Our Borders Issue (20/Spring-Summer 2011) is now available! Get your free copy at the UAL Student Union, 272 High Holborn, London WC1V 7EY, or at a UAL campus near you.

A is for Jewellery
Text by Xanthia Hallissey
Photography by Anna Johnson

A Alicia is a jewellery company with a difference. On setting up her own practice, founder Anna Johnson didn’t want to litter the market with plastic, throwaway items. She took the idea of waste literally, sourcing vintage and fair-trade fabrics to make eco-ethical jewellery and a homeware company with heart. When asked about what motivated her to set up the company, Anna replied: “I’ve always wanted to be able to feel that I’m doing something positive in the world.”

Anna is a graduate of Art History from the University of Kent, but the practice side of her career was really developed during her MA in Fine Art at Central St Martins. Now making jewellery, she nicely synthesises her art history and fine art backgrounds. Anna always felt inspired to stand out of the crowd, saying that the idea to start an ethically aware line felt natural. She explains: “In a way it didn’t really feel like a choice, I just couldn’t stomach the idea of running a business who’s supply chain involved exploiting other people or the environment.”

Although Anna is ethically aware, the aesthetic of her work is still important to her: “Of course, there’s the ethical side of knowing how and by whom something is made, but then there’s also the sheer joy of living with or wearing beautifully, thoughtfully handmade products.”  By using textured materials such as handmade beads, vintage kimono fabric, pompoms, in clear, bright colours, the pieces fit in comfortably with current fashions. Anna lists her inspiration for the line from diverse sources such as Japanese craft to simply having the television on whilst sewing; these wide-ranging influences highlight the sense of fun evident in her personality and in her work.

By going back to process and thinking about how things are made every step of the way, Anna is part of a growing number of designers putting production first. Her ethos is inspiring, believing that each of us has the opportunity to be ‘green’ with our work by thinking of the making at the offset. “I also truly believe that all our tiny individual actions really can be part of a bigger change,” says Anna.

Reflecting on her studies, Anna muses: “It’s hard to describe quite how much my Art History studies have influenced my creative practices – they gave me such a wonderful source of reference points that play a part in everything I do.” Hinting at a holistic view of life, A Alicia is not just a business prospect but something Anna really believes in.

For organic, fairtrade fabric visit the Organic Cotton website.

Visit Anna’s online shop, visit Anna’s mainline and wedding websites.

The Magic Flute: Exploring Symbolic Opposites in Textiles
Text by Andrea Fam
Textiles by Hana Kitazaki

“My textile collection ‘The Magic Flute’, originally inspired by the opera with the same name, is based on the idea of the sun versus the moon. The two symbolic elements, sun and moon (day and night), are antipodes and seem never to share anything. However those two share the border, and as long as there is a border between them each element is partial without the other.”  These are the words that designer Hana Kitazaki, a BA Textile Design alumna from Chelsea College of Art and Design, has used to describe her designs.

Conceptually, one is drawn to reflect further on this ‘border’ on which the designer centres the theme of ‘The Magic Flute.’ The image of a horizon evokes the thought of Japan as ‘the land of the rising sun,’ perhaps spurred by gazing intensely at the fabric with the orange glow. An interesting notion, taking into account that the characters that make up Japan’s name mean “sun-originating,” and so we arc back to this series’ original concept: the sun contrasting the moon.

Hana’s descriptive words evoke a sense of the sublime – an ethereal experience. This correlates with her research on ‘The Magic Flute’, where she discovered the opera was influenced by Enlightenment philosophy.

In examining Hana’s textile designs, one is taken by the affective co-existence of the rigidity of the solid geometric lines with the softness of her pastel colour pallet and the fluidity of her chosen fabric. The colliding and imbibing of these elements with each other seems a nice translation of the couplet sung in the finals to both the acts of the opera: “Dann ist die Erd’ ein Himmelreich, und Sterbliche den Göttern gleich”, translated: “the Earth a heavenly kingdom, and mortals like the gods”.

See more of Hana Kitazaki’s work on her website.

Chelsea to New York: FIT Internership Winners
Text by Joe Young
Photography by Don Ackerman

Year 1 BA Graphic Communication students from the Chelsea College of Art and Design were recently given the once in a lifetime opportunity to win 5 places to study at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York City for 4 months between August and December.

