4 posts tagged "Salvor Projects"
Salvor Projects’ Desert Rose
For Salvor Projects’ Ross Menuez, if it can’t be made nearby, he won’t make it. When the industrial designer-turned-fashion designer opened his Lower East Side shop earlier this year, he stocked it exclusively with pieces made at his nearby studio.
The local-is-better approach had always ruled out silk pieces from his womenswear collections; silks are more often than not made and printed in the Far East. “I’d wanted to do silk for a long time, and it’s been really frustrating,” he told Style.com. “Almost everyone does silk in Asia, but I feel so dissociated when it’s happening so far away.” But thanks to the discovery of an ink from Fuji—one not intended for fashion purposes, from the same Fuji that manufactures high-end camera equipment—he’s begun hand-printing silk pieces in New York. Mid-November, the first of these new pieces, a range of printed scarves, hits the floor at Barneys New York; this spring, tops and dresses will follow at the Salvor shop.
To celebrate the new addition, Menuez tapped Charlotte Free, the pink-haired model of the moment, for a lookbook. Free’s been enjoying a banner season, shooting editorials for Love and the upcoming issue of V and campaigns for Topshop and Pamela Love. Menuez explained that he met Free through his daughter, India. “We decided to do it with Charlotte before we had even made half of the prints,” he said. “All of those prints were designed specifically for the shoot with Charlotte in the desert.” The images were shot by Keetja Allard outside of Free’s home in Southern California’s Canyon County, where, as it happens, the sun-faded rocks matched the fade in Free’s hair. “She looked like this bizarre rainbow spirit ghost floating around in the desert,” Menuez remembered. “The whole crew was just staring at her.”
Salvor Projects Sets Up Shop
Salvor Projects’ Ross Menuez was an industrial designer (an award-winning one, no less) before making the jump into fashion. So no chance he would settle for a regular bricks-and-mortar space when he decided to open Salvor’s first retail store, just down the block from his studio on New York’s Lower East Side. In fact, there are no bricks and no mortar in evidence at all in the space. Working with designer Nick Dine, who has designed retail spaces for Kirna Zabête and Calypso Christiane Celle and is also a partner in the business, Menuez created the entire store without paint, sheetrock, or visible brick: The entire interior is covered in waxed MDF (that’s medium density fiberboard for the layman). “We wanted it to look like we carved the space out of one material,” Dine explained, and so it does—one material that angles geometrically throughout the shop, creating walls, partitions, and even a register station that wouldn’t look totally out of place on a streamlined, high-design UFO.
That makes it an admirable home environment for the Salvor collection, whose various components and categories are collected under one roof for the first time. (“We wanted to bring the whole family together,” Menuez explained—in the past, bags might be available at Isetan in Tokyo, menswear at Barneys, special projects at Dover Street Market, and so on.) Soon, a revamped Web site will begin e-tailing the collection as well.
The line focuses on prints, hand-applied in Salvor’s Manhattan studio, and overlaid on traditional men’s shirts, Cone Denim jeans, and gauzy silk dresses. Oversized scarves are printed with vintage photos: some with swooping eagles, others with William Burroughs (who lived for much of his old age just across the street) brandishing a gun. (It’s the first time the Burroughs Foundation has approved and licensed the use of his image.) “We wanted to make things we couldn’t buy,” Menuez explains simply. From the silver-coated Bowie-esque jeans to shirting-fabric anoraks so overprinted the material feels like technical nylon, there’s little chance you could buy them before he dreamed them—and less chance still you’ll find them anywhere else.
Salvor Projects opens today at 172 Forsyth St., NYC, www.salvorprojects.com.
Ecco Domani Looks To Tomorrow—Very Early Today
8:30 a.m. smack in the middle of fashion week is a rough call time, but the winners of this year’s Ecco Domani Fashion Foundation awards were bright-eyed for their victory lap at an ED-sponsored breakfast this morning. (The journalists assigned to cover them, maybe less so.) Former winner Derek Lam kept his remarks to the new class brief: “Get out there and meet everyone.” Winners Prabal Gurung, Joseph Altuzarra, The Blonds, Salvor Project’s Ross Menuez, Siki Im, Prova’s Irini Arakas, and John Patrick, get thee to the schmooze.
First things first, of course: the shows this week, all of which got a boost from the cash award. “A big difference will be backstage, where, instead of six people running the whole thing, we’ll have a proper staff to make sure things run smoothly,” said Altuzarra. Gurung is making the transition from presentation to full-on runway shows and is “excited to shoot higher and push the line further, now more than ever,” he told us. And menswear designer Siki Im may have gotten an influx of funds, but his collection remains about just the opposite. “It’s a story I dreamed up of the boys from Lord of the Flies,” he explained, “growing up, securing a good job on Wall Street—you know, carte blanche, all that—and then suddenly losing it all.”
If He Builds It, They Will Come
Salvor Projects designer Ross Menuez is a hands-on type of guy. That’s putting it mildly: As Menuez prepares for his first-ever fashion week presentation, he’s handling just about every part of it himself. He’s designed the setup of his multimedia installation, created hammocks of industrial plastic in which to suspend Salvor Projects-clothed models, shot and edited the film he’ll be projecting, and has mixed together his own soundtrack, as well as composing some of the music therein. “Do I need to make the food for backstage, too?” Menuez asks, half seriously, as he shows off some of the prints he’ll be using in his upcoming collection. (That’s one, above.)
Given that Salvor Projects is one of the six labels to win this year’s Ecco Domani award, Menuez ought to be able to outsource the catering, at least. But then again, why not take a crack at cookery, too? The designer long ago proved himself a dab hand at, well, just about everything. Trained as an industrial designer, Menuez designed furniture, lighting, and housewares for several years prior to arriving on the fashion scene; in 1996, he took home the Best New Designer prize at the ICFF. While working for Habitat, he developed an interest in textiles, and, he says, “began shifting into thinking in 2-D.” The interest in textiles begat an interest in printing, which begat Salvor Projects in 2003. The line has since comprised silkscreened tees and scarves, printed leather handbags, outerwear, and one pair of steel-toe work boots. Fall ’10 is Menuez’s fourth season focusing primarily on womenswear, and his February 10 presentation has given him an excuse to revert to 3-D thinking: He says he wants the experience of entering the West Chelsea space he’s booked to be immersive. “It’ll be dark, and kind of like the girls are sleeping, and the film is like their shared dream. A collective unconscious. And when people enter, it’ll be like they’re entering the same dream.”