VIKTOR & ROLF Dolls at the Royal Ontario Museum

      Dolls are conceptual art objects of strange beauty and desire.
                                                                   (Exhibition Label Viktor&Rolf Dolls at the ROM)

Viktor & Rolf Dolls at the ROM, Photo I by Ingrid Mida 2013

Ever since I first laid eyes on the Viktor & Rolf dolls in 2008 at the Barbican Gallery in London, their fashionable presence has haunted me. I've studied the exhibition catalogue repeatedly, read and reread Freud's essay on the uncanny, undertaken research on fashion dolls and used them as inspiration for my own creative journeys into the essence of the uncanny as it relates to fashion. For these reasons, I've been counting the days to their arrival in Toronto as part of the Luminato Festival.

Viktor & Rolf Dolls at the ROM, Photo II by Ingrid Mida 2013

On Sunday, June 9, I visited the ROM, expecting line ups out the door.... I was utterly surprised to find the gallery almost devoid of visitors, and the few that wandered in seemed not to know what they were looking at. I overheard several people asking the gallery attendant for information on what was on display.... Quel horreur!

The June Fashion Calendar

I cannot recall another time when there have been so many fashion related events in Toronto, which means that, for once, I don't have to get on a plane to get my fashion fix. Here are a list of upcoming fashion related events in Toronto for June 2013.

VIKTOR&ROLF Dolls

June 9 - 30: VIKTOR&ROLF DOLLS at the ROM as part of the Luminato Festival
In this presentation at the Royal Ontario Museum, about 25 hand-crafted porcelain dolls styled to replicate runway looks are dressed in scaled-down versions of Viktor&Rolf couture designs. Initially presented in 2008 at the Barbican Art Gallery in London, England in 2008, these dolls have been set on a specially crafted miniature runway in the ROM's Thorsell Spirit House.  The exhibition is free and open during regular Museum hours. I saw this exhibition at the Barbican Art Gallery in 2008 and wrote a post at that time and have written about the dolls as part of a creative process journal project. For these reasons, I am really looking forward to having another look at these uncanny incarnations.

June 9: Out of the Box: The Rise of Sneaker Culture, An Illustrated Talk by Senior Curator Elizabeth Semmelhack at the Bata Shoe Museum 
Curator Elizabeth Semmelhack will discuss the history of the sneaker and the rise of sneaker culture in becoming the footwear of choice for many. My review of the exhibition was published on Modeconnect and my behind-the-scenes visit and interview with Elizabeth Semmelhack is presented on Worn Through.

June 21 at 330 pm: Decentralizing the Museum: The Ryerson Fashion Research Collection 
The Discursive Spaces Conference at the Art Gallery of Ontario (June 20-23) considers the "integration of art, design, and architecture in the creation of memorable and immersive museum experiences, while balancing the public’s expectations of self-directed expression and engagement".  In my joint presentation with architect Guela Solow, we will talk about our shared vision for the remodelling of the space to house the Ryerson Fashion Research Collection. In this conceptual plan,  the barriers of the museum have been disintegrated by integrating the collection within the university environment. Advance tickets are required for this conference and day passes are now available.

Creative Process Journal: The Cabinet of Curiosities for Fashion

The Cabinet of Curiosities at the Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty Exhibition at the Met
(Photo by Ingrid Mida 2011)

Most museums today offer an aesthetic of pristine perfection. This connoisseurship bias rejects anything showing signs of use (the sweat or stains of life on a dress for example) or items that are broken or damaged. Order, perfection and education seem to be the guiding principles of museum presentations today, leaving little room for imagination and wonder.

This is quite unlike the idea of the Wunderkammer or Cabinet of Curiosities that were popular in the 15th to 19th centuries (see my previous post). These rooms or cabinets were packed full of objects meant to inspire delight and wonder at the juxtaposition of rare and unusual objects. The aesthetic of dense accumulation of objects is rarely seen anymore although I can think of one museum where it still exists (The Redpath Museum on the campus of McGill University in Montreal).

