Reflections on Pre-Holiday Shopping

While relaxing at home, quilting some fabric while watching Sleepy Hollow on Hulu.com, I came across a series of commercials in preparation for Black Friday and the "Pre-Holiday" shopping insanity that has overtaken the United States and, arguably, the world.

I wonder how many times we see commercials likes this and are told about the effects of buying into such a system. Yes, you will have items that look vaguely similar to the items in the commercial, at prices that, if you are working a job making $30,000 a year and spending less than 20% of your income on Pre Holiday fashions, gifts for nephews and nieces, and a new bag every month for yourself, you could certainly afford it. Nonetheless, how often are we reminded of how buying products through venues such as this supports slave wages that preclude the people who make these products from enjoying the same livelihood as we do, products made with real and synthetic materials that carry immense amounts of toxins, bleaching agents, pesticides and hazardous materials, especially at the rate at which they are mass produced and mass-dumped into non-biodegradable dumps, and that we are buying products that we will never know the process through which such designs are syphoned from unacknowledged independent designers and losing the sacredness of knowing from where the items that we adorn our bodies were conceived and made manifest.

So please, this holiday season (whatever your spiritual and secular persuasion), if you are about the gift giving life, experiment with perhaps making something yourself or purchasing an item that you can build a relationship with its maker, a relationship rooted in love, mutual respect, and reciprocity. Like the original spiritual inspiration behind the now corporatized gift giving season declares, " And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love." (1 Corinthians 13:13), let's spread a little love this season.

Peace, love, and loving our neighbor as ourselves,
T*

New Creative Partnership with Tejer Las Américas!

Boa noite my dear readers!

I write this email to inform you of an incredible partnership and collaboration. Remember when I first started the blog, I mentioned that I would dedicate this project to organizing fashion shows and collections throughout the Americas, in an attempt to weave together our beautiful hemispheric diversity through recycled fashion?

Well, while facilitating the fashion-gender-politics workshops in Los Angeles, I met the wonderful Justine Massey, creative and mastermind behind "Tejer Las Américas," where she will be doing just that- traveling throughout every beautiful country of our hemisphere connecting artists and creatives of all flavors (including fashion!) in a beautiful tapestry of partnership and connection. These connections will manifest themselves through the creation of a mural in each city, modeled after an amazing geometric tessellation (fashion line threeASFOUR does this!) of hands joining together as well as an image unique to each city.

And thus ReciclaGEM-theMovement has been invited as creative liaison! While based in New York, we will nonetheless be using the tools of the internet, skype, and digital media to create collaborative fashion shoots, collections inspired by Tejer Las Américas' murals,  connecting artists remotely to the project, and when in the same cities, partnership on fashion shoots in person!
 

It's amazing how serendipity brought us together and how through art, we shall weave literally and figuratively a beautiful web of connections and artwork representative of the beautiful hemispheric diversity that is America, the beautiful.

We are funding for a van to assist with travels. Being at a critical point in funding for the campaign, join us in bringing this project to life!
 

As a bonus for supporting the project, you can opt for some beautifully crafted, geometrically intriguing, woven jewelry crafted by the designer Justine Massey herself (artisan-made GEMs yes!) or even have the opportunity to partner with the project onsite in one of the cities!

Synergy, Collectivity, and Let's Tejer Las Américas!

T*

Artist Highlight: Miki Katagiri | Hatmaking as Sculpture

Today, I had the amazing pleasure to meet former junk-artist, current hat-sculpting activist artist, Miki Katagiri, in her Williamsburg studio. Miki and I met at the Eyebeam Gallery last week at the Carrie Mae Rose Computational Fashion opening. Miki was wearing this hat, and my friend, Helese, stopped her and complimented her on her amazing style, after which I joined the conversation. She went on to explain the significance of the hat; the internal battle of youth struggling between two thought paradigms: love or prestige, the "heart" or the "castle." With the style, uniqueness, craftsmanship, and activist message, I had to know more. After an email exchange, she invited me for tea and great conversation in her studio.

 (The story behind this piece? You need to break through 

the repetitive "record" of life to move forward).

Miki relocated to New York City from her hometown of Tokyo 24 years ago, and has been a practicing artist ever since. She began creating what she describes as "junk art," art reclaimed from the environment, sculptures of refuse, monuments crafted with the unique remains of all the environments that she collected from. Miki says that her mother, a visionary woman and artist who created everything from handbags made from discarded umbrellas to elegant pouches made from reclaimed obi belts, inspired much of her interest in reclaimed materials.

