Ma Ke 

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Ma Ke (born in 1971) is one of China’s most successful designers. She graduated from the Suzhou Institute of Silk Textile Technology in 1992,  studied womenswear at Central Saint Martins in 1996 and later that year set up her own label Exception de Mixmind, which is often dubbed ‘China’s first designer brand’, with her ex-husband Mao Jihong.

The Chinese fashion business is only 30 years old and mostly known for its cheap knock-offs. Exception de Mixmind though is celebrated for helping preserve tradition by using traditional dying, weaving and embroidery techniques by the Dong People of Southern China.

Each piece begins as a conventional, comfortable piece made from organic materials, but by the time Ma Ke is done transforming it, it becomes an innovative example of Chinese design.

Unfortunately I have not been able to find a web-store that sells the brand. The collections are only sold in the by now over 100 Exception de Mixmind stores in China.

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Wu Yong, the Haute Couture line by Ma Ke

Ma Ke is among the youngest of the first generation of Chinese fashion designers who have received international acclaim . Her interest in the crossover between contemporary art and fashion led her to establish the artistic brand Wu Yong (meaning Useless) in ’06. Next February, Wu Yong was presented at Paris Fashion Week for the first time and attracted much attention within both art and fashion circles.

Chinese loom

The production of Ma Ke’s haute couture line is completely done in a workshop in Zhuhai, which employs a team of  workers skilled in traditional clothing manufacturing techniques. All stages of production are done in-house, including the spinning, weaving, dyeing and sewing; even using traditional equipment such as a Chinese loom dating from the 19th century. Some of the garments in the collections either incorporate or are made out of recycled material and found objects, including a paint-covered sheet made into a dress and an old tarpaulin (large sheet of strong, flexible, water-resistant material, often cloth such as canvas) constructed into an over-sized coat. Through this brand, Ma Ke is praised for the dedicated efforts to preserve both traditions and the environment. 

WU YONG  ’07, ph. Zhou-Mi

Ma Ke was awarded the title of ‘Best Asian Fashion Designer’ at the ’07 Elle Style Awards. In ’08 she was invited to show her work at London’s prestigious Victoria & Albert Museum and at Paris Haute Couture Week. The President of the Fédération Française de la Couture remarked of the show, “We are witness to the birth of a true talent.”

She is also the subject of the film “Useless” by Jia Zhang-Ke, a poetic documentary contrasting the artful creation of Ma Ke’s collection with the lives of China’s garment factory.

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Victoria&Albert / Paris Fashion Week

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Victoria & Albert Museum : Fashion in Motion, Ma Ke Wuyong

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Book

Point One (March 1, 2006)

While many readers will associate Chinese textiles with low-end exports, some may already know that the new generation of Chinese young people, who have grown up with greater and greater exposure to luxury goods and the brands of the West and Japan, are beginning to make fashion. They are digesting an array of new influences and readying themselves to conquer the world. Ma Ke, who is considered the most important young fashion designer in China today, founded her brand, EXCEPTION de MIXMIND, nine years ago. Point One, the first book about her work and the first book in English on Chinese fashion, is divided into two volumes: The first part presents a wide range of Ma Ke’s creative work; the second part beautifully illustrates a fashion show held in Beijing last winter.

ISBN-10: 9889839563

ISBN-13: 978-9889839567

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Movie/Documentary

Useless

“Useless” can be digitally downloaded:

(http://www.amazon.com/Miracle-workers-Zhang-Ke-Artforum-International/dp/B001JTZN76/ref=sr_1_1_twi_1_dig?ie=UTF8&qid=1428330740&sr=8-1&keywords=movie%3A+%22Useless%22+by+%22Jia+Zhang+Ke%22)

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 Ma Ke with Wu Yong model at Victoria&Albert Museum

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website:   http://mixmind.com

Comme Des Garçons 1998, ph. Sarah Moon 12345 

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“…On a rainy day, in the morning light, I look back at all these photos I have accumulated-moments of awakening, split seconds, a slow motion rough cut from a film, which I have been living by proxy, more from outside than inside… Is it dreams that my photographs are about? Or even better, are they hallucinations?”
Sarah Moon

