The Look Book says Hello

Many look books are story books. They talk of fables, or recent events,

or places visited, or things overheard. Recently, Starfish looked at the work

of artist Len Lye to create a story-based collection, while Sophie Burrowes

visited a dark, but sometimes silvery, London for her look book.

And, like a sub-genre, the world of nostalgia has increasingly become a big,

warm engine for storyline inspiration. Nostalgia isn't riding back centuries to

epochs we never knew like the court of Eighteenth Century France or the

horse-racing events of Edwardian times. More, it is a brief trip back into our

own memories. It can be a glance at things we're just on the cusp of forgetting

about: psychedelic patterns, quaint sayings, black and white TV, sitting around

a cheese fondue.

With such effort going into the look book, it is great to see print versions still

being produced along with the online presentations. The printed books are

distinctively tactile. We spot them sitting on counters, we take them away for

perusal at our leisure, and we can show them to friends. The print medium

allows for a huge variety of size from the jumbo like a Sunday newspaper

through to a pocket-edition. All types of paper stock are used from newsprint

to heavy gloss, and there is scope for typographical swish.

One such pocket-edition look book is the Voon Winter 2011 collection: "How to Make a Bath Bomb". Immediately we are in the realm of story-telling (the 'how-to' manual), and nostalgia 
('I haven't heard of that for ages'). Voon's book takes us through instructions of how to make these scented tablets which fizz when they hit water at a delicious, illustrated pace. Oh no, we won't be rushed.

This image is called 'Sprinkle with Dried Petals'. We are about half way through the recipe, and illustrated is the collection's Bow Wow jacket and skirt. This is a fine weave of polyester/wool, with the white cotton bows being felted and weaved into the bolts of fabric. The bows are arresting and fanciful; not unlike the black tips of ermine tails seen across the dazzling white of coronation robes.

 

We are now ready to deliver the bath bomb to a friend. Illustrated here is the Cupcake Dress -- its confectionery pink colouring and glorious rose blooms done in velveteen. Over the dress is the Frosting Jacket. Although entirely synthetic, the material has exactly the same texture and feel as the Astrakhan wool used for centuries as collars, hats and facings.

Finding Old Wool

Deep in the cupboards of hundreds of houses lie jerseys and cardigans mostly unwanted, or at least unused. They are considered old-fashioned and a little ‘home made’. They have patterns which today are considered ludicrous, and some of the colours might make us run a mile. But for some this is treasure waiting to be reworked – upcycled – into exciting new presentations. It is a resource to be extracted from friends and swept up from thrift shops.

Coromandel-based Emma Churchill, a 2009 graduate from Massey University, loves the wool that nobody much wants. She has a keen sense for recycling based on both an ethical sense of abhorring casual waste, and also the artistic spirit of ‘this is still useful’.

She unpicks garments, surrounds herself with yarn, then re-knits this into lengths of cable. This is the hobby-like, unhurried, technique of French knitting. The cables are all lengths and all colours, sewn together side by side. The cables stand out like paint squeezed straight from the tube. The result is bold, painterly, and visceral. Further, the garments possess the decided patina of being art pieces; it is not necessary that they are worn. The works shown here come from her collection titled ‘Consume This’ – a title whose subtext says consume this instead.

This balaclava is a tea-cosy hilarious accessory with its meandering lines of confectionary colour. It would, of course, be superbly rejected as an item of camouflage for a Special Operations unit.This work of garment/art retains its spool showing how a single thread ends up being a thick cable. It’s like an instruction manual attached to the finished item. And, stitched in white, is the ‘designer label’ – Churchill’s brand name and web address //emroce.com 

Welcome Home

The materials for this piece called Welcome Home are enamel fused onto copper, set around lengths of found chain. The work is both a necklace and also a work of pinned-up art which you go up to from time to time and simply peruse. The tags read of actual places – Ealing, Rangitata, Hinds, Tinwald – and sayings like ‘hook, line and sinker’ as well as depictions of items like an axe, a milk bottle, a fishing hut and a magpie. 

The lettering is done in big capitals; the informal typeface we might find down rural roads warning us not to trespass or dump rubbish. The locale of these place names is the countryside around Ashburton, and up into the headwaters of the rivers of the Canterbury Plains. We read the tags, but the tags are saying more than just the words. For this piece is a protest. 

The tags recall a clear, unhurried time full of childhood destinations but now, on revisiting, pollution, overcrowding and bulk farming practices have spoiled the land. The name of the necklace has now become wry and cynical.The necklace is by jeweller-artist Kay Van Dyk whose childhood years were spent in the district. Now based in Nelson, Van Dyk trained both in New Zealand as well as at the Guildhall University in London where there was great attention paid to the art of silversmithing. 

Her accomplishment in techniques, coupled with a spirit of wishing to memorialise recent events and nostalgia, gives her work a great presence as both jewellery and one-off works of art. Van Dyk is represented in Wellington at Quoil gallery at 149 Willis Street

Into Wonderland: Trelise Cooper in Wellington

Since it went up in 1906, the old Public Trust building on Lambton Quay has always fascinated with its Florentine-Edwardian architecture. Here is a full display of the polished granite, marble, limestone and red brick so beloved by the period’s best architects—the delicious Baroque notes, the little decorative surprises, the feeling that here is something special.

