Creative Women Around The World: A Spring 2010 Wrap-Up
The list – WWM has been up since the summer 2009. (GOTS, of course, much much longer). I thought the coming of the sun would be a good time for the first benchmark, a moment to check in on who’s been talked about so far so nothing gets lost in the shuffle. For that purpose, I’ve compiled this list. I have to warn you, it’s not complete because there’s way more content than I thought possible when I started putting it together but I think it will at least set you on your way to navigating through the site as it starts to have a past.
Next bit of news: There’s now a video page here where the incredible women featured on the site and others can come to life. Top notch creativity and thoughtfulness to engage and inspire you. I’ve replicated it here as a single stream but it will be a page (above, in the black top nav) forever and constantly growing:
- Chauncey Zalkin
httpvp://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=939C5BC98E37CE3D
WHAT HAVE WE HERE?
(a partial yet substantial list of women featured on What Women Make)
Venia Bechrackis
Fashion Week F/W 2010
Samantha Pleet, Leanne Mai-ly Hilgart, Melissa Kirgan, Xing-Zhen Chung-Hilyard, JoAnn Berman, Lizz Wasserman, CooperativeDesigns
Lorna Walker, Dr. Vicky Lofthouse, Angharad Thomas, Dr. Angela Lee, Beth Perry, Linda Relph Knight, and Rachel Cooper
Rineke Dijkstra, Jessica Jackson Hutchins, Dana Schutz, Tamy Ben-Tor, Nathalie Djurberg, Klara Liden, Ellen Altfest, Huma Bhabha, Cao Fei, Misaki Kawai, Mary Reid Kelly, Josephine Halvorson, Tacita Dean, Isa Genzken, Rachel Harrison, Julie Mehretu, Mary Heilmann, Cindy Sherman, Faiza Butt, Jean Shin, Swoon, Maria Lassnig, Janet Cardiff
What Women Bring to the Table – Designers, Artists, Thinkers, & Inventors to Start the Week
Dr. Afsaneh Rabiei, Edyta Cieloch, Front Design: Sofia Lagerkvist, Anna Lindgren, Charlotte von der Lancken, Capsters: Cindy Van Den Bremen, Lynn Jackson, Yin Xiuzhen, Dr. Annalee Newitz, Wieki Somers
Eva Zeisel, Ma ke
Girl Drive: Nona Willis Aronowitz, Emma Bee Bernstein
Dieneke Ferguson
Anita Roddick, Zaha Hadid
Yu-Ying Wu
Janine Benyus, Dayna Baumeister
4 Women on Top 11.09
Herta Mueller, Angela Ahrendts, Kazuyo Sejima, Malalai Joya
2010 Buckminster Fuller Fellows
Sahar Ghaheri, Ashley Thorfinnson (other mentions: Deb Johnson and Emily Pilloton)
Too many. Go to link.
Caroline Swift, Sophie-Elizabeth Thompson, Paola Masi
0 CommentsWhen Women Make Fashion with a Future: An A/W 2010 Review
*lead picture, Lou Doillon in Anthony Vaccarello on StyleBubble
I haven’t been to fashion week since 2005. And that was after more than ten years of attending the New York shows. The biggest reason for stopping: I was bored. Mostly the fashion press is what really pushed me over the edge. But now I realize, fashion is a little bit like god and religion. I believe. But inundate me with too much proselytizing and I forget the main act. In other words, whimsical and masterful fashion design is something truly beautiful and even more so when everyone sort of shuts up, folds their hands in their lap, and looks on in respectful silence at the mastery of the production.
Here are my picks:
1. The GreenShows in New York. Designers Samantha Pleet, Leanne Mai-ly Hilgart / Vaute Couture, Melissa Kirgan & Xing-Zhen Chung-Hilyard / Eko-Lab, JoAnn Berman, Lizz Wasserman / Popomomo.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9WQrkWsSmV4
Tesco (UK grocer) joins with Florence & Fred fashion label to launch line of recycled clothing - (read more on the Guardian)
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PxZ-uhVDfIs
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nhrkzl88ICk
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DvIzBTrrFvE
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=liKu3G0kDHQ … noting Cassette Playa’s ‘enhanced reality’ specifically here and not so much the clothes themselves. push envelope push.
- Louise Goldin’s A/W ’10 geometric shapes.
