ACCORDING TO THE PHILOSOPHERS Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, in art as in philosophy authors create conceptual personae as productive tools to express ideas and suggest new modes of thought.¹ Friedrich Nietzsche signed himself ‘the Antichrist’ or ‘Dionysus crucified’ while Joseph Beuys crafted his ‘shaman’ persona for his Actions from the 1960’s forward to combine his spiritual inclinations with unorthodox materials and a ritualistic brand of performance art. The same is true for artistic collectives such as Invisible Committee and Bernadette Corporation, which can be seen as examples of ‘collective conceptual persona[e]’ in that they are groups who perform a fictive person by ‘opting for opacity.’² In fashion, both designers and brands can become ‘social and/or artistic masks.’³ Designers or brands often employ a conceptual persona as productive tool to describe their creative approach or express their philosophy. The recently renamed Maison Margiela has successfully chosen anonymity as core value and PR strategy since its establishment, often using the mask both literally and metaphorically.

Yohji Yamamoto’s autobiography, My Dear Bomb (2010), similarly creates a complex conceptual persona of a designer, that of the ‘insider/outsider.’ A composite autobiography; the text of My Dear Bomb is a collection of multiple voices, writing styles and visuals. The designer’s own poetic writing dominates the text of the book, but is punctuated with other ephemera: recorded conversations with writer Ai Matsuda, lyrics to songs by Yamamoto, as well as short contributions and letters from friends and critics. Visuals such as photographs and sketches confer to the autobiography elements typical of journals and sketchbooks. Throughout the book, and in the obscurity of its non-linear narrative, Yamamoto positions himself as an outsider despite the fact that he is celebrated as a ‘designer’s designer’⁴ by the fashion industry at large. The book is an extension of Yamamoto’s practice but ultimately reinforces the core values and aesthetic of the Yamamoto brand in the creation of this paradoxical persona.

Throughout My Dear Bomb, Yamamoto maintains a resistance to the fashion industry. Reflecting on his 1981 debut in Paris, which received criticism from mainstream press and established his cult-like following, in the book the designer explains this ambivalent position with a metaphor: ‘I was turning my back to stick out my tongue at the world, so when they praised me for it, I immediately felt uneasy.’ This oppositional stance to the industry, and accepted notions of fashion, is reiterated with the use of militaristic terms. His relationship to fashion is a ‘fight,’ a ‘struggle,’ a ‘battle’ motivated by ‘anger’ and ‘rage’ – a careful selection of words that underlines Yamamoto’s awareness in crafting his persona and philosophy. Fashion itself becomes a war-like endeavour: ‘Simply put, the work of a fashion designer is a battle with tailoring.’ These principles can be seen in Yamamoto’s women’s and menswear, which regularly seek to challenge the association between Western femininity, display and sexuality and traditional notions of masculinity and power. This outsider stance, further developed in My Dear Bomb, extends beyond fashion and embraces broader socio-cultural systems of control, including bourgeois values and gender roles, an ingredient essential to the Yamamoto brand.

In My Dear Bomb Yamamoto’s conceptual persona is reinforced in the poetic style in which the book is written. The text resembles that of poetry or music, rather than a traditional narrative of autobiography. Throughout the book the author regularly likens his work to other components of the arts: according to Yamamoto, in fashion, as in music, the hand of the designer must be practiced like a ‘finely tuned piano’ to create a garment that will have a life of its own and ‘begin to sing.’ Even functionality is bestowed a lyrical quality in Yamamoto’s descriptions, where pockets are ‘for storing treasures,’ the ‘life or death of a garment depends on finding the point of rapture’ for a button and ‘the pleasures of attaching sleeves are like those of building tunnels.’ Yamamoto indirectly becomes himself a poet, musician and architect, creating secondary conceptual personae that reinforce his status as a fashion outsider, while simultaneously projecting an artistic aura onto his designs and, by association, his brand. By proclaiming himself an outsider, then, he engages in a branding strategy that paradoxically reveals his position as an insider.

