Interview

Almost a decade ago, a friend hang gliding over the Quebec wilderness made a discovery that would inspire Mireille Boucher's Harakiri jewelry line—after its first owner had thrown it away, or, more precisely, thrown it up. From the air, Boucher's friend noticed his dog wild with glee in the tall grass, and he landed to investigate. What he found he remembered from his rural childhood and he called Boucher right away, knowing she would appreciate the unconventional treasure. Boucher, a Montreal-based designer, eagerly cracked open the find—a ball of bones regurgitated by an owl during digestion—and discovered perfectly preserved mouse and rat skeletons, stripped clean by the owl's stomach. A line of striking memento mori jewelry was born.

The simplicity of Boucher's pieces, often a silver-cast bird skull or a single bone on a chain, can appear unformed from certain angles and unnervingly precise from others, which renders them poignant, private and elegant. "They are like little talismans," Boucher explains over coffee during Montreal Fashion Week, where she has taken a break from her usual role as accessories designer for Denis Gagnon, Quebec's leading conceptual designer. "I was not familiar with the concept of memento mori when I first discovered them, but I understood that wearing these bones was my way of deferring my fears of death."

Before coming upon the bones, Boucher had earned herself a cult following by casting a collection of a 18th and 19th Century crucifixes that she had inherited from her uncle. Outside Montreal, high-end Gothic accessories often haunt catwalks, but Boucher's sterling silver animal pieces still cause controversy in the French Canadian city, where the reigning aesthetic is crafty, frilly and, as Boucher describes it, "very Madame." But Boucher has found a nest in the city's concept store, Rebourn. "I have been making these for a long time," she says. "For me this is not a trend. How can trying t deal with death with dignity be a trend?

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"I do not want to play magician," Ying Gao says amidst the whirring mechanical sounds emanating from the gears that make the thick leather and chiffon flowers on her simple gray shift dresses move as if underwater. "I want people to understand that there is a mechanism at work, without letting them see the ugly wires."

Although the technology behind Gao's "Living Pod" dress is, as she describes it "a mess," Gao's overall aesthetic is as graceful and delicate. During a visit in the midst of Montreal's Fashion Week to Gao's atelier inside the UQAM's Graduate School of Fashion where she teaches, she discussed how her work hovers between conceptual fashion and art. The Beijing-born, Swiss-educated and Montreal-based designer creates kinetic clothes that express an idealized relationship between the garment and its environment.

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Fast fashion is commonly considered the enemy of artistic creativity and artistry in fashion. But avid art collector Cynthia Rowley has made high-concept art and beat the copycats with her own a limited edition series of photographic reproductions of fifteen looks in her Fall 2010 collection. Rowley's concept borrows from post-modern appropriation strategies and the tradition of galleries selling editions of photographs or lithographs of great artists' work. The collection itself, the replicas, a "Cynthia Rowley for Gagosian" label, and small sewing kit housed in a Lucite box are all currrently assembled as an salable installation at Madison Avenue's Gagosian Shop alongside the limited edition Jeff Koons Puppy Vase, Tom Sachs' Chess Set and the Damien Hirst Superstition Plates. Here we discuss with Rowley the eternally nagging question, "But is it art?"


ANA FINEL HONIGMAN: You say that this project isn't art. But it's concept and aesthetic and serving as commentary. How do you define art?

CYNTHIA ROWLEY: I like the way Jerry Saltz defined it: Art is "the ability to imbed thought in material."

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PHOTO BY TINA CASSATI

Let's be honest: Berlin Fashion Week isn't posing any immediate threat to London or Paris. But it does have its own potent brand of timeless decadence and style, embodied in the stellar body of leading fetish model, Eden Berlin.

Anyone catching the exhibition of photographs of Twiggy in London's National Portrait Gallery will know that Woody Allen failed at flirting with the model when he asked her, "Who is your favorite philosopher?" Eden Berlin, the city's  very anti-Twiggy (think Marylin Monroe..in her dreams) leading fetish model, would have no trouble with that question, and suitors might find it a great way to woo her. The answer is Bataille, although the French philosopher who found lust in filth and eroticism in death might struggle for traction with a beauty as flawless as Berlin. The model, who comes from a small German town and flirted with punk before brilliantly finding her look in a perfect embodiment of forties style, has been photographed by Peter Lindbergh for German Vogue's 30th anniversary issue and is also featured on Lady Gaga's blog. Berlin has given serious though to the implications of her look in feminist and sociological terms, but she also just finds that looking effortless and chill imposes its own tyranny and she is sorry that women feel ashamed to show pride in being pretty. In any event, she is never with a hair out of place, even in grungy Berlin, and the world she inhabits is definitely grateful for her efforts. Those who encounter her during Berin Fashion Week, or any other time when seeing her in her regular immaculate state, will feel as though they have stepped with her into Woody Allen's Purple Rose of Cairo.

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