“At the vanguard of avant-garde designers, Martin Margiela and his eponymous Maison are masters of reworking existing clothes, fabrics and objects to create new garments and accessories.”
British textile designer, Samantha Warren, creates six new designs for the Martin Margiela Open Source Dress Project. Working with Cubo-Futurist paintings from the early twentieth century with the Slow Textiles Group at their recent workshop Introduction to Cubo-Futurism: Learn to Create Placement Prints for Dynamic, Timeless Fashion Textiles, Warren creates inspired new looks for the experimental Belgium designer who is offering Open Source patterns as part of his forward-thinking sustainable practice Maison Martin Margiela.
Maison Martin Margiela, in true conceptual fashion style, made an open source offering several years back, to take up an unfinished dress pattern and create a new vision with it. Here was the atelier’s challenge:
“Rather than merely allowing the downloading public a chance to recreate the garment, Margiela wished to offer an opportunity to engage them in a two-way exchange, a dialogue of mutation and innovation with the esteemed design house. The simple shift dress pattern, without sleeves and with no hemming, is the basis to make a design of your own conception – by augmentation and addition. As if joining the actual designers at the key stage in the making of a garment, this is your raw material to shape into the new.”
Members of the Slow Textiles Group led the dialogue with a Cubo-Futurist aesthetic inspired by their work at the V&A with the Diaghilev & the Ballet Russes exhibition Digital Education Programme. Inspired by the work of Baranov-Rossine, Alexander Bogomazov, Aleksandra Ekster and Lyubov Popova, the December 2011 Slow Textiles workshop introduces the layers of innovation, mutation and augmentation that Margiela decribes.
these are great! would love to see them made up