The evocative language of these moments of reflection on craftsmanship through metaphor, imagine new possibilities for fashion as discourse and practice. By enriching its vocabulary, Yamamoto indirectly offers alternative approaches of engaging with the subject of fashion based on the richness of materiality and the bodily, sensorial experience it can trigger. In particular, references to touch and hearing throughout My Dear Bomb offer a unique insight into the potential of the ‘erotics of design’⁵ to enrich everyday life and the human experience. Like Thomas Carlyle’s tailor in Sartor Resartus, though lacking the irony of the original, the designer’s words elevate fashion to the status of an autonomous artistic realm that may even offer reflections on the human condition:

‘Just as man lives and grows old, so too does fabric live and age. When fabric is left to age for a year or two, it naturally contracts, and at this point it can reveal its charm. The threads have a life of their own, they pass through the seasons and mature. It is only through this process that the true appeal of the fabric is revealed. […] The intense jealousy I occasionally feel towards used clothing comes from this fact. It was in just such a moment that I thought, “I would like to design time itself.”’

Simultaneous to his symbolic struggle with mainstream fashion, My Dear Bomb reveals a reverence to the craft of fashion that encourages us to read Yamamoto as an ‘insider’ to the fashion community. He admits a sense of companionship with the likes of couturiers Jean-Paul Gaultier and Azzedine Alaïa in their quest for the perfect construction. When discussing the issue of the neckline, for instance, he declares himself jealous of Sonia Rykiel’s perfectly calculated round neck rather than Rei Kawakubo’s neckline, a ‘hole for the neck’ that she masterfully opens with bold, punk-like attitude. Yamamoto’s views on garment construction confirm his position as colleague to these influential designers of the past three decades, and embeddedness within these ranks in the fashion industry.

The book My Dear Bomb as an object itself fulfils Yamamoto’s trademark sensibility and ability to engage successfully with branding. The design of the book, by Paul Boudens, well-known for collaborating with members of the Belgian and Japanese avant-garde, reinforces the idea that, more than an autobiography, the book is an artistic manifesto. Yamamoto’s trademark black extends across the cover and on the edges of the pages. The paper of the book, coarse and thick, has a tactile quality that further reinforces an emphasis on the format, alongside content, of the book. My Dear Bomb in this sense is a collectible and a rare commodity in itself.

Anecdotal and often obscure, Yamamoto’s My Dear Bomb is lacking as traditional autobiography. However, it can be read as a highly refined and crafted manifesto in which Yamamoto as a person, his persona and his brand are inseparable. But if, as Deleuze and Guattari write, ‘the destiny of the philosopher is to become his conceptual persona or personae,’ My Dear Bomb allows Yamamoto to become, from time to time, a rebellious outsider, a critical insider, a master tailor, a warrior, a nostalgic poet, a sensitive musician and, ultimately, a designer whose success lies in the impossibility of pinning him down.

Alessandro Esculapio is a writer and PhD student at the University of Brighton, UK.

1. G. Deleuze & F. Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, London & New York, Verso, 1994. ↩

2. S. Lütticken, “Personafication: Performing the Persona in Art and Activism”, New Left Review, 96, Nov-Dec 2015. ↩

3. Ibid. ↩

4. L. Salazar, Yohji Yamamoto, London, V&A Publishing, 2011. ↩

5. A. Aldrich, “Body and Soul: The Ethics of Designing For Embodied Perception,” in D. McDonagh (ed.), Design and Emotion, Boca Raton, FL, CRC Press, 2003. ↩

From a formal fashion education, to an informal art education, Cianciolo’s practice spans two decades and resides in both of these contexts. Her performances and exhibitions during the Nineties with figures like Bernadette Van-Huy and Rita Ackermann inform a body of work that subverts fashion, though not always overtly so. This living archive is crucial to Cianciolo’s practice, and she constantly draws from her past output, repurposing clothes into new projects and in the process reminding us that fashion can be a continuum – an ongoing process that doesn’t necessarily forget itself with the rigour that mainstream fashion sometime suggests.

Laura: Could you explain your practice as a fashion designer and talk us through how you put a collection together?