Comme Des Garçons by Sarah Moon 

Crash magazine

Vogue Korea

Comme Des Garçons a/w 2012, 10 Magazine

Books

Coincidences

Sarah Moon made her name in haute couture fashion photography with luxurious and mysterious compositions. This volume brings together that work with her other images in an exciting first retrospective. In the fashion work, her models are studious and disengaged, often turned away or intentionally blurred themselves transformed to a compositional element. Images of animals, portraits, still lifes, and wonderful landscapes both rural and urban fill out her oeuvre. In her black-and-white images, Moon (also a filmmaker) masterfully tends the edges of darkness where the merest hints of light create detail, texture, and form. Her tasty color work is highly saturated and grainy. Innovative, witty, and seductive, Moon’s photographs draw the viewer into a dream world, at once soothing and vaguely troubled like the opening of a storm. Everything a great art book should be, this volume makes apparent Moon’s original contribution to photography over the last 30 years. The book may be of special interest to clothing design/fashion collections..

ISBN-10: 1892041464   /   ISBN-13: 978-1892041463

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Sarah Moon 12345

Sarah Moon is a contemporary photographer of international renown. A former model, she has taken award-winning photos for such magazines as Vogue, Harpers Bazaar and Nova. The images she has created for several brands, among them Chanel, Comme des Garçons and Cacharel, all share her poetic sense of place and personality. This publication, which includes an example of Moons cinematic work on a DVD, is a personal memoir in pictures, evoking her life, friends and fantasies. Distinguished writers Dominique Eddé, Ilona Suschitsky, Magali Jauffret, Alain Fleischer and Robert Delpire provide commentaries on her work in still and cinema photography, drawing out her thoughts on colour, contemporaries, influences and, in her own words, her unique approach to her subject. This is an unparalleled celebration of the vision of a gifted and individual photographer.

ISBN-10: 050028783X  /  ISBN-13: 978-0500287835

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“Very often I say to myself: I would like to make a photo where nothing happens. But in order to eliminate, there has to be something to begin with. For nothing to happen, something has to happen first”. 

Sarah Moon

 Sarah Moon by Martine Franck 

Sarah Moon by David Bailey
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Sarah Moon (born as Marielle Hadengue), is a French photographer. Initially a model, she turned to fashion photography in the 1970s. Since 1985, she has concentrated on gallery and film work

Sarah Moon is born in Vichy in 1941. In WWII her Jewish family is forced to leave occupied France for England, where, as a teenager, she takes up a study drawing.  At nineteen she starts working as a model in London and Paris (1960–1966) under the name Mallriee Hadengue. During these days she becomes interested in photography, taking shots of her model colleagues. In 1967, she finally decides to spend all her time on photography rather than modelling, adopting Sarah Moon as her new name.

Cacharel

Cacharel commercials

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She soon becomes consultant and photographer for Cacharel fashion house, which advertisement films made her win the Lion D’Or in 1979. She also gets commissioned for some of the most important magazines of that time, among which there are Vogue, Marie-Claire, Harpers’ Bazaar, Elle.

Sarah successfully captures the fashionable atmosphere of London after the “swinging sixties”, working closely with Barbara Hulanicki, who has just launched the popular department store Biba.

Biba

Biba in Seventeen Magazine January 1971 

Biba in Seventeen Magazine January 1971 

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In 1972, Sarah Moon shot the Pirelli calendar, the first woman to do so. She worked in Paris, at the Villa des Tilleuls, in a rich, blurry colour reminiscent of Degas’ paintings of ballerinas. The models are small women, childlike, with rosebud lips and dressed, mostly, in archaic underwear. What little bare flesh there is seems accidental — and quite unvoyeuristic. The pictures are certainly sensual but quite unsexual. The air is of a fin-de-siècle brothel in which the customers and bosses have gone home, leaving the girls to themselves. The Villa des Tilleuls was the Paris headquarters of the Gestapo.Hers is a world of young women — girls, almost. The few men in it are hidden, sometimes behind animal masks. 

Pirelli calendar

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“Each photography is the last witness, or even the last evidence of a moment that would otherwise be lost forever; it is the sense of loss, and of time passing by …”

Sarah Moon

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Early Editorial Photographs 

Vogue Italia 1972

Vogue Paris, February 1973

Vogue Paris 1973 

UK Vogue April 1972

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Marielle Hadengue, with boyfriend, Francois Fould, wearing `his’ & `her’ shirts made from cotton the French call `Farmer’s Satin’. Ph. Bill Ray

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info: Vogue Italia, WikiPedia and YouTube

In September ’14, the National Portrait Gallery unveiled the latest commissioned portrait of Dame Vivienne Westwood. She was captured in her London garden by photographer Juergen Teller.