Dorothee Hagemann & Annalisa Dunn make up Cooperative Designs
<<Read more about Cooperative Designs on Grazia.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NS93VRMPcpg
Ada Zanditon website
TreeHugger covers all the ecofashion from the week with a salute to designer Ada Zanditon.
and last but not least, the Times Online addressing the feminist issue in Fashion after Miuccia Prada calls herself a ‘former’ feminist.
To see some really funny cool fashion week coverage in London (lets face it, this is mostly London) check out Amelia’s magazine. Reminds me a little bit of vintage Girlonthestreet.
1 CommentFull of Grace: Questions Raised by Vogue Documentary “September Issue”
1947 Vogue, one that I own, still wrapped in its plastic, somewhere in storage.
Half a review of the documentary “September Issue.” The other half a review of how differently I see things now from 15 years ago.
I wrote my thesis on Vogue magazine. Up there in that old Vogue library on the top floor of the former Condé Nast building, I lived and dreamed in the pages of Horst P Horst and Man Ray’s dramatic lighting, in the whimsical pithy fashion prose of Diana Vreeland with her face painting and pony fantasyland. From Edna Woolman Chase’s days of the corset to WWII fabric shortages, from the New Look to Grace Mirabella’s power suit, I was fascinated.
But just as Anna Wintour said in the tedious bedraggled documentary, September Issue, some are not let in. But far from making me envious and mournful of all those lost years not spent at Vogue, I was ultimately empowered by fate. I thought about all of the broken hearts and broken spirits of the young girls who went there full of dreams and came out beaten and diminished and possibly anorexic and I wondered, ‘what do you do with that?’
If a girl has any sense (but who does at 21? And why should she?), she’d never get wrapped up in the first place. She pursues her dream whatever it may be, undaunted. Hopefully it’s something noble, helping mankind, that sort of thing, but if not noble, something personal, something that takes discipline, dedication, some measure of purity of intent.
Now that we’ve opened up a whole new platform for people to create and be heard without any golden gates barring entry, what will become of Vogue’s primacy? Or maybe we should be looking at the real monster these days - the ghastly tasteless celebrity circus with its gobs of drooping collagen-implanted lips and tight foreheads with forced squirrel eyes. That whole ordeal makes Vogue look like Glenda the Good Witch — or maybe Hollywood and Us magazine are so vulgar and absurd that it makes you yearn for a high priestess arbiter of taste again, the kind they had in the old days, the kind that, well, it seems Grace Coddington carries with her in her disappointed expression looking out over the Tuileries on a grey Paris day. ‘Maybe I’m just a romantic’ she muses, and you feel sad for her, all those lovely frocks and dreams on glossy pages and for what? Surely there is something more she can do with it all. If she couldn’t then, she can now. Create a book of all the fantasies in her head without Anna’s veto power. Or costume a ballet or an opera like Chanel, Picasso or Cocteau. Or move to a new medium and have an exhibit of her own work, her own vision, without the dress price tags. Write a book… It’s ironic that her face in that scene, the only one that resonated for me, reminds me of all the women and girls out there I want to promote, applaud, and support. A spirit that needs saving.
There’s something lost and something gained in every generation. I’d take autonomy and freedom of expression any day. Let the curators and editors find their artists and let the artists find their curators and editors among the millions of profiles and networks and shouting voices out there, politics and pecking order be damned.
-Chauncey Zalkin
Here’s the TRAILER:
0 CommentsTalk about an Inspiration – Two to start the week
picture of Ma ke from Victoria & Albert collection
1
Eva Zeisel
Eva Zeisel turns 103. Thank you to Haute*Nature for bringing this working woman’s birthday to our attention and for posting her TED Talk which I hadn’t seen.
Eva is a fully decorated *design revolutionary and **lifetime achiever (*New York Magazine, **Cooper Hewitt) and then some.
2
I had my students read this article about socially useless companies, a descriptor I like even better than ‘socially responsible’ which is already a buzz word that has been bandied into meaninglessness. Instead of thinking about how you might,as a company ‘do your part’, the idea of social uselessness makes you consider whether you should be in business in the first place. I personally have a fantasy of wiping the corporate slate clean with all new business models instead of watching the old geezers limp along like the wounded brittle giants they are so the word ‘useless’ struck me as did Ma ke’s work, found on Design Boom:
Ma ke
This fashion designer from China, who spoke at the ICOGRADA Beijing World Design Congress 09, writes Design Boom, “confronted by the local clothing industry with its cheap, homogenizing mass-production and poorly paid workers… and by a fashion scene lacking local aesthetic influence and dominated by foreign labels… dedicated herself to developing her ‘useless’ (‘wu yong’ translates to ‘useless’) ideas.” (ideas of uselessness). The results are breathtaking. She’s doing what nobody I know of in China is doing, communicating the roots of Chinese design and tradition. I want more.
