VINGT Paris News

Cité de la Mode et du Design

Anna Bromwich writing for VINGT Paris

Cité de la mode et du Design,image by Ollografik

Perched on Quai D’Austerlitz on the old industrial banks of the Seine is a 21st century Emerald City. The Cité de la Mode et du Design is a converted storehouse wrapped in a vibrant green, wavy skin that was designed to echo the murky Seine running beside it.

Cité de la Mode has been due to open for over a year now and the public should soon be able to visit the complex of boutiques, restaurants and exhibition spaces all pertaining to the theme of fashion and design.  The building already plays host to the post-graduate fashion design and management school l’Institut de la Mode. However, it is the Cité's adventurous architecture which is the greatest testament to its proposed use. Twenty years ago this part of town was a run down industrial zone. Stretching from Gare d'Austerlitz to Boulevard Général Jean-Simon, a visit to this corner of the 13th arrondissement was easily bypassed unless you happened to be tugging a boatload of merchandise up the Seine.

Yves Saint Laurent, Tout Terriblement

Mabli Jones writing for VINGT Paris, image Da Nes

When looking back at his career, Yves Saint Laurent states ‘I have only one regret: not having invented jeans’. Indeed, there is not much more the late designer could have done to influence the world of fashion and revolutionize the way women dress.  From individual items which liberated ideas of what could be stylish or sexy (‘Le Smoking’ trouser suit, the safari jacket, his modern art-inspired shift dresses), to his whole attitude towards fashion: that a designer should be an artist, but one who creates for modern women, their bodies and their lives.

In this film directed by Jérôme de Missolz, we are immersed into the world of a creative genius. Excerpts from interviews with the designer and his memoirs (read by Jeanne Moreau) are interspersed with archive footage of a master at work:  sketching feverishly, putting the finishing touches to a collection in his atelier, preparing the models before a show; all done with the eyes of a true perfectionist gazing out from behind his trademark square-framed glasses.

Vidéodanse 2009 at Centre Pompidou

Tiffany Tang writing for VINGT Paris Image Bruce Grant

Centre Pompidou's annual Vidéodanse festival clocks up it's 28th year in 2009.  A five-week event presenting a selection of 200 films and documentaries including works by Marin, Decouflé, Forsythe, De Keersmaeker, Bel and Hoghe. The event also dedicates four days in homage to the late renowned figures in contemporary dance ­– Pina Bausch and Merce Cunningham – by retracing their works and their legacy shaping the present contemporary dance scene. Titled “Quand Le Réel Entre Dans La Danse,” Vidéodanse 2009 adopts a dialectic approach in questioning how “the Real” (le réel) enters and manifests itself in the domain of contemporary dance. This is in relation to French philosopher Alain Badiou’s idea of “the passion of the Real”, which he believes to be the ultimate and defining experience of the twentieth century as we come into direct encounter with the Real by shedding layers of reality. The series of selected films approachthe concept through the examination of various themes: the setting, politics, history, auto-portraits, documentaries, food, animals, the question of genre and identity and the image of the body. Vidéodanse 2009 aims to rediscover and re-examine how the transformation of reality through the century has influenced and brought the development of contemporary dance to its present stage.

Vidéodanse 2009  - Through 23 November from 11.30 to 21.30, at the foyer of Centre Pompidou, Level -1.

Free entry.

Guy Maddin - The Magicien de Winnipeg

Brendan Seibel writing for VINGT Paris. Photo netlexfrance.

Renowned Italian master Frederico Fellini isn't the only subject of a career retrospective in Paris right now. Although the sparsely decorated lobby outside one of the the intimate cinemas of Centre Pompidou could be easily missed the collected works of Canadian auteur Guy Maddin are being celebrated in an exhibition in association with the Festival d'Automne still playing until the end of this week.

Having made a stunning entrance into the world of cinema with his feature debut, Tales From the Gimli Hospital (1988), Maddin is known for his anachronistic style, heavily informed by silent films and
German expressionism; savagely dark humor; frenetic and primitive editing; and absurdly lavish set designs. Lacking any formal film education, often relying on antiquated equipment and meager budgets, Maddin has cultivated a startlingly original oeuvre of nine features and almost thirty shorts.

La Clique Burlesque Circus

Philippa Brangam writing for VINGT Paris

An ordinary night out in Paris usually consists of dinner and drinks or a trip to the cinema. There is nothing ordinary about a night out at La Clique; the Burlesque circus which has taken the world by storm since its first and continually sold-out performance at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival’s, Spiegel tent, in 2004.

