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Virus (1994 - 1998) Anno Numero 13 maggio 98



HELEN STOREY

interview by Olivia Corio



Mutation
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Primitive streak - courtesy ICA

Heart development - ph. Jason Lowe

Helen Storey. Stilista ma fino a che punto. Una collezione da galleria d'arte. Volta a rappresentare le prime 1000 ore di vita di un embrione. Tessuti tagliati usando l'ultrasuono. Fibre di vetro. Polimeri. Materiali compositi. Arte e scienza s'incontrano nel mondo della moda, una moda senza definizione perchè non commerciabile. Non fine a se stessa. Ma sperimentale. Fine alla conoscenza. Al desiderio di spingere i limiti della creatività oltre i confini stabiliti. Arte e scienza non sono più una dicotomia. Ma si accoppiano. Sfoggiando le innovazioni della tecnologia.

Olivia Corio: Helen, you started your career as a fashion designer... and than you moved on to developing something like Primitive Streak, that is a collection but not a commercial one, a collection that is presented in Art Galleries rather than in a catwalk. When did this shift, from commercial fashion to fashion as a more artistic form, take place?

Helen Storey: I spent ten years running a traditional fashion company which allowed a small amount of experimentation... But at that time the British industry didn't support young designers and there was no understanding from the fashion institutions of how to back a designer. It was a very critical situation to be in and to run a business. So very quickly I become an exporter, 80% of my turnover went to Japan or America and that what's kept me going through the British recession of the early 90's. Then I started to develop the idea of an experimental collection, something different...

Is Primitive Streak the first project that you developed not related to fashion in the commercial sense of the word?

It was an unusual project in the sense that it was never intended to be manufactured and produced. The purpose of it was not to sell clothes to women but to explain some process that was very complicated to ordinary people.

You chose to use clothes to represent a biological substance such as an embryo in its first stages of development. Your collection in fact portrays some key events in embryonic development such as fertilisation, neuralation and heart development. This is a breakthrough with tradition because biological processes have never been portrayed through the medium of fashion... do you believe in a possible correlation, interaction between fashion and science in artistic terms ?

I think that the world of science is huge, it has got more inspiration than history because its importance is on how we came to be rather than how we lived . A few people have done history very well, such as Galliano and Westwood, but I am more interested in the world of science as a source of creativity. Creativity in terms of experimentation makes it more difficult for me to be a commercial designer but it does not matter... if I can't make enough money. I am not greedy, I am not particularly materialistic...

Your are driven by passion...

Yeah... it optimises what I do actually. I am not been judgmental on the people that are like that... I just know that I don't need to have that in me so it's better to be honest and try to work in a way that is nearest as I am as a person.

What about the content of Primitive Streak, what did you want to communicate?

What I did is... I worked with my sister who is a biologist and she concentrates on the first 1000 hours of human life and everything that is involved in that... Primarily she looks at cells, why a cell divides in the ways it does, why it grows in one direction and not in another, and how cells become different from one another. So we had to try to find a way of taking those 1000 hours and splitting it up into clearer areas... what I was trying to do was to explain not the most complicated part of the work because the most complicated part of the work would have been to difficult for me to learn... but to explain bits and bits in the middle that most people don't know about... most people know about the eggs fertilisation and they know about DNA stuff form Jurassic Park and they know about the final stage of embryonic development...and what they don't know is how you go from there to there... so my job was to put in some of the facts in between, which is the title Primitive Streak, which is the first key devlopment of an embryo. Trying to find textiles and crafts to trace a history of the mystery of life. That was my job. I didn't have a studio, or a company behind me. I worked with the London College of Fashion. I really had 3/4 months to do it, which was a short time, but people put money into it, the Welcome Trust, and therefore I had a deadline. In a funny way by being pressurised to do it in a certain time, and everybody was under the same pressure, we all come up with it in a very spontaneous way. May be if we had longer it would have been less immediate, less spontaneous.

Your project has been realised relying also on state of the art technology: a fabric created using an ultrasound machine and a scanner, hydrolic heeled shoes, fibre optics to feed electricity into the garments, a fabric created from your DNA's structure... What is the relation between fashion and technology in your view?

