AngloMania: Tradition and Transgression in British Fashion

AngloMania focuses on British fashion from 1976 to 2006, a period of astounding creativity and experimentation. Over the past 30 years, British fashion has been defined by a knowing and self-conscious historicism. In their search for novelty, designers have looked to past styles with an appetite that is as audacious as it is rapacious. Focusing on their postmodern, historicizing tendencies, this exhibition presents a series of tableaux based on Britain's rich artistic traditions.

The irony of satirical prints, the romance of landscape paintings, and the glamour and bravado of grand manner portraits are evoked through a wide spectrum of British designers.

The exhibition is set in the Metropolitan Museum's English period rooms-the Annie Laurie Aitken Galleries-to create a potent dialogue between the past and the present.

The exhibition and its accompanying book are made possible by Burberry.

Anglomania defined on Wikipedia.

May 30 , 2006

On view December 9, 2005 - March 26, 2006
Organized by the Kyoto Costume Institute, Fashion in Colors explores color as a design element through 300 years of Western fashion.

Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, Smithsonian Institution is the only museum in the United States devoted exclusively to historic and contemporary design. The Museum believes that design shapes our objects, environments, and communications, making them more desirable, functional, and accessible. The Museum celebrates the nature of design and explores its impact on the quality of our lives.

Cooper Hewitt - Fashion in Colors website
Kyoto Costume Institute

December 1, 2005

Issey Miyake

Miyake was born in Hiroshima, Japan in 1938. He established the Miyake Design Studio in 1970 and started to show his line at the Paris Collections in 1973. Miyake's basic tenets for making clothes has always been the idea of creating a garment from 'one piece of cloth', and the exploration of the space between the human body and the cloth that covers it. His approach to design has always been to strike a consistent balance between tradition and innovation, handcrafts and new technology.

PLEATS PLEASE, which was born in 1993, is a radical but eminently practical and universal form of contemporary clothing that combines technology, functionality and beauty. PLEATS PLEASE is exhibited at the Pompidou Center, Paris as the firstexample of clothing design, currently on view as part of an exhibitionentitled: BIG BANG: Destruction et Creation dans l'art du XX Siecle show.

In 1998, Miyake embarked upon a new project called A-POC (A Piece of Cloth) with Dai Fujiwara and a team of young designers. He is challenging the way in which clothing is made using new process that harnesses computer technology to industrial knitting or weaving machines to create clothing beginning with a single piece of thread. Miyake established the Miyake Issey Foundation with the authorization of the Ministry of Education and Science, in February of 2004.

Issey Miyake
Pleats Please Collection

Nov 27, 2005