2 posts tagged "Goga Ashkenazi"
At Milan’s Salone del Mobile, Furniture Fit for a Medusa
Next week’s Salone del Mobile, the annual Milanese furniture fair, will include plenty of Italian labels, as usual. Marni is releasing the latest of its colorful chairs, as well as hosting a workshop with the Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, where visitors can create “Abi-tante,” which the label describes as “small objects in the form of humanoids/robots made out of industrial waste.” Vionnet’s Goga Ashkenazi has blessed a variety of Italian designers with her patronage, and they’ve responded in kind with pieces like Nacho Carbonell’s chandelier inspired by the Maison.
But the festival queen may be Donatella Versace, who takes the occasion of the fair to show off Versace Home’s latest OTT wares. This year, she teamed up with the young L.A.-based Haas Brothers (their other brother, Lukas, is a sometime actor and rocker), who have already contributed one-off pieces to Mario Testino shoots and been commissioned by Peter Marino. For Versace, they created pieces like the Honeycomb club chair and the demurely named Bondage bench (above). “The process is very important to us,” Nikolai and Simon Haas told style.com. “It starts with a spark of inspiration and then becomes a tangible form. Donatella was the spark, and this furniture collection is our interpretation of the legend and the house of Versace.”
The spark herself had this to say: “I love the new iconic pieces the Haas Brothers have created for Versace Home. They have captured the essence of Versace today, with pieces that are grounded in tradition while also looking fearlessly to the future. It’s amazing how they have taken elements from Versace’s fashion DNA and remixed them to make pieces for the home that are fresh and new. I enjoyed working with the Haas Brothers so much, they also created some special graphic animal prints for my recent Fall 2013 womenswear show.”
Keep reading for a special video teaser of the collaboration coming together >
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Art and Fashion Meet in Milan
Vionnet’s Goga Ashkenazi and W‘s Stefano Tonchi hosted an opening party in Milan last night for Thayaht: Between Art and Fashion. Ashkenazi recently acquired a collection of illustrations Thayaht made of dresses designed by Madeleine Vionnet between 1919 and 1925. Famous for inventing the bias cut, the French couturier never sketched; rather, she draped all of her pieces on eighty-centimeter mannequins. Originally hired to design the house’s logo, Thayaht, an Italian futurist artist and industrial designer, born Ernesto Michahelles (he liked the palindromic qualities of his nom de paint brush, apparently), became her collaborator and documentarian. “There’s nothing more graceful than seeing the garment float freely on the body,” Vionnet once said. Thayaht’s drawings would seem to confirm that; some of the dresses look startlingly modern, despite being made nearly a century ago. Among the sixty sketches in the collection, a few include the name of the client for whom the dress was made. “They put the idea of body types in perspective, because the drawings were about the client, not about the idealized woman,” Tonchi told Style.com. “One of Vionnet’s big revelations was to eliminate the waistline,” he added. There’s some debate about who, exactly, freed women from the corset—Poiret, Chanel, or Vionnet—but Ashkenazi has her answer. “Vionnet—she made us all comfortable.”
Thayaht: Between Art and Fashion is open at Milan’s Museo Poldi Pezzoli until February 25.