The new Trelise Cooper shop for Wellington is in this building, and serenely complements the old architecture with its own fresh wonderland offerings of Baroque notes, surprises and feelings.

The shop is like a long gallery. This is the architecture of fantastic first impression, followed by a thoughtful voyage through it, pausing and noticing. Overhead, skylights and wooden ceiling trusses add flavour, and escort us.

The design is the work of Penny Barnett whose long association with Trelise Cooper meant there was a deep understanding of what the brand stood for; what its story was. A Baroque spirit presides. 


This is no suddenly decided-upon notion, as the brand has had this spirit for many years. In this shop, the baroqueness appears in a wealth of bloom-and-tendril motifs. These appear in framed drops of vintage wallpaper, the moulded ormolu on the French furniture, the painted rondels on the floor and the copper and iron work which dazzles along the way. Particularly stunning are the peony-big blooms fabricated from copper sheeting left behind by a previous tenant of the space.

Garments are displayed both on racks set into shallow bays, and as styled mannequins. This styling work is exceptional: the mannequins show the exuberance of each individual piece as well as combining pieces so the visitor can really absorb the Cooper love of layering, colouring and embellishment.

Towards the back of the shop are the dressing rooms – big, glorious tents of bronze-flecked material jutting out to soften, and excite, the view. They hint at the lavish campaign tents that Napoleon used on his way to Russia. Such a military hint is also occasionally encountered in some of the garment designs where there is the use of braid, epaulettes, pipings and facings done in regimental gold and cord.

At the rear of the shop stands a magnificent mirror, so generous, and bordered by metal tendril work. On top of the mirror, like a coronet, stands the Trelise Cooper cipher, a lower-case ‘t’ beautifully engulfed with vines. It is the same cipher used for the signboard on the building’s exterior which signals Here Is Wonderland.

Terence Hodgson

Photos courtesy Trelise Cooper

Dallas and Carlos at Superette

It isn’t often that a design house names itself after two apartment blocks,   but this is the case with Australian-based Katherine Etheridge and Jess Constance.The Dallas and The Carlos were the apartment blocks the partners were living in in 2009; sited on the Brazilian island of Floianopolis with immediate access to the area’s forty beaches. 

It was this Brazilian stay which fuelled the idea of setting up a label. Both had been involved in the worlds of interior, fashion and styling design prior, but now was the time to burgeon and thrill with their own ideas. From the beach life came a love for vivid colours, the sounds and smells of a different country, and the juxtaposition of materials like leather made from fish skins, horsehair, rivets and plastics. 

Dallas and Carlos was now a brand making a range of accessories of careful craftsmanship and superb, carefree soul. The photo shows some of the designers’ wristbands – revelling in texture, small engineering and the almost gaudy colours of neoprene. The bands are available at Superette, 106 Victoria Street, where they are displayed with humour around lopped-off branches of silver birch.

Things You Should Know

The Winter 2011 collection from Robyn Mathieson, 97 Willis Street, is titled ‘Things you should know’. The title looks back to the 1960s and 1970s where such phrases as ‘Tomorrow is another day’, ‘Cheese gives you nightmares’, ‘Look before you leap’ and ‘It’s now or never’ peppered so much speech and attitude. These phrases were like maxims, like little survival tips, and Mathieson’s collection has used them as names for a remarkable breadth of garments.

In the photo, from the designer’s look book, the dress is called ‘Tomorrow is another day’. It is a polyester-chiffon, and frothily transparent. It requires a background in the form of a slip, and this means the wearer decides how brilliant or subdued they want the patterning to appear. The patterning is delicious. It, like the collection names, easily puts us in mind of 1960s and 1970s patterns one came across in ceramics, big murals for new buildings, and the decor of inter-island ferries.

Around the shoulders, almost like a bodice but actually a separate garment, is a vest made from felted wool, two layers thick to give it sturdiness, and subtly darted to give it form. Attached to the vest is a collar of possum skin. This is a work of statement. Not everyone will be comfortable with the use of skin, and there is a visceral element as the skin hasn’t been totally trimmed of all its anatomical features like whiskers and ragged edges. The jacket is called ‘I’m a pest vest’.
‘Things you should know’ is an excellent collection; a parade of separates and ensembles with the added wry humour of telling-offy names.

Good Wool

The dress is called ‘Brooke loves that fashion’ and is from the Hale Van Traa autumn collection for 2011.
Here we have the season’s colors of peaceful blues and leafy browns – tones which lead us into wistful, hopeful autumn thinking. These are calming, slow-down shades rather than the dense colors of squalls and approaching thunderheads.

The colors are lightly inked onto the fabric. Close up, as we enjoy the patterning, we may well discern in the bands such impressionistic depictions of coast lines, city skylines or geological layers showing where dinosaurs became extinct. The material is wool; a tactile, chunky wool yarn whose unusual weave provides a brilliant texture almost akin to a very fine chain mail. Hale Van Traa is represented by Goodness at 19 College Street, Wellington, and the illustration comes from photographer Russell Kleyn who did the designer’s look book.