I think that designers are being forced more and more to look at it. They have to because you can only go so far by looking at history without looking at substance as well. To me the future of fashion lies in textiles and trying to understand textiles is trying to understand the human
body, almost to go back to the cellular content, go way beyond what might be seen as a primal vision, to go back to where things are actually made and start experimenting at behind stage rather than at finished stage. There is a lot of talk about smart fabrics... fabrics that can think... I am not convinced so much... yet... 3 or 4 seasons before I finished working commercially I started using lavender and rose in clothing because I wanted to create clothes that had an aura because of the smell realised. So I was fooling around with it then. But I think that now I would put that into the yearn so the actual fabric comes with a smell, a scent. There's a lot of work going on with technology and fabric but a bit of a gap is how designers can use these commercially. These fabrics are still very experimental... the concern is how they are going to last and whether that will cause commercial world problems, so the fashion world is split between those who want to experiment and shape history and those who don't. Part of the reason for that is that fashion is moving too fast for the wrong reasons. It is moving fast just to keep the commercial machine going...This kind of speed is what I resented.

When you said the future of fashion lies in fabrics...is that because there is a creative saturation concerning line and shape?

I think that different designers have strengths in different directions... three are very few designers who are experimenting with shape, Commes des Garçons is one of them. May be because there is little tolerance for wearing things that are extraordinary in terms of distortion of form so again you get the distinction...people who end up being experimentalist on their work on shape... but the chance to sell is very small... I am among those who are very creative on craft, and I love doing this, with all the experimentation.

It seems that the barriers dividing different forms of knowledge and different means of expression are becoming weaker and weaker... therefore there is more freedom for an artist to experiment and express herself... How do you feel about the concept of means of expression will you remain faithful to clothes as an expression of your art or will you drive your creativity towards other areas?

I think I will remain faithful to clothes because that's what I learned. And I like the female form.

Concerning the female form... how do you conceive the relation between fashion and the body?

In many ways I don't do it consciously... whatever comes out of my head it has already been somewhere up there, it has been formed from the fact that I am already feeling it. I don't have a muse. A lot of my work is biographical in the sense that it refers to experience that I am going through on my own. In some occasions these experiences are relevant to fashion and other times they are not at all. In terms of female form I think that... it is just natural... a natural idea that I have in my mind...

It's unconscious...

Yes... I tend to draw a lot. I drew, for Primitive Streak, 100 sketches. But it's just part of the process. I know nothing good will come out of the first 50 and I have to get through that stage. It is like a journey passing through stages... sometimes I don't know what I am doing but only by allowing this in the end I develop ideas. There is no short cut to this.

It seems that fashion has entered the museum. Clothes become sculptures. A whole collection becomes an installation. Art galleries present collections as art pieces. Has fashion transcended its status of frivolous body decoration to enter the realm of art ?

Designers find it difficult to know whether to be a business designer or whether to make art. Most British designers don't go into fashion to make money but they see fashion as an extension of their artistic inclination and the business side is always difficult to deal with. I think that designers have this problem about being an arty business. I don't consider fashion art I just consider it something that has not been labelled yet.

Which makes it more interesting... There is more freedom to experiment and to play with something when it has not been labelled and thus constricted into certain limits...

Yeah. But there aren't enough people doing it really...

So... now you are working on this new project, again a non-commercial collection, seamless clothes to be presented in art galleries. A year long project. Again the arts and science meet.

Yes I have managed to find a sponsor for my next project. The concept of working on science and art is understood by some and misunderstood by others. You have to be careful when you are talking to people. But the more projects I do of this kind, in theory, the easier it should get. With Primitive Streak it was more difficult because you had to educate people to the idea of the world of science and art working together, particularly with fashion because people relate fashion to the Fashion Week and the catwalks and that is it. I had to support the spirit of the project and in the end it all worked. The next project I am doing will involve a lot of crafts people. I will be much of a choreographer... I am almost scared of it. In effect it could be a millennium project. The most experimental thing I have ever done.