The brief was to come up with a piece of work which takes inspiration from some of New York’s most famous features such as the Statue of Liberty, the Pretzel, the New York Taxi Cab, the Grid Map and the Dollar Bill. The aim was to communicate exactly why they should each go to New York.

The winners, Don Ackerman, Joseph Egan, Sofia Clause, Miriam Abrahams, and Julia Salotti produced a variety of unique ideas from training to swim the Atlantic from Land’s End to New York, ‘living’ in the city for 24 hours and even bungee jumping! The winning work is featured below.

Don Ackerman

See photographs above.

For more of Don’s work, visit his Tumblr.

Joseph Egan

For more of Joseph’s work, visit his Blogspot.

Sofia Clause

For more of Sofia’s work, visit her Tumblr.

Miriam Abrahams

For more of Miriam’s work, visit her Blogspot.

Julia Salotti

For more of Julia’s work, visit her Blogspot.

Soukaina Aziz El Idrissi: Beautiful Garbage
Text by Keren Oertly
Photography by Soukaina Aziz El Idrissi

Soukaina Aziz El Idrissi is a name to watch. Graduating from Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design in 2010 with a BA in Textile Design, Aziz El Idrissi specialized in weave, but not a weave of your everyday variety. Her ecological considerations, particularly her use of recycled materials, inform her conceptual position and distinguish her design practice from the rest.

“I’ve always used found materials in my work, be it textiles or any other medium,” explains Aziz El Idrissi.  “I think the main reason I work with ‘garbage’ is because its there, there’s loads of it and its not going anywhere, so I might as well make the most of it!”

Aziz El Idrissi began using trash as her primary material at the beginning of her third year of her degree. She started looking at junkyards, particularly the Echoloplast plastic recycling plant in Morocco, and started processing trash as a healthy combination of colours, textures and shapes rather than something that was just unwanted and discarded. “Once I started to really look into trash, it stopped looking like trash,” Aziz El Idrissi says. “I wanted to give trash a second chance, a second go at life. Ultimately I see trash as arrested development rather than a pile of slowly decomposing matter.”

After Aziz El Idrissi gathered all her visual information, she began translating her research into woven fabrics. Initially, she wanted her fabrics to be sturdy enough for architectural textiles and building compounds, but due to the nature of the materials, she adapted her approach from exteriors to interiors. Now she is considering how her fabrics might be used as upholstery, blinds, splash backs, wall hangings, table runners and other items.

The design market has certainly been receptive to Aziz El Idrissi’s beautiful and eco-friendly works. She has participated in trade fairs, including HeimTextile ’10 and New Designer ’10, and was awarded The Textile Society New Designers Award at the New Designers fair. She participated in a couple of events during UAL’s Green Week earlier in February 2011, and will also be participating in the Textile Society’s Manchester Antique Textile Fair on 06 March 2011.

Her reputation is gaining increasing momentum, but Aziz El Idrissi remains pragmatic about her future as a textile designer. She reminisces about the advantages of all the machinery and equipment available to her during her degree: “once you graduate, it’s all taken away!” she laments. Currently she works as a part time technician at CSM in the weave studio and aims to buy her own loom in order to continue developing her surfaces and start up a little business. Aziz El Idrissi hopes to collaborate with engineers and mills to produce her surfaces on a more industrial scale in future, but for now is happy squeezing in some weaving time between helping students.

But remember her name…the future is looking bright for this talented graduate!

Alex Fury on . . .
Interview by Eshe Nelson

. . . London

“Have you ever read the fashion conspiracy by Nicolas Coleridge? It’s an amazing book from 1997. One of the things he talks about is London fashion, the idea that women don’t really dress up in London. There’s people saying London doesn’t have the grandeur of Paris or New York and it’s essentially, because it’s never been ripped down and built again or built from scratch to a specific plan, it’s like a lot of little villages. Women don’t dress up because they feel like they can hang around in their village and sort of look a bit ‘scrubby’, that’s my word not Nicholas Coleridge’s’. London’s got little pockets and it’s almost like you don’t know what’s in between those. I can’t really think what’s between Central London and West London. I suppose it’s Hyde Park but you don’t really get that and it feels like it’s quite far away, it feels like Knightsbridge is miles away from here [Mayfair] but it’s not I could probably walk it, but it sort of feels miles away.