Susan: This is actually a question I am always asking myself since I don’t create a collection in the formal sense, even though it’s a body of work that includes clothing. For example, in a few days I’m leaving for Mississippi for a show at Yalo Studio, this is a gallery in a community steeped in the tradition of quilting and textiles. The reason I took this residency, brought about by the Pine Hurst Artist Residency, is because I like going to different locations where I merge with a new environment. So what I’m doing right now is preparing a collection of clothing or products for the project. I decided for the project to go into my archives and add pieces from it, for example I’m using these body suits from a performance I did at MMK in Frankfurt. I am always looking through my archive and pattern library and pulling things out to recreate them in a new context.

Laura: So it’s part of an ongoing process…

Susan: The clothing is one part of these projects, they might also involve a performance, drawings, film or animation. It is just one of the mediums in my work. I don’t sit down and plan for a season. It all depends on what the exhibition or project is and I make specific pieces for each context. After that private clients come to me, or friends like the retailer Maryam Nassir Zadeh, who sells my work in her shop. But all this happens after, and it’s not something I plan for.

Laura: When you say ‘performance’, what exactly does this mean in the context of your work? Are we talking about a traditional runway presentation?

Susan: It can be anything really, in the last performance I did for an exhibition at Mito Contemporary Art Center (which was later shown at MIMOCA) in Japan I cast girls that worked in local galleries and museums and customised my garments to them. I’ve also worked on projects with a pop up restaurant that travels to various private homes, and for this I create a dining experience for the visitors. We dress the staff in costumes that we’ve made, so it’s a visual performance as well as an experience through the food, and then there’s the music and all the details of the event. Every aspect is hand-made and connected to the experience.

Laura: So it’s almost the reverse of the way traditional fashion works in that, instead of putting clothing on a pedestal or catwalk, you’re bringing it back into a more intimate context.

Susan: I’m creating an experience or sensation with the clothes, it’s important to me that the presentation of the products is as natural as the process, to show that all the aspects are equal and accessible. Most of the garments and homewares are completely made by hand, so it’s a very tailored and labour intensive process. I also try to re-use my archive of works and keep adding or adapting past designs but we also keep making new pieces.

Laura: How is your studio structured? Do you have a production team?

Susan: It changes, but right now there are three people in the studio, which is quite a big team for me. I stopped doing production some years ago because I needed such a big team to do it in-house. At the moment I’m collaborating with Kiva Motnyk in Soho and we’re recreating RUN Home collection, which is something we began in the Nineties, so we have a team at her studio and I have a team here at my studio developing the collection, and it goes back and forth.

Laura: What’s the thinking behind revisiting a past RUN collection into your current way of working?

Susan: I’m always going back into my archive and using original pieces from RUN in new projects, so there’s never a sense of new or old for me. And Kiva and I have been working together for so long there was a real understanding of how we could do something similar in a new context: this collaboration was born from that complicity.

Laura: How does the collection work?

Susan: RUN Home is a collection for the home, and comes out of RUN, the label I originally worked with when I started out making clothes. The collection is made up of all kinds of products for the interior, from bedding to drink coasters. What I’m doing now is making clothes that work with the Home collection, for example a hand-made pillow set comes with a kimono to wear. I’m taking a holistic approach; it’s continuum of my work with one-of-a-kind pieces. We’re also collaborating with other people: artists and clothing designers like Jessica Ogden and Zoe Latta, Hans Gillickson, who is making furniture, and we have ceramics made by Jasiu Krajewski. So we spend a lot of time seeking out collaborators. But the wearable aspect, like the kimonos, reflects what you would wear if you were in your home, so it is an imagining of what a home space would look like.

Laura: How do you exercise control over an aesthetic when you collaborate in this way?

Susan: Well we approach like-minded artisans so that our aesthetics join together. With Kiva, since we’ve worked together for so long, we already have an understanding of an aesthetic for the collection, so we know if it works or if it doesn’t. We share a common language.

Laura: In light of the topic of ‘slowness’, the theme for the next print issue of Vestoj, is sustainability a conscious aspect of you work?

Susan: A lot of people ask me this and it isn’t something I sought out, but it’s always existed in my way of working. As ‘sustainability’ became really popular, I got brought into the conversation, but it’s not something I do consciously. I’m not waving the flag of the eco-friendly designer; I feel it’s much broader than that. Most of my textiles are either organic or vintage, and I’m constantly repurposing in my studio, so sustainability just happens naturally.