Roll up, roll up for a phantasmagorical performance from the truly gifted to the downright freaky.  A lot can happen on a small round stage. From the eye watering stunts of the almost superhumanly strong English Gents to Captain Frodo’s contortionist tennis racket routine, La Clique is a visual feast you can’t take your eyes off. Balanced out with slap stick humor and musical interludes from the deliciously camp Mario Queen of the Circus,  puppeteers Cabaret Decadanse and latex clad Miss Behave, La Clique is two hours of strictly adult entertainment. This being France, those aged twelve and over are permitted!

La Clique is showing at the Theatre Bobino, 20 rue de la Gaité, 75014, Paris

Photo taken from Circus Review

 

Save the Date: VINGT Paris invites you to our Sale Privée

Sarah Moroz writing for VINGT Paris

Fabien Larchez, creator of accessories brand Meilleur Ami, capitalizes on the idea that your wardrobe should be your best friend, your asset. It's a great concept, to mix friends and fashion. Larchez has done just that: reaching out beyond his accessories line, he’s recruited friends from the fashion community in order to organize ROOMconnection. He's collected clothes from various mode-immersed industry types (buyers, editors, models, etc.) that they no longer wear, be it because they don't have enough space or they're ridding themselves of pieces bought they in a moment of folly (it happens). Lanvin, Pierre Hardy, YSL, Isabel Marant, Chloe, Prada are amongst the names you just might recognize...

Green in the City: Baba chic

Stephanie Wells writing for VINGT paris

Take it from a San Franciscan. Hippies do not great fashionistas make. Yet, am I imagining things? Could this be the elusive green-chic boutique that until now has avoided Paris?

While eco style outposts carpet New York and California, Paris has been fashionably late to jump onboard. Green in the City owner Helene Sananikone approaches eco chic with a refreshing Franco-Asian attraction to refined modern elegance. The absence of flawlessly stylish green and fair trade apparel in the capitol of fashion stirred Sananikone to launch her Marais boutique earlier this year.  Without a doubt, she has created something special.

FIAC 2009

J.Christian Guerrero writing for VINGT paris

With each season of contemporary art fairs in Paris, a window opens for us to take the temperature of the 'state of the art', as it were, in aesthetic consciousness and conscience. Last year's Show-Off expo clearly demonstrated that although there is always something inherently appreciable about honestly bleak representations of truly dire circumstances, the results of such testing can be less than encouraging.The sum total of the themes preoccupying the vast majority of new works on display at this year's FIAC, however, confidently indicated that present concerns have successfully moved out of last year's madly over-decorated, four-cornered cell of youth, money, death and design into a far more fertile space of investigation. This has been encompassed by predominant and often blending interests in hum/animality, architecture, dreams and information control.

 In 1804, the obscure French revolutionary philosopher, Destutt de Tracy, asserted with bold clarity that "ideology is a part of zoology". Very many of the works which addressed these four operant themes (often in combination) curiously seemed to focus on what such a still provocatively unfathomed assertion might mean in the context of the present day. Last year's broadsheeting of the ideological imaginary concentrated almost fetishistically on the textures of the bars enclosing various contingencies of semiotic exchange. By contrast, this year's interests in the idea of the human as a self-sanctifying type of animal and our modes of nesting and establishing the economies of our spaces as simultaneously private and public were unambiguously freer in their ranges and modes of expression and far less melancholic in tone, if only rarely shying away from how deeply problematic such dynamics always remain.

That at least three works on display were comprised of various takes on unhinged doors indicates clearly that the question of negotiating the thresholds between personal and public domains - or taking the ever both necessary and impossible 'pas au-dela', as Maurice Blanchot once ingeniously phrased it - has become a matter that the contemporary imagination can no longer afford to ignore or stifle. Such disclosures about our modes of self-enclosure as being inherently problematic give meaning to the floor of the unconscious  that constitutes the abyssal basis of the spaces we inhabit on a quotidian level and renders especially
important a new attempt to focus upon the ways in which we exchange information across and throughout these spaces.

Although this present assessment can only briefly recap the essential themes which tied together the inherently historical logic of the concerns demonstrated at this year's FIAC as occupying contemporary aesthetic consciousness, the way in which these concerns are consistently providing an ongoing undercurrent to the contemporary art scene will be examined in an article to follow soon on how the works of Thomas Suire currently on display at Grace Teshima's Montmartre gallery through November 1 cover precisely the same terrain in ways as conceptually rich as they are acerbically witty.