“You don’t have the unity you get in Paris where you want to dress nicely because it’s so beautiful wherever you go and it’s always looks like the eighteenth century. London’s weird because it’s a medieval city and you still get that feeling from it, it’s got some charm to it in that way. I also like that it’s progressive in a way that Paris isn’t. There are arguments going on in Paris now because there’s a rule in Paris that you’re not allowed to build anything in Central Paris that’s modern because it disrupts, they sort of see Paris as a historical entity. There are lots of arguments that a city isn’t a city if it can’t grow and develop. If you look from the Eiffel Tower at Paris now you see what Gustave Eiffel would have seen when he built it. It hasn’t changed, you have La Défense but that’s the only kind of modern architecture in Paris. London embraces growth more and more so than elsewhere in England.”

. . . Virtual Space

“I think it’s democratising. That’s the really amazing thing about it and also that it’s unedited which can be a good thing and a bad thing. There’s something quite exciting about the idea that you can write about fashion and publise it to the world. It’s not filtered by anyone else but at the same time that’s quite a dangerous thing. However, it depends on how well informed the person writing is. It gives a lot of people a voice and I think that especially now it’s been recognised for that but now the time has come when you need to decide which of those voices you actually want to listen to. I think that there is a danger that there’s going to be too many people putting out information. Its not just in fashion, there’s lots of stuff about politics obviously but in fashion it seems to be a particularly now that lots of people are jumping on to this bandwagon. I was really shocked when I went to Milan in February/March time. People were coming up to you going ‘are you a blogger?’ and you’re like ‘no’ and they were going round trying to find people to take their picture and that’s what they were really obsessed with. There was sort of this whole online obsession and it’s quite specifically in Milan they sort of jump onto little things, but it’s weeding out the people that you actually want to listen to from the mass of people shouting.

“I think what’s really interesting now is the idea that established people are giving the Internet power and are allowing for the importance of the Internet. I’m really interested to see how people are going to develop and refine online content. I think it’s started but there’s a long way to go. I also think people are going to start looking at speed and I’m actually interested in how much faster it can get. On American Vogue.com this season they actually previewed the London designers collections before they showed them, they had like stuff from Mary Katrantzou, Michael Van Der Ham, Meadham Kirchhoff and Christopher Kane before London Fashion Week. They’d been to their studio and photographed a few pieces and their mood boards and Sarah Mower had written a piece about what the collection was about. Which for me was amazing because I could go and didn’t have to decipher what Christopher Kane was about, these are his references and I could actually write them down before I went to the show and I think maybe that’s the way it’s going to go and certainly in Milan it’s weird. Milan has a two show system, the first show for buyers and then a show for press. When I was on my way to Gucci I was looking at Twitter and seeing pictures of the show that I was about to see and at Dolce and Gabbana they have big screens up where they were showing backstage at the show. Is it going to be that we’re going to see the whole collection before the show and then are they going to push the show into something totally different because it’s not really about showing you the clothes anymore? But then on the flip side of that there’s Tom Ford and it might be that everyone’s going to pull away from broadcasting everything and giving it a bit of mystic again.”

. . . Time

“I think it’s always relative to you and your life; it’s always relative to everything else that’s going on. Something that I find interesting is that our attention spans are shorter and that we are demanding things quicker. I think that’s especially evident in fashion. One of the films that we did recently, that was really successful, was an interactive film where, rather than it being one long film it was 26 film clips and you mixed them together yourself. The guy that made it said it was because he had looked at viewing figures and that if you do a three-minute film people watch 30 seconds and then skip to the end and watch the end. The idea was to keep you involved as you had to press buttons to view everything. It’s weird because it’s like okay that’s because our attention spans are shorter because we’re so much more sophisticated, but at the same time he actually based it on Fisherprice keyboards where you hit it so it makes a noise to keep a baby interested.

