the Australian debut of The Consul. For this production, his innovative moving sets were described as a ‘new and brilliant feature’, which allowed scene changes to happen mid-performance in view of the audience.

Offers to design for the stage continued and in 1954 Kahan designed the sets and costumes for the Royal Command Performance of the Tales of Hoffmann. Little survives beyond the page of Kahan's prolific output for the stage. Six masks however that he crafted himself (from bandages and plaster of Paris) for the Tales of Hoffmann demonstrate the material and expressive qualities of Kahan's work, which was steeped in a deep knowledge and love for European theatre and opera traditions. His gouache and pencil costume designs not only express a sense of form and scale, but also reveal Kahan's technical expertise in cut and construction. Numerous designs include small-scale sketches of pattern pieces and instructions for the costume cutter and maker. Fullness and fit are all carefully articulated.

The last theatre production Kahan designed was L'Elisir d'Amore for the Australian Opera in 1975. At the age of seventy he concentrated on his painting, portrait work and printmaking. Always drawn to the figure, Kahan continued to depict tailors and dressmakers at work. In the last decade of his life however, the figure is replaced by the tailor's mannequin or pattern pieces. It was at this time that Kahan revisited his early life as a tailor and his years in Paris. His late works are populated with objects from his early life - tailor's shears, tape measure, patternmaker's L-square and a wristband pin cushion. Combined with the tools of the artist - a palette, paint brush and spatula- these objects symbolise the span of Kahan's life, from a young tailor in Vienna to fashion designer in Paris and fully-fledged artist in Australia.

Louis Kahan: art, theatre, fashion

Town Hall Gallery, Cnr Burwood and Glenferrie Rds, Hawthorn, Melbourne

27 August – 23 October 2016

Louis Kahan with mask - Despina (Nancy Rasmussen) disguised as a lawyer, Cosi fan tutte, National Theatre Opera Company, Melbourne, 1953. Kahan Family Collection.

Kahan Tailor business card designed by Louis Kahan, Vienna, c.1935, 14.7 x 11.8 cm, Kahan Family Collection.

Wolf Kahan seated in Kahan Tailor's showroom designed by Adolf Loos in c.1930, Vienna, 1950. Kahan Family Collection.

Louis Kahan, fashion design 'Boulevard' for Maison Paul Poiret, Paris, c.1926, mimeograph, 27.5 x 18 cm, RMIT Design Archives. 

Louis Kahan, Josephine Baker, Paris, 1926, pencil on paper, 23.4 x 15.4 cm, RMIT Design Archives.

Boris Lipnitzki, Paris, St Catherine's Day at Maison Paul Poiret, 25 November 1925, 19 x 29 cm, Kahan Family Collection.

Louis Kahan, Dorothy Lamour, Road to Rio, 1947, pencil on paper, 29 x 21.2 cm, Kahan Family Collection.

Louis Kahan, Costume design for Don Alfonso, Cosi fan tutte, National Theatre Opera Company, Melbourne, 1953, gouache and pencil on paper, 33 x 21 cm, Arts Centre Melbourne, Performing Arts Centre.

Louis Kahan, Still life over Paris, 1995, oil on canvas on marine ply, 59 x 79 cm (framed), Kahan Family Collection.

Louis Kahan, Torso and samples II, 1995, oil on canvas on marine ply, 87.5 x 67.5 cm, Kahan Family Collection.

Preston Zly and the material Renaissance

By Laura Jocic

Melbourne designers of handmade shoes, Johanna Preston and Petr Zly founded their label Preston Zly in 1995. Their designs constantly push the boundaries of shoemaking, both in aesthetics and construction. In their recent collection, Detail to Whole (Autumn-Winter 2016), they challenged their shoemakers with the construction of the Babi Circle. In this, the leather upper is wrapped around an extended insole and hand-stitched to create a distinctive welt. Here the complicated stitching of the upper to the sole becomes a design feature.

Preston Zly, Babi Circle, Detail to Whole collection, A-W 2016

When reading Ulinka Rublack's article "Matter in the material Renaissance" (Past and Present, no. 219, May 2013, 41-85) for the Textiles Reading Group at the University of Melbourne, I was struck by the similar material and design issues faced by shoemakers in the sixteenth century and those who hand make shoes today. The common challenges of designing a shoe that is fashionable and innovative, whilst remaining sympathetic to the material, is just as current as it was in Renaissance Europe when Hans Fugger, a wealthy German magnate, placed orders with his shoemaker in Antwerp.

Commenting on Fugger's request in 1568 for shoes made of soft leather, Johanna Preston observed, that, in asking for footwear to be made from what is essentially a fine glove making leather, Fugger was asking for an item which the shoemaker must have known would fall apart quickly with wear. Fugger's request creates a tension between design and construction, the aesthetic and the material. His desire for shoes that are not only made of the finest leather, but are weakened through the stamped and perforated decorative design he requests, destined them for early destruction. With this particular order, which included shoes of white leather, Fugger was not aiming for footwear that lasted. He was striving to achieve something which was both elegant and luxurious; an object that smacked of conspicuous consumption.

Shoe, c.1590-1600, Bayerisches National Museum

Fugger was aware that shoes with slashed designs weakened the leather and "looked bad" after a short period of wear. In this instance however, durability was not the aim. Rublack notes that, "Like other fashion items, perfect shoes of a particular kind constituted a visual act which showed off new technologies and transformed people's ideas about what was possible."

For the artisan, all materials present certain limitations and challenges. Leather comes in a range of qualities, and the knowledge and ability to work it into a fine pair of shoes which both fit and are innovative is the skill of the designer-shoemaker. The material and decorative aspects of Hans Fugger's stamped, pinked and perforated shoes and the textural lavishness of Preston Zly's interlaced leather uppers of Avignon Woven reveal that the Renaissance desire to create "things skilfully produced" (Rublack, 41) crosses centuries.

Preston Zly, Avignon Woven, Classic collection

In the face of footwear mass-production, Preston Zly focus on small-scale, high-end handcrafted shoemaking. They produce a total of fifteen pairs (in two to four colours) per style, in sizes ranging from 37 to 42. Designing such limited runs pushes Johanna and Petr to be creative with the leather which is in supply each season. Stripping, re-colouring and distressing available leathers allow them to create a distinctive look, and when combined with elements such as hand-carved wooden heels, hammered tacks and welted stitching, harness what Rublack identifies as "the life and vibrancy of matter itself" (Rublack, 44).

Preston Zly, Patten Shoe, Axis collection, A-W 2014

http://prestonzly.com