Learning Portfolio Post #4 Brooklyn Museum reflection

To me, the show ‘Pierre Cardin: Future Fashion’ was an educational and interesting experience. Be a fashion designer, I think one of the important element for a great designer to have is the ability to vision the future, which means that he or she need to have the boldness to create beyond. After visited the Brooklyn Museum, I strongly think that Cardin is one of those great designers. Even though a large portion of the garment were from the 1960s, almost all of them are still considered futuristic to me. Walking into the Museum, I saw six models standing right in the middle of the room with three large black and white combined circles in the background, the shapes and materials immediately gave me a futuristic sense for its very different look from what we wear today. I thought many objects at the show were very interesting to look at:

I was really excited when I saw theses shoes, thinking that these were created at least 30 years ago,  but they look so modern. The very bold color combination of orange and black, orange and white, and kinda a square head of these shoes all indicates that why Pierre Cardin is considered to be fashion futurists.

According to the museum introduction, a large portion of the show were from his 1964 collection called “Cosmocorps” which I did some research on. In the collection, he added plastic googles to helmets to make them look like astronauts’ helmets, leather shorts and plastic see-through dresses, as well as the then-uncommon synthetic fibers that have since become one of his trademarks. In 1968, he took it a step further, introducing a “Cardin fabric” made from vinyl and metal textiles. From theses pictures, the geometric patterns, a wild mix of fabrics, the shapes and details of all garments foresee what fashion looks in the future.

“Future Fashion”, a nod to a series of futuristic designs, was chosen to open to the public on July 20, the 50th anniversary of the moon landing, and memorabilia shops are also selling NASA moon landing memorabilia. The space elements in Cardin’s creative storm are woven into the context of the time and can’t be separated.

This garment is one of my favorite. With the large circles shape and white line prints, it seems to have the magic to draw the viewer’s  eye into the the garment. Especially from the angle that I took the picture, the white circle-like prints creates this illusion of time tunnel where at the end of which you can see just a little bit of what the future will look like.

In the reading this week, I found the following quotes really educational :“FASHION IS A TERRIFIC time-travel machine. There is a kind of optimism built into the industry that makes the future a recurring theme, a kind of sustained argument that there will always be people who need to make a statement with what they wear. But one of its curious paradoxes is the way in which it can remix the past, or the past’s unique vision of the future, to create something that feels resonantly of the moment.” 

“Nothing and everything is anachronism; nothing and everything looks “vintage.”

“Visions of futures past always feel almost willfully innocent in retrospect. It’s not unlike the feeling of opening an old box and discovering one’s first-grade class photo, when you still thought you’d become an astronaut or win a Nobel Prize. But then, the retro-future is powerful precisely because it reveals to us the faultiness of those dreams, the seductive gap between our fantasies of what we thought the future should look like and what it turned out to be.”

That makes me wonder when Cardin designed theses cloth, did he imagine this is how it would be in today’s fashion world? With the exaggerated shapes and special materials, etc? I guess this is what I found educational, the futuristic design back in the 1960s would still considered to be futuristic design in the year of 2019. The fact that there is a gap between what we thought the future should look like and what it actually turn out to be. But who knows, I think this is what human does, always to have fantasies when looking forward.

source used:

https://www.brooklynmuseum.org/exhibitions/pierre_cardin

https://www.dw.com/en/pierre-cardin-iconic-fashion-designer-honored-in-fashion-futurist-show/a-50497336

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/03/21/t-magazine/fashion-future-history.html