“Other things that I think are interesting in terms of time is the idea that everything is sort of collapsing together. Before you would see the collections and you would expect to buy it sixth months on, now people see the collections and they want to buy it straight away and it’s putting pressure on designers to deliver. I’m not sure if I think it’s a good thing, I think sometimes it can be, but when you look at companies who design collections to be sold straight away rather than actually thinking about what you would want next spring, it’s a bit sort of seasonless. Big companies can do that because they pre-manufacture things to have them ready for the show to be able to sell straight after but it’s going to choke out smaller designers. There are so many designers who just couldn’t possibly do that. But if it becomes standard are we going to have to change or does that just mean that they are going to be forced out of the market? Everyone is expecting everyone to do a pre-collection and that’s okay in the summer because if you work it out as a designer you have two months extra in summer but then you get round to winter, and then they are demanding that we want to have 12 drops, then 52, we want it to be like Topshop, we want to have something new from you every week, I’m just wondering when that’s going to end, this demand for it. You can’t be expected to churn out ideas, a lot the London designer probably could do that but there’s no manufacturing to back it up.”

Gavin Fernandes: Cyber-punks and Sci-fi Photography
Text by Clare Green
Photography by Victoria Mullins

Gavin Fernandes teaches at LCF and has photographed countless shoots, including model Alek Wek’s first. Known for great image making and a unique approach to styling here he recalls how his career began with making the most of an opportunity:

“I had always dreamt of going to the Royal College of Art but once I got there it all went a bit pear shaped. My professor was very conservative and there was little creative freedom. The strict boundaries blocked my creativity and eventually they asked me to leave. I felt down at the time, but really it was a blessing in disguise.

“After leaving I was a bit lost, I consulted my foundation tutors who referred me to Steve Pyke, a photographer who created these interesting stories about certain groups based on role play.

“I had the idea to do a story on cyberpunks- a subculture inspired by technology and sci-fi. I photographed cyber punks and styled the shoot using a mix of the models own clothes and pieces I had found. I used a mix of second hand and if I did want something from a shop I’d leave a cheque with the staff and ask them to tear it up when I returned the clothes in good nic.

“Cyberpunk was picked up by a lot of magazines and years later people would still be asking to use it. The V&A saw the shoot and asked me to contribute to their future street style exhibition. I started looking at the graduate shows and found 13 outfits (including designs by Julien Macdonald and Eley Kishimoto), expecting them to take eight or so but they ended up showing them all.

“Styling just happened, I would never say “I’m a stylist”- I’m a photographer and believe that the end product is what counts.  I pass this message onto my students, styling is one thing but it’s more important to be able to control a photo shoot, conduct yourself in a professional way and get the pictures into print.”

British Asian Style: Fashion and Textiles, Past and Present is out now, published by V & A Publishing, £24.99. British Asian Style is available from the V&A online gift shop.

See more of Gavin’s work on his website.

Hilary Baxter: There were Times and Places…
Text by Rosie Bee
Photography by Victoria Mullins

Hilary is the course leader for BA Costume Design at Wimbledon College of Art. Here she talks of what lead her to this line of work, and illustrates how sheer determination has been the catalyst of her successes:

“Having trained in Theatre Design at CSM, my conscious brain was telling me that this would be my calling. However my unconscious brain was interested in costume design. I proceeded to work freelance as a costume designer post graduation. This appealed to me as a highly collaborative practice, as a costume designer you inevitably get to have more of an impact on the performance, and it brings different levels of involvement. The performer is ‘the thing,’ rather than the set, if you get me? This practice has lead me to work in, for the most part London, however also Rome, Iceland, Norway, Denmark and France.

“Most of the projects I’ve worked on in the past have come about through luck, there’s no structure when freelancing sometimes in this industry, and therefore one always needs to be available and suitable. I love the idea of being able to have that massive impact on the character when designing, which intern has a huge impact on the whole performance. Looking at which projects I’ve enjoyed the most, it’s always the piece I’ve just finished, at the moment I’ve just completed one for the National Gallery – The Prince and The Showgirl. I like the idea of taking an opportunity that doesn’t exist and exploiting it to make it something interesting, being able to take the current situation and make it live on stage.

