Arts and Crafts: A new organic spirit in fashion
Fashion's call of nature, from the Industrial Revolution to today's organic spirit
LONDON: There is a new organic spirit in fashion - and its roots go back at least a century. A focus on the imperfectly natural and work touched by human hands is growing away from the high-tech modernism that once seemed to represent the future. Current social issues - about rampant consumerism and a loss of craft skills - also recall the ideals and concerns of an earlier era.
The 21st century seems a long stretch from the original Arts and Crafts movement, founded in the 1880s as the Industrial Revolution belched smoke through England's green and pleasant land. But an exhibition on that subject at London's Victoria & Albert Museum breathes the same air as current fashion.
"It's the right time - Arts and Crafts laid down a whole principle of living and working that has a resonance today," says Karen Livingstone, curator of the V&A show on which she worked for three years and now realizes "completely chimes with people's attitudes."
"People today are looking at the work/life balance, they are socially responsible and concerned about overconsumerism - and they want to escape the pressure of urban life," Livingstone says. She believes that those early intellectual ideas have grown, a century on, into "more fundamental issues about how to live in the world and how to treat the world."
"International Arts and Crafts," under way until July 24, does not present William Morris or John Ruskin as harbingers of holistic living, even if it shows the extraordinary influence the British movement had across the world from Frank Lloyd Wright's prairie housing in urban Chicago to Japan's Mingei (folk craft) movement in the 1930s.
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It would be pretentious to suggest that fashion for 2005 is setting out to relive a 19th-century movement that had, in Livingstone's words, "a strong social underpinning inspiring everyday life."
As Dries Van Noten, the Belgian designer with a personal passion for gardening and a sense of nature in his clothes, says: "As an addicted gardener, I am also aware that I am only a fashion designer. I try to be conscious in that way - without trying to preach."
Yet Van Noten's clothes, with their hand-blocked prints and textured fabrics, are a fine example of the current organic spirit.
Central to the floral patterns that have sprouted this season is the idea of imperfection - or even a touch of the withering and decay that were present in the fin-de-siècle jewelry of René Lalique.
"Too beautiful scares me and too pretty becomes a little boring," says Van Noten, who showed black flower corsages, as if singed, in his latest collection.
The Belgian designer admits that he is inspired directly by his garden, even if he might choose to focus on a dahlia and then deliberately make it oversize. He also works on organic prints, as the Arts and Crafts founders did.
"I am fascinated by tradition and by skills and way of printing and all those things," Van Noten says. "But the Arts and Crafts wanted to go back to old ways - they were against modern times. I like also modern techniques."
Livingstone says that it is not true that the original movement had a Luddite desire to reject the Industrial Revolution. Its founders were sophisticated, urban and modern, even if the textiles, panels and furniture in the exhibition often look like handmade medieval-gothic images.
"One of the myths about Arts and Crafts is that it was just about things made by hand," the curator says. "It was also about improving industrial design, and they were happy to work with industry as long as it was done properly."
At Marni, a powerful Italian brand that still seems rooted in the organic, there is a similar spirit. The designer Consuelo Castiglioni, known for her textured fabrics, veined-leaf patterns, feathery accessories and a color palette of green, brown, russet and slate blue, says that up to 25 percent of each Marni collection is unique, using "motifs which have an identity."
"I like rough woven wools, cottons, linens and silks that are sometimes actually handmade," she says, describing nature as "such an immense basin into which I can plunge for ideas."
"Flowers, leaves, rocks, seeds, bird feather or fish patterns - there is such a variety of shapes, colors and combinations," Castiglioni says. "The imagination is then free to operate by simplifying or replicating patterns, changing, enhancing or neutralizing colors."
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