The article has interviews with Dries Van Noten and Consuelo Castiglioni, of Marni.
Arts and Crafts: A new organic spirit in fashion
By Suzy Menkes International Herald