London Fashion Week may be just about to begin but Norwegian menswear designer Siv Støldal got her show in last week before the rush! I popped over to see her magnificent exhibit 'Cover Up' at Sketch on Thursday, where she had decorated its frontage with her A/W '07 collection.
Inside, Lewis Ronald's film that had been screened at Siv's show was showing on Sketch's impressive complex of screens. As well as being quite mesmerising viewing, it demonstrates how the palette of the rain coats was fixed upon by pixellating a picture of a mountain by the designer's home town of Tyssøy.
She told me a great family story about how the exterior installation had been inspired by an anonymous photograph of a Danish shop-keeper who had become frustrated by his poor sales and so had hung all his garments on the outside of his store, inciting a riot in so doing. Siv later found that same image in a much-treasured 1940s copy of Life magazine of her grandfather's, which had been marked out by him with a hand-written transcription into Norwegian. Who says these things don't happen for a reason, eh?
View this blog entry >The thumbnail looked to me like so many tassels hanging on the front of the building with a huge billboard underneath to be unveiled for fashion week.
Not until I took the time to open the link did I realize what I was looking at. An open air exhibition of the collection. What cool merchandising! The story that goes with it from the 1940's Life magazine makes it even better. Some ideas just work and are timeless. Thanks for sharing.
http://www.time.com/time/picturesoftheweek/0,29409,1651474_1425564,00.html\
Another open air display - was a Time picture of the week - under different circumstances. Oh, the contrasts of life.