Creative Process Journal: The Viktor & Rolf Dolls

Viktor & Rolf doll for 2008 retrospective

The dolls used in the Viktor and Rolf retrospective at the Barbican Gallery in 2008 were based on a nineteenth-century bebe type doll intended as a plaything and produced by the Maison Jurneau in Paris. A Belgian doll maker used real human hair, bisque porcelain faces and paper-mache bodies for the Viktor and Rolf dolls.

Bedtime Story Autumn/Winter 2005-6 Viktor & Rolf

There were two sizes of dolls used in the exhibition at the Barbican: 70 cm tall dolls dressed in miniature versions of the designer's collections and life-size dolls dressed in the actual garments. The shift in scale created an Alice in Wonderland illusion and it was somewhat surreal.

Cover of the exhibition catalogue

The cold perfection and the haunting gaze of the Viktor and Rolf dolls at the Barbicon – both large and small – depicted what Freud has defined as uncanny (and which will be the subject of an upcoming post). Caroline Evans referenced Freud’s essay in the exhibition catalogue and she also pointed out that “the double poses a challenge to the idea of individuality and the doll straddles an uncomfortable boundary between the living and the dead.” (Evans 19).

References:

Evans, Caroline and Frankel, Susannah. The House of Viktor and Rolf. London: Merrell. 2008.
Freud, Sigmund. The Uncanny. London: Penguin Books, 2005

Notice of copyright: 
All text and images on this blog are the copyright of Ingrid Mida, unless otherwise noted. The copying of posts, images and/or text without proper attribution is violation of copyright and legal action will be pursued.

Creative Process Journal: The Uncanny

Viktor and Rolf L'Hiver de L'Amour 1994

This post marks the beginning of a new creative project - that I've tentatively titled The Uncanny. The spark of inspiration for this project comes from a passage I read in the book Adorned in Dreams where fashion scholar Elizabeth Wilson considers the unsettling feelings created by the haunting spectre of costumed mannequins within a museum setting:

The living observer moves with a sense of mounting panic, through a world of the dead…We experience a sense of the uncanny when we gaze at garments that had an intimate relationship with human beings long since gone to their graves. For clothes are so much part of our living, moving selves that, frozen on display in the mausoleums of culture, they hint at something only half understood, sinister, threatening, the atrophy of the body, and the evanescent of life. (Wilson 1).

The element of the uncanny reminded me of the Viktor and Rolf retrospective exhibition at the at the Barbican Gallery in London in 2008 in which porcelain dolls of various sizes were used to present the designer duo’s fifteen years of work. The installation played with scale and was somewhat like a trip to Alice in Wonderland, which was exactly the intent of the exhibition designers (Evans 6).

Viktor and Rolf had used dolls in their collections before. Dolls were part of an early collection called “Launch” presented at the Torch Gallery in Amsterdam in October 1996 in which they presented their hopes and dreams for the future in the form of a miniature design studio, runway show, photographic shoot and boutique. Dolls reappeared in their subsequent collections as well and became the locus of their retrospective at the Barbican.

Over the weeks to come, I will explore the idea of the uncanny, dipping into Freud's essay of that name and as well as researching related topics like mannequins, dolls and the museum. The final outcome will be a visual response to this material. I hope you'll join me on my creative journey!

References:

Evans, Caroline and Frankel, Susannah. The House of Viktor and Rolf. London: Merrell, 2008.

Wilson, Elizabeth. Adorned in Dreams: Fashion and Modernity. London: I.B. Tauris, 1985, reprinted 2011.

Notice of copyright: 
All text and images on this blog are the copyright of Ingrid Mida, unless otherwise noted. The copying of posts, images and/or text without proper attribution is violation of copyright and legal action will be pursued.