Laura: In terms of your artistic approach and philosophy, I wondered how you see clothes and their role in our everyday lives? How do you hope that your garments are used and worn?

Susan: I don’t have any expectation actually, but I would say that I feel a lot of love towards the clients who buy my garments. It’s a very intimate relationship between a designer and a wearer. For a personal client, the pieces are custom-made or they’ve bought pieces for so many years that we have a really close relationship. These clients understand my clothes so deeply, and the amount of sewing that goes into the pieces as well as the level of care. I never project how I want a piece of clothing to be worn, they’re free to do what they want with them.

Laura: Since your process is so personal, I wonder if there are particular aspects of the fashion industry that you react to, or are trying to subvert? Your earlier work was more overtly subversive, how does that compare to how you work now?

Susan: Earlier I was really trying to be subversive. I was trying to make a point and it was my goal to be as subversive as I could possibly be; I guess I did a good job. But now I realise that I don’t have to try so hard, it just comes naturally by working in a different way to the mainstream. I don’t think there is even the slightest bit of me needing to rebel anymore, it’s more about accepting that my work will always stand out as different to the fashion industry.

Laura: Could you discuss your earlier work, with artists like Rita Ackermann and Bernadette Corporation, a bit further? Were you exploring specific ideas at this time and do they still come into your work?

Susan: When I remember those first presentations, for me that was the beginning of making a show. What set it apart was very subtle. For example, for the first show I did at the Andrea Rosen Gallery on Spring Street in New York, I put tape on the floor to mark the runway for the models, which at that time seemed so different, but it was just all I had to offer. The first model had a switch-blade that she flipped while she was on the runway, an action that echoed the aesthetic of the clothes. Bernadette Van-Huy (of the art collective Bernadette Corporation) had sliced the tank tops off the shoulder. We also had cheap wigs for the hairstyles and I was really experimenting with styling, so the subversion came out of our resourcefulness and experimentation.

The second show we did was in an abandoned parking garage. A friend drove around and picked up these wooden planks used for shipping crates which we covered in brown paper and used as the runway. I also had the makeup artist do really heavy makeup, so the models looked ugly and sickly in a way. So like the first show, it was very raw and through these aspects, it became a subversive statement.

For the third show, I presented a film, ‘Pro Abortion Anti-Pink’ which collaborated with different photographers who had never made films before, like Terry Richardson, Annette Aurell, Chris Moor, Cheryl Dunn, Marcelo Krasilcic, Tobin Yelland and myself and we each made a vignette. During the fashion show, the band No Neck Blues played and it was so loud that it was quite bothersome to the audience. It was always one thing after another, and it wasn’t about money, it was just ideas and experiments. I think all this work came about from not having any resources, just your brain and your creativity!

Laura: Were you trying to work more in an art context? Or was it a fashion vernacular you were working with?

Susan: Well I didn’t have a strategy back then, but now there’s a lot of planning in the way that I work. At the time I was married to Aaron Rose who owned Alleged Gallery, so half of my existence was in the art world. I think I was making art, but not intentionally. So many interviewers would ask me ‘is it art or fashion’? Having to decide which to align with felt very stressful at the time because back then no one was doing both. But eventually I just thought why not, and why couldn’t I?

Laura Gardner is a writer in Melbourne.

Fashion is a complex symbol of consumption, ego and beauty; but simultaneously it is also pleasurable to consume, so it is highly potent in an art context. The three-dimensional collage of New York-based artist Josephine Meckseper is one of many personifications of this canon of work. Her work vividly comments on commercial layers of consumer culture by presenting disembodied fragments of sculpture and photography, which act like snapshots of gestures from everyday life. So fashion imagery is used as this sort of double-edge sword, such as in ‘Talk To Cindy’ (2005) which depicts a vitrine filled with knick knacks; a portion of an underwear-clad mannequin, an upside-down box of men’s Calvin Klein underwear, and other domestic artefacts; steel wool, found text and a toilet plunger suggestively hint at smut, but in a sterile way. In this work, the pleasure of consuming the fashion image or aesthetic, at least in fragments, is still functioning, yet re-contextualised in an art framework. Other artists, for example, Richard Philips, Erwin Wurm and K8 Hardy (a contributor to Vestoj‘s On Fashion and Power), to name only a few, whose work – in varying ways – often engages with the fashion image to a similar degree of popularity. Meckseper’s own reputation has been solidified by recent shows at the Parrish Art Museum, NY, and features across fashion and art publications, for example, Interview magazine.¹