“After I freelanced for 8 years, I was recommended to Wimbledon College to take over a post teaching costume design, I juggled teaching and freelancing for 10 years, and then I stepped down from freelancing when I had my daughter. This industry has changed immensely since I graduated, there’s no such thing as the rep system, or the Arts council bursaries anymore, and it’s much more fragmented for young designers these days. If you’re not taken on as part of a training scheme, it’s hit-and-miss with your product. The BBC’s training scheme has over the years broken down, so it leaves a harder platform for emerging designers to get a head start. Working at Wimbledon gives me the opportunity to work with younger people, and give them the opportunity to produce a strong portfolio of work.

“At the moment I am looking forward to digesting what’s happened over the past couple of years, and focus more on researching, an area I’m particularly interested in.  Advice I’d give to people starting out in costume or even theatre design is hard to sum up in a phrase. However, I think it’s crucial you believe in your ideas, and are prepared to work hard. Very hard.”

Pants to Poverty: Great Things Come in Small Packages
Words by Grace Mbugua-Nwosu
Photography by Gseus Lopez

On Wednesday 9th February 2011 at Southampton Row, front of fashion was treated to a ‘Victoria’s Secret’ show courtesy of Pants to Poverty.

Walking for a cause, Pants to Poverty is a fashion brand that stamps ‘fashion without poverty can exist’. Working with farmers in Africa and India in the cotton trade they ensure all their farmers don’t use pesticides and pay the fair-trade premium allowing farmers to benefit from the profits. Their work is sold on over 25 countries, making sure we all have a little pair of ethical goodness for those of us who dread the morning mirror. Standing still amongst the brave models we managed to find the founder of Pants to Poverty, Ben Ramsden, for a little chat.

“The future of Pants to Poverty is to prove a new model for fashion that is profitable, social, environmental and financeable,2 says Ramsden. “To push into mainstream retailers and to attract interest, unfortunately you need celebrity endorsements. Before Christmas we also want to push into the Switzerland, Germany and Scandinavia market. Building ourselves as international underwear brand, we might prove that fashion without poverty is truly beautiful.”

If their ethos and products are not enough, you can get involved with Pants to Poverty through work experience, supporting marketing and sales or become a full time employee. They are also launching a competition for students to design regal pants fit for a prince and princess. The wining designs will be in production and will be sold on their website. Their products are also available at Asos, Adili, and Alls Fair.

Footprints Across Fresh Snow: New Territory for Drawing
Text and photography by Xanthia Hallissey

Footprints Across Fresh Snow is a new mixed discipline exhibition by the Wimbledon College of Art. Don’t expect to see any snow though because there isn’t any, not even a drop.

Instead, snow is being used as a byword for new territory in what is essentially a drawing and mark-making exhibition. Not only is this exhibition showing current talent at the University, but in a sense it is advertising for new talent as the forerunner of a new proposed course: MA Drawing (subject to validation).

Although it’s an exhibition about drawing, they won’t be drawings that most people have seen before. None of the artists showcased typically create drawings for exhibitions; instead they make working drawings: architecture plans, diagrams by surgeons and plans for sculpture. Some are finished wall pieces, others are pages from sketchbooks or mixed media experiments. Despite the differences the exhibition speaks with the clarity of one voice, it feels confident and sure.

Highlights include the artists and performer Tim Spoones’ Experiments From Inside A Cave, featuring a horizontal projection of piano hands, and sheet music with fingers that seem to pluck at the staves. Continuing the mixed media theme is Jeremy Radva’s Seamless, a performance artist who has projected coloured sketches onto a dress designed by Caterina Radvan. From a distance the drawings seem to form the figure of a woman, merging perspective and suggesting the dress has soul. Watercolour sketches of feet by Dr Caroline Wilkinson from the Centre of Forensic and Medical Art, act as a breakdown of the anatomy and challenge perceptions of normality.

The exhibition as a whole acts as a challenge towards perceptions of normal drawing. Grouped in this context, the work feels fresh and exciting, and invites potential just like a sheet of untouched snow.

Footprints Across Fresh Snow: Drawing and Mark Making Across Disciplines is being held in the Wimbledon Space at the Wimbledon College of Art until the 4th of March 2011.

For more information check out the Wimbledon College of Art blog.