As Volga Volga prepares to show its collection for the first time at Pitti Uomo in Florence, we talk in depth with the Tokyo-based, Russian born designer who has spent years working with Yohji Yamamoto and has collaborated with Comme des Garcons.
In art, the tension between artistic expression and commercial work is nothing new. Every artist dreams of being unfettered by commercial constraints; some good ones get to pour their creativity into commercial work; for the lucky few it can even pave a path to art (James Rosenquist is one famous example). The Japanese cnematographer Kensaku Kakimoto has found commercial success early on in his career. At only 34, he has already created a slew of videos for some of the biggest Japanese and international brands like Toyota and Coca-Cola. He has also produced three feature films in Japan.
If there was one leitmotif in the work of the Japanese photographer Masahisa Fukase, it’s solitude, or more precisely, loneliness.
I have a beautiful Undercover perfecto jacket in my closet. It’s made from silky jet-black lambskin and lined in tartan. The genius of its design is the doubling up of every pocket that a usual perfecto has.
If you are into film, Andrei Tarkovsky’s “Stalker” needs no introduction. The 1979 Soviet picture has become a staple of any film school curriculum and a must-see for any cinema connoisseur. And if you have never seen it on a big screen and live in New York, you are in luck, because the new digitally restored version now plays at the Lincoln Center Film Society through this Thursday. Based on what is arguably the most famous Soviet science fiction novel, The Picnic on the Side of the Road by the Strugatsky brothers, it’s an exercise not only in masterful film-making but in film as philosophy. The picture’s deathly location sets of the Zone, an alien-created place where our innermost desire come true, are only matched by the philosophically infused dialogue about the meaning of life and human nature by the film’s three protagonists, the Stalker, who is simply the guide in the treacherous Zone that reads its visitors characters and intentions and changes accordingly, and hist two clients, the Professor and the Writer, whose true nature unfolds as the film progresses.
I first met the photographer Deborah Turbeville in 2011 when I profiled her for our second print volume. It turned out that Deborah was an avid Russophile, and our conversation ranged from her work to her love of Russian literature, cinema, music, and ballet. After Deborah passed away, it was the first article from our print editions that we shared online.
I kept in touch with people who managed Deborah’s estate, and early this year I finally went to see her archive, housed in an Upper East Side townhouse and to meet its co-director, Paul Sinclaire, who also was one of Deborah’s closest friends. While I was browsing the photos, like some kid in gothic Disneyland, I spotted a box titled “Comme des Garçons.” I went through it, and the ethereal, otherworldly photos in it were marked “1981.” Could it be that Deborah had shot the first collection Kawakubo presented in Paris? It very well could, though we did not know for sure. But what I did know was that given the May exhibition of Comme des Garçons at the Met these photos should be made into a book. I asked Paul what he thought about making a book, and he loved the idea.
If you go to the Met Museum’s Comme des Garçons show, do not leave without buying the accompanying catalog. If you don’t go to the show, buy the catalog. This is as simple of advice as I can give you about this stunning publication by the Met (distributed by Yale University Press). The white, oversized…
One of the several questions that came to me as I was leaving the press preview of the “Rei Kawakubo/Comme des Garçons: Art of the In-Between” show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art was, “Who is this exhibit for?” Or, to reframe it in broader context, what is the role of museums today?
We are always eager to learn about the new projects from the Iceland-based designer Sruli Recht, who has successfully transcended fashion design and who is more of a mad scientist in the best possible sense of the word.
Robert Pirsig, the author of the cult novel “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance,” passed away yesterday at his home in Maine. The below reflections are in lieu of an obituary.