Inversely, looking at an artist from the fashion side of things, Juergen Teller is a classic example. Very much operating within the fashion framework (but also as an artist), insofar as he is a fashion photographer, yet after the seasons and magazines have passed, his fashion images are sold as artworks and exhibited in galleries. In working in this way, Teller offers fashion the sort of enduring integrity, or ‘coolness’, that is associated with art. His 2008 series for Marc Jacobs collection campaign with Victoria Beckham, received mainstream attention when he presented Beckham literally as a fashion product, or a product of fashion, when he photographed her in the Marc Jacobs shopping bag. As Teller recalls to Cathy Horyn for The New York Times his conversation with Beckham of the clothes-less image; ‘[…] fashion nowadays is all about product — bags and shoes — and you’re kind of a product yourself, aren’t you?” She was, like, “Uh, yeah.’²

Likewise we see this duality between critique and engagement with the fashion image in the work of the New York-based collective Bernadette Corporation. The one-time fashion label, publication and art collective’s popularity has been solidified by their recent exhibitions at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, and Greene Naftali Gallery in New York. The Corporation (core members include: John Kelsey and Bernadette Van-Huy) have a body of work that delves deep into the structure of a fashion company, creating actual fashion shoots that offer both a critical output, whilst also engaging with the fashion industry. For the photo series ‘Is Everybody on the Floor’ (2009) they recreated a Levis fashion shoot from the 1990s with photographer Jason Mandella, and their show at the ICA featured fashion mannequins in ensembles of cheap taste, references to tattoos, fur, gold jewellery shaped into awkward outfits, which in the gallery context had a surreal effect. The Bernadette Corporation offers a complex critique of the fashion system, and of capitalism, but they are working in a way in which their aesthetic is so dependant on the desirability of the fashion image that it is at risk of moving away from critique. As they explained in an interview with Kaleidescope magazine, ‘Fashion was interesting to us originally because it already operated across all these sectors, across all media. […] It was both a system and an image, and it moved very quickly.’³ But perhaps it is possible to have the best of both worlds, to simultaneously engage with fashion and to keep at the hostile distance of criticism, in avoiding this ‘one or the other’ duality. As Jason Farago writes in his review of their ICA show, ‘Although the label set out to expose the fashion industry’s appropriation of downtown (often immigrant) subcultures, it was also a bona fide brand, covered everywhere from i-D magazine to The New York Times, and noted for recklessly mixing high and low end looks in single items.’⁴

Moreover both these worlds have merged in a complex landscape of visual communication; galleries host fashion shows; artists work as designers, all with weighty PR teams behind them ensuring coverage in the realms of both digital and print. But it is certainly popular for artists to engage with fashion; suggesting that critiquing consumer culture is ‘fashionable’. In the social pages of Purple magazine Josephine Meckseper appears mingling with other influencers and hand-picked cultural figures we are recommended to aspire to, suggesting that art is very much ‘in fashion’.

Laura Gardner is Vestoj’s former Online Editor and a writer in Melbourne.

1. Josephine Meckseper interviewed by Liam Gillick for Interview magazine, http://www.interviewmagazine.com/art/josephine-meckseper/#_ ↩

2. Cathy Horyn for The New York Times, ‘When is a Fashion Ad not a Fashion Ad?’, 2008 http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/10/fashion/10TELLER.html?pagewanted=all ↩

3. Bernadette Corporation interviewed by Annie Ochmanek for Kaleidescope magazine, http://kaleidoscope-press.com/issue-contents/bernadette-corporation-interview-by-annie-ochmanek/ ↩

4. Jason Farago for The Guardian, ‘Bernadette Corporation: “Don’t have sex with each other”‘, 2013 http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2013/mar/24/bernadette-corporation-ica ↩