Here is a link to a review of a documentary, also called Useless about her work and Chinese factory conditions made by Jia Zhangke.
Photos by Zhou Mi.
-C Zalkin
2 Comments18 Predictions For The Future To Live By Now
- The intelligent craftsperson is the visual world’s thought leader.
- A challenge to the primacy of traditional currency – a resurgence and innovation in barter.
- The most useful and most simple exchange of goods and service wins.
- Learning how to continue to trade, create value and be compensated in the face of the creative commons shift. People will not pay for things they can get for free therefore creativity that is spreadable through the ether (music, movies) must find a new way to be supported, through networks of supporters. The contract will be implicit. Just not sure yet how.
- Living life as a combination of your online identity and brand and your offline interactions, enriching both through the recording and refining of both to its bare essence of what matters most to us.
- Consumers are empowered with increasing control over the shaping of the things they surround themselves with. Products we consume must be refined to their ultimate utility. The consumer is too savvy and stretched too thin to tolerate poor design and unnecessary steps in service. New creative challenges result in more innovation in design, higher mental processes up the ante, more inventions result and inventions that matter, that speak to our current concerns of climate, sustainability, environment, crowded spaces, creating more time for our hurried society to enjoy life.
- Remember that sustain means creating something that allows us to stay on this planet longer, to enrich future cycles in the life of a thing, allow for continuous improvement, continued harmony.
- As technology is further and further integrated into our mobile lives we will become untethered to our computers again and our interactions will exist in a third space, now forming.
- As more exciting innovative materials are being created and light sources are redefined and evolved, the raw organic materials from metal to wood to vegetal fabrics will be prized and cherished and treated with respect. Nature the new ‘love mark’.
- Finding ways for us to live for a common good instead of an increasingly alienating individualistic and ephemeral satisfaction. Individualism will be more and more about satisfying both social and common needs and finding time and space to recharge. Rampant selfishness and egoism is now subsiding.
- The end of the traditional fashion magazine. A centralized authority defining what we should love, follow, wear, is falling to the wayside as more diverse voices share the stage and fashion moves so quickly as to be as unremarkable as yesterday’s lunch special.
- Design is integrated into utility. Design means organization of principles. Ordering. Prioritizing. We will have to take the most time and care at this stage because competition is fierce. Homogeneity is a constant threat. And for the process to be invisible, it must be thoughtfully considered beforehand.
- Simplicity is king but that doesn’t mean dull.
- Scent and color become design elements.
- Everything has a purpose but that purpose might be visceral, might be emotive. We have to listen to culture and hear the shifts.
- We must stop saying ‘consumer’ and say ‘people’ ‘person’ ‘citizen’. As marketers and developers, we are on the same side. We must not work to ‘trick’ people into buying. We must respect their needs and serve up the best solution, the best most enjoyable experience or product.
- Create whimsy. Create pleasure. Get people to think. Promote expansiveness. Promote progress. Promote sharing.
- Time is a luxury. Time will be a currency. We will ‘pay’ in order to have more time.
An agency in Barcelona asked me what I thought about the future and this is how I answered in an email. It came off the cuff and still holds true for me more than a year later.
-Chauncey Zalkin
All rights reserved.
0 CommentsMeta-Tagging Your Life
previously titled “Mind Tag – You’re It”. My mind goes through so much subject matter with all that’s going on. My more precise thinking disappears before I can get my fingers to march.
Flit flit go the pages..
