If there’s one thing the fashion industry hates (possibly), it’s frivolous waste; so often (read: rarely), you’ll hear fashion-types bemoaning the ephemeral nature of trends, and wailing miserably about the idea of objects which cost a phenomenal amount of money to produce being cast aside in favour of newer and equally expensive replacement. “Won’t somebody please think of the environment?” they might have asked (though it’s highly unlikely), possibly while clutching an unfeasibly large bag, made from the week’s most popular endangered species. “We simply can’t bear the thought of all this capricious crap ending up on the scrapheap.”
Thankfully, in one case at least, a solution’s been found to the throwaway nature of fashion’s more theatrical elements – at the Fondazione Prada, an exhibition has been curated from the remnants of the brand’s former catwalk props, turning the raw materials of these set designs into new, reconstituted artworks. If, after this, Prada can only dream up a way of making lucite banana earrings into a timeless design classic, they’ll be set for the season:
Ex limbo, the project presented by Rotor at the Fondazione Prada in Milan, is an investigation of the architectural and scenographic elements realized for the fashion show sets designed by Prada and OMA for more than a decade. After being used, they returned to a status of raw materials and were placed in storage at different locations.
The starting point of this project is a curiosity for the materials used, the reasons why they have been conserved, and how this was practically managed. Rotor’s work consists in bringing forth the ‘remnants’ of a world that after a moment of meaningful splendor is discarded and put in limbo, inviting a second look at the forgotten. The Fogazzaro exhibition space hosts a labyrinth of elements that bear witness, simultaneously, to the amount of work involved in producing each fashion show, and to the silent existence of its materialization beyond the event: ex limbo.
Thus, in Milan piles of wood, polyethylene seats, metal structures, mirrors and walls, together with the denuded construction from the last show, return to fill the space in Via Fogazzaro with a transformed physicality. Among others, the metal structures made of steel tubes used to build the stands in the late nineties, the beige-painted plywood podium on which 40 photographers gathered for the FW 2011 fashion shows, the seats in pink and green polyethylene foam used during the SS 2008 and FW 2010 fashion shows, and a dismantled catwalk from the AI 2011 fashion shows with its white vinyl covering.
Ex Limbo runs at the Foundazione Prada until June 5th, 2011.
Foundazione Prada (Click Here)