Filpi Arikcx & An Vandervorst, ph. Ronald Stoops

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AF Vandevorst stands for the Belgian design duo of An Vandevorst (born ’68) and Filip Arickx (born ’71).

The husband-and-wife design team met in ’87 at the Royal Academy in Antwerp. On graduating, Vandevorst worked as assistant to  Dries Van Noten. Meanwhile Arickx, who worked for Dirk Bikkembergs for three years as a teenager, completed military service after leaving the Academy and then worked as a freelance designer and stylist. 

Together they established their own label in ’97, and presented their first collection in Paris for a/w ’98. The label quickly came to the attention of both the fashion press and establishment; after only their second collection they were awarded Paris Fashion Week’s Venus de la Mode award for ‘Le Futur Grand Createur’, a prestigious prize for newcomers. For the spring/summer and autumn/winter ’00 seasons the pair were invited to design the Ruffo Research collection, an opportunity periodically offered to young designers by the Italian leather house Ruffo. 

AF Vandevorst clothes convey a slouchy confidence and a version of femininity that evokes a sexy yet intellectual cool. Traditional clothing (horse riding equipment, kimonos, frock coats) is often referenced, reworked and refined until it sits slightly left-of-centre; a medical-style red cross is their enduring symbol. For collection themes, they often favour the unexpected, as for a/w ’03, when honey bees provided inspiration. Following no set colour palette, AF Vandevorst stray from muted tones into brights. The label expanded to encompass footwear, accessories and lingerie and they continue to present catwalk shows during the Paris collections.

Exhibition & Book

In ’05, An and Filip were asked by MOMU, the renowned Antwerp Fashion Museum, to curate “Katharina Prospekt” an exhibition based upon the couple’s impressions of Russia.

Exhibition “Katharina Prospekt”

A series of objects or images inextricably linked to Russia: Russian matrioshkas or Russian dolls, vodka, the fur hat, the long queues of the Soviet era, the Volga … These stereotypes give a distorted image of contemporary Russia and obscure the diversity of its peoples, cultures, styles, and historical periods. By integrating these clichés into the scenography of the exhibition, A.F. Vandevorst makes us rediscover modern Russia. Like the Russian dolls which hold inside them a series of smaller dolls, the exhibition comprises several dimensions in which the historical collection of clothing of the State Historical Museum of Moscow is confronted with ever different contexts.

Curators:Tamara Igoumnova, State Historical Museum Moscow,An Vandevorst & Filip Arickx

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Book by the exhibition

Fans of Belgian avant-garde fashion, Russian style and great book design, unite! This exceedingly seductive volume documents Katharina Prospekt: The Russians, a tour de force exhibition put together by the innovative Belgian fashion house.A.F. Vandevorst of Russian cultural artifacts borrowed from the State Historical Museum in Moscow, coupled with contemporary fashion designs by A.F. Vandevorst and others–including Yves Saint Laurent, Bless, Martin Margiela and Jean-Paul Gaultier.

There are sections on Propaganda, Military Design, Fur, Chess and even the iconic Russian dolls that fit one inside another. The bold typography riffs on Constructivist design, and we see antique objects, artifacts, textiles and costumes alongside vintage photographs and eye-popping contemporary fashion design.

Author: A.F Vandervorst, ISBN: 978 9061 536185

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Installation 

A.F.Vandevorst installation @ Arnhem Mode Biennale 2011

In June 2011, A.F.VANDEVORST was invited to create an original installation for the Arnhem Mode Biennale, for which An & Filip drew inspiration from their second collection and presented DREAMING, a life-size sleeping girl made out of candle wax

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Short films 

String Theory 

Director Zach Gold, Producer David Dumas, Cinematography Steve Romano. An Fashion / Art short for AF Vandevorst which won the Grand Prize at the ICG Emerging Cinematography Awards. Shot with Phantom HD Gold camera and Leica Lenses.

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Delfine

Delfine by A.F. Vandevorst. Directed by Stef Viaene as part of the Selfridges Film Project.

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Official website: https://www.afvandevorst.be/en