Flit flit the remarkable sentiment Obama unearthed deep in America’s heartland on Super Tuesday, flit flit Recession panic circling 
the globe showing how much the rest of the world looks to us to know their own fate, flit flit the conversation I had with an Indian bricolage store owner on Faubourg du Temple where he told me that the caste system in India has disappeared (his words) and how the country is becoming predominantly Muslim because in the Muslim religion there IS no caste system (his words); he thinks there will be a Christian Muslim World War Flit flit how a new bar for innovation in the online and offline world has us soaring to ever more hypoxic heights, flit flit my newly pricked ears homing in on companies like Ideo, flit flit taking online social networking innovations offline, flit flit amorphic online offline design and social space experience, flit flit living in paris, flit flit not living in paris, flit flit the view of New York from Paris, flit flit Should I consider Shangai? Hong Kong? How could I even get there? Could I find a way to live in the east for six months? flit flit the universal love quagmire and the single woman, and on and on.
While writing this an ex-boyfriend started up a video chat so again, my attention is divided. The distractions of multiple tabs and multiple agendas. I am writing and submitting. I am looking for a job. This is the first time that I am REALLY looking for a job because I want one and not just for the money. Actually honest to goodness desirous of a company I can believe in and call home. And it can be in Shanghai or Tokyo or Portland. I am open. I have a fantasy of looking out from plate glass windows onto some wilderness in some sort of city on the ocean/forest/cliff side/mountain range so that I can feel elements other than taxi horns, pedestrian body smacking, and foie gras stinky cheese sewage concoctions – but I love cities so I can accept the aforementioned. I just want my future to be ‘tagged’ innovation, design, experiential, experimental, revolutionary, ethnographic, social network, social space, team, creativity, and best of all user generated.
A CHORUS OF MANY VOICES FROM LIVES LIKE YOUR OWN BUT NOT
I currently live in Paris in case that wasn’t clear. I’m dedicated to my search to get a small chorus of multinational voices going as I continue to talent scout in the city of the ‘createur’ (createuse). I am looking for photographers, artisans, artists, visionaries, and designers for my next shopping party hosted in my home. I have found a great Vietnamese sister duo who have a store not far from my apartment. They are going to find a gang of like-minded souls that I can sift through as well. At least in theory they are.
I’m very happy to have Aja contributing to this site and I have a few interesting thought leaders lined up. Aja’s next post is already waiting in the wings as her mind is as fast as a Virgin Galactic plane. Daonne Huff has also written. She writes about sexuality in New York from a different point of view – not the jaded been there done that trickster viewpoint. It’s not ready to post though.
ON CROSS CULTURAL RESUMES
And outside New York, where I’m aiming to pick up more traction, I’ve met a woman at an international women in business event at the Deloitte & Touche building here in Paris who I think would be of great interest to you. She’s from Alicante, Spain. She just got her MBA (with a semester in India), she’s lived in Madrid and speaks Italian, Spanish, French and Russian. She raised her hand with great enthusiasm to say she was looking for a job in India and wanted to write a c.v./resume that would be of interest to Indian companies but make sure to separate it from her European C.V. (resume) in her online profile. What reads well in France wouldn’t work in India – or New York for that matter. In France, including a picture on your c.v. has been customary for years (one woman claims that’s a thing of the past but I was told to do so) and they always seem to ask your marital status and what your parents do -even when you’re in your 30s – and its not against the law. There is not one universal way to present yourself that is palatable or relatable to employers internationally.
FEAR OF FLYING IS NOT JUST A BOOK BY ERICA JONG
We know India and China have huge growth opportunities but I was really struck by the enthusiasm she had for every day life in Southern India. The danger right now is that these countries are drawing their own talent back home from the United States where they came to be FREE and CREATE and PROSPER because of our as-of-late impossible immigration policies and fear based government. But the even bigger danger is that us as Americans are still the most hesitant in the world to embrace cultures different from our own. ‘Assimilate to our ways gosh dang it’, would say our president. We are not natural emigrants – anymore. We cling to our comfort zone more than most anyone. Australians, as we’ve all seen, seem to get up and go and keep going once they do (I know, they live in the middle of nowhere). And though the French are afraid to put their toe in the water, the people I meet in Europe are infinitely better traveled than anyone (including me) that I’ve known in America. They are happy to trot around the globe as much as possible for work and adventure. We’re the ones that think Turks and Caicos is far enough for most vacations. It’s no surprise – with just ‘two weeks’ and 15 hour work days, there are a lot of reasons why this happens.
NOT GETTING INTO OBAMA HILARY
Lets see how the earth (r)evolves in 2009. I won’t get into Obama and Hilary as I really have to walk my dog but I will say I do hope to hear from my new Spanish friend and that she will tell you more about why she is so antsy to get back to life in Southern India.
-Chauncey
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