Postcards of my travels

I've been burning the candle at both ends... So much so that my brain hurts and I seem to be incapable of stringing a coherent thought together. The timing was unfortunate as today I gave a talk on art and fashion at Ryerson University and felt like I stumbled my way through it. I'm craving sunshine and sleep this weekend, neither of which are on the agenda so I thought I'd travel back in time with my postcard collection. Here are some of my favourites  with links to the posts I wrote at the time.

From the Viktor and Rolf Retrospective at the Barbicon, London 2008

Viktor & Rolf Hana doll 2008
From Bedtime Story, Autumn/winter 2008-09
Photo by Peter Stigler

From the Chanel Mobile Art Container in New York Central Park, 2008

Sophie Calle for Chanel-Mobile Art 2008

From the YSL Retrospective at the Museum of Fine Arts in Montreal

YSL Wedding Dress, spring-summer 1969
Photo by Diane Michals

From the exhibtion Watteau to Degas, French Drawings at the Frick Museum, New York, 2009

Femme Debout, rue de doi, vers 1742
by Francois Boucher

Happy weekend!

Viktor and Rolf

I first fell in love with the work of Viktor and Rolf when I attended a retrospective in 2008 at the Barbicon Gallery in London. It was there that I realized the boundaries between fashion and art sometimes overlap. For Viktor and Rolf, creativity and innovation are expressed in a form of wearable sculpture. I particularly enjoyed their Flowerbomb 2005 collection which included extravagant bows like a gift wrapper gone wild!

Viktor and Rolf's show on March 9, 2010 featured Kristen McMenamny dressed in layers comprised of  the entire collection which were then removed one by one and given to other models. This format was  similar to the routine for their Babushka collection from ten years prior. In a season that has seen a lot of restraint, this performance did not go over well with the critics who seemed to suggest that the show would be remembered "more for the spectacle than the clothes".  

In spite of the poor reviews, I have to applaud Viktor and Rolf for not playing it safe. Apparently many of the clothes have dual uses (for example, a leather coat which reversed to a beaded one), which in a recession, sounds like investment dressing to me!

The House of Viktor and Rolf at the Barbican Art Gallery

Viktor and Rolf are a Dutch design duo that create technically exquisite, artistically breathtaking fashion. I attended the retrospective of their work at the Barbican Art Gallery in London (June 18 - September 21, 2008).

The exhibition presents looks from the past fifteen seasons on custom-made life-size porcelain dolls with the features painted and the hair styled to resemble the model that initially wore that garment. The other-worldly beauty of these dolls is surreal and somewhat unsettling.

My favourite garments were from Flowerbomb 2005 where bows and ribbons decorated the outfits like an exquisite partly unwrapped gift.

Flowerbomb Collection Spring/Summer 2005
Photo by Ingrid Mida 2008

I also loved the dove-white duchess satin wedding dress of Her Royal Highness Princess Mabel von Orange-Nassua from the White collection of 2002.

Viktor & Rolf White collection 2002
Photo by Ingrid Mida 2008

Viktor & Rolf White Collection 2002
Photo by Ingrid Mida

The highlight of the show is a spectacular 6 metre high doll's house containing 54 custom-made dolls, wearing a perfect miniature version of a Victor and Rolf garment. Sadly I was not able to photograph this. I walked around the doll's house several times trying to absorb and remember all the details.

One of the most meaningful parts of the exhibition for me was seeing the evolution of Viktor and Rolf's artistic vision and success. They are true artists as much as they are fashion designers. A dress is more than a dress; it has to express a vision and conform to the theme for the season. A key part of their development seemed to be the 1996 collection which presented their collection in miniature. The designers said that "we created a series of miniature installations visualizing our strongest ambitions: a doll on a catwalk, a doll in a photo studio, a miniature boutique and so forth. The dolls were an abstraction of people and the scenes they enacted showed a life we desired but only dared to dream of."

House of Viktor and Rolf June 18-September 21, 2008
Barbican Art Gallery
Silk Street, London, England EC2Y 8DS
www.barbican.org.uk/artgallery