(A beautiful pouch made from a reclaimed obi belt, made by 

her mother who has inspired much of her interested in reclaimed art)

Miki participated in many art shows, including one group show called " Urban Jungle," where the entire collection was purchased by legendary 1980s/1990s boutique, Unique (You might remember this boutique from Isabel Toledo's memoir, Roots of Style). From her junk art days, when asked what type of art she created, Miki would respond, "It depends on the street."

Over the past ten years however, she has created hats as sculpture. While by day she may be a hat designer at Ralph Lauren and Patricia Underwood, or a hat instructor at Parsons at the New School for Design, by night she is creating powerful, prolific sculptures that speak narratives of environmentalism, social justice, and the complexities of the human spirit. What else should you have on the sacred crown of your head, other than a work of art that can speak your values for you?

With some freshly brewed black bean tea in hand, I had the opportunity to iPhonegraph some of Miki's dialogic works for art:

 

 (See the art hidden within?)

 (Not all of her pieces are explicitly political. For instance, this hat, adorned with suspended falling leaves, is simply and elegantly inspired by the season, Fall)

(Wear this hat, and you can take out small felt hearts from the top and give out love to everyone you pass along your merry way. Think loving thoughts and spread the love around, literally!)

(311: a reminder of the aftermath that continues to be experienced as a result of March 2011 earthquake and tsunami in Japan. To this day in October 2013, Japan and now Hawaii and California are faced with radioactive leaks that put many in danger. Our planet needs us. And this piece reminds us that caring for each other in the aftermath is as critical as during the event itself.)

(

(Even the vegan in me appreciated these. The first is made from reclaimed fox fur. However, instead of merely using the animal and not acknowledging the life lost, Miki created a hat inspired by the fox dreaming of being a bird in its second life. The second piece, created from reclaimed beaver fur, is inspired by a beaver dreaming of being a tree in its second life. What if ever fashion product created from animals did this? So brilliant).

(Deforestation and the lone animal searching for shelter. Enough said).

There are so many more brilliant pieces, such as the ones inspired by the process of oxygenation, created with live plants that convert carbon dioxide into oxygen right on your head. I invite you and encourage you to look through her website and blog. The works truly do speak for themselves.

**A SPECIAL INVITATION**

If you are in New York on Monday November 4th, Wednesday November 6th, and Monday November 11th, you will have the amazing opportunity to attend a workshop with Miki firsthand at noneother than the Ggrippo Art + Design Gallery in Williamsburg.

Let's create some powerful, world-changing, hat sculptures together,

T*

Designer Highlight: threeASFOUR

Fashion that demonstrates "how the visual world binds these cultures to one another...”

 (From exhibit "Insalaam Inshalom")

A Palestinian, an Israeli granddaughter of Auschwitz survivors, and a German all join together to start a fashion line in the name of unity, in the cosmopolitan city of New York, as a technology for human unification and healing. Need I say more?

threeASFOUR is an inspiration. It is an avant garde brand that, like many brands that have undergone changes and transformations, re-emerged on the NYC scene in 2005 as a fashion line less interested in producing fashion for commercial means and more interested in life-changing meaning making. They make use of technology to re-engage sacral geometry and other age-old shamanic wisdom, creating garments seek to project a silent cry for peace and unity beyond difference through the textile hieroglyphic effect of their design.

More than simply a brand, they are a team of visionaries. In this amazing styleLikeU interview, Gabi Asfour, Angela Donhauser, and Adi Gil drops some knowledge that is truly inspiring me as I write this post in my studio, and hopefully you as well.

• "Using tiling was a representation that the whole comes from the unit and the unit creates the whole. By using tiling, we felt like we could also deal with things that are outside humanity. It's not just about religions but the connections of humanity to animals and to plants and to the planet and to other planets and to other solar systems and galaxies. As a message of unity we feel like geometry is the essence of it."- Gabi Asfour

"I look more for the unity between everybody because I think we are the same in the end."- Adi Gil

• "To be able to make clothes and to have some kind of a message behind it means so much because, at the end of the day, nobody needs more clothes. Nobody needs another dress, but if we do something and there is a meaning behind it [that] brings people together, for me this is like a dream come true."-Adi Gil

"We are becoming more wise and we are healing ourselves from all of the shit that we went through."- Gabi Asfour


It is not surprising that their dedication to peace and unity has extended into history-making artist collaborations, such as Spring 2010 collaboration with avant-garde peace activist, Yoko Ono.


Let's give peace a chance.

Peace, love, and fashion human-culture-art-actvist history,
T*

Artist Highlight: Johannes Zits

 

("Embodying Nature: Relating to Geography")

Boa tarde, my readers,

It is only fitting that I follow the workshop on Fashion and Embodiment with a series of posts that highlight artists who are addressing those very subjects. For while fashion is a word we are all familiar with, embodiment is the very essence that we are talking about.

And one of such artists is Johannes Zits, Toronto-based but globally prolific, who engages the subjects of embodiment, textiles, and garments in ways that extend beyond the word "fashion" but, in the words of my dear friend and muse, Randal Jacobs, become "high concept."

I first met Johannes in the lobby of SESC-Vila Mariana of São Paulo after watching him, day by day, over the course of the Hemispheric Institute's Encuentro conference, shred his suit jacket to pieces and weave it into a loin cloth.

 

This loin cloth then became revived once again as the embodied action in the trees of the Praça Roosevelt in São Paulo, similar to another performance  "I'm not slim." which he staged in Callejon de Mesones, "a gentrified section" in Centro Histórico, Mexico City.



These pieces  represent but a myriad of ways that he has engaged art viewer and audience in subtle engagements facilitated through the interaction of his body with the environment, urban, natural, remote, gentrified, diverse, provincial- environments are ripe with connotations and opportunities for activist engagement.

What dare I say of this praxis??

A lot. Johannes has been practicing for two decades. His work has explored via his material surroundings subjectivity, corporeality, nudity and cloth. Cloth is a language through which he paints narratives of discourse, some pre-defined, others, open to the reinterpretation and re-envisioning of the viewer. The narratives are then recommunicated through the media of photography, live installations, performances, videos, actions, and last but certainly not least, textile bricolage.

Similar to El Anatsui, some of his work involves recycled materials because of his sheer interest in the medium and the performance of reinterpretation instead of an explicit environmentalist statement. Nonetheless, because of his intimate connection with the material, whether the re-envisioned fabric scrap, nature or his nude body in concert with these natural and reclaimed materials, his work still illuminates, perhaps inadvertently, questions of consumption, excess, and human living that either is amenable or sharply contrasts that of the natural earth.

("Re-Dressing Landscape")

While in Toronto for Fashion Art Toronto earlier this year, an event at which he also presented, I had the amazing opportunity to meet with Johannes in his beautiful studio  and view some of the latest textile works that inform much of his performance.

"The Marriage Quilt"

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Bricolage is a powerful medium to re-engage the mind on the power of embodiment.

Inspired by artists such as Johannes Zits, El Anatsui, Jean Michel Basquiat, David Hammons, and Wangechi Mutu, among many others, I move foward with my ever evolving environment-inspired line, ReciclaGEM, through the crafting of my Fall 2014 Collection, entitled "Bricolage," created with the vision of reclaiming the discarded of our environment to become re-aquainted with it.

That is what Johannes and such artists have done in art and performance, and that is what I hope also do in fashion, with the worlds of performance, art and fashion being in symbiotic and consistent conversation with one another.

Peace, love, and embodiment,
T*

Lovely Photos of Our L.A. Workshop!

Some more lovely photos of our brilliant "Playing Dress Up" team, from a range of cities from Santiago to Toronto, together in L.A.!

My Role as a Designer

Boa noite friends,

I write this post with my deepest sincerity and candor. ReciclaGEM is world is an open world to which you are invited to enter, play dress up, deconstruct garments, reconstruct identities, leave preconceptions at the door, and bring a mind and a heart and a fashion sense ready to challenge fashion's previous and currently destructive hegemony over people and our planet. If you ever felt excluded, if you ever felt confused in a sea of leather jackets and handbags wondering if cruelty free fashion is truly possible, if you ever wondered how fashion could answer to its history and present hand in slave labor and environmental disregard, if you ever felt alienated by monochromatic palettes, tailored shift silhouettes, and trend books conceived scientifically but without a notion of soul, this world is for you.

(Photo Cred: Kat Soutar)

While I oscillate between the business-minded "we" to refer to the behind the scenes work I do, I am writing this post to let you know that WE are together in the imaginative creation of this world.

Whether via social media or in person, I write to reassure you that you have been given the keys to the city of ReciclaGEM with the opportunity to help craft a world where fashion is a prominent, self-reflexive, and dynamic vehicle for social balance, image activism, environment justice, peace and love.

(Photo Cred: Kyra Frierson)

 

Each collection, post, encounter, and interaction reflect a chiseling away at a vision of what recycled fashion, culturally inclusive fashion, cruelty free fashion, and people and earth conscious fashion can do to add to the creation of more beauty and harmony in this world.

(Photo Cred: Stephen Elliot, Mud Productions)

With that, I will see you breakfast,

Peace, love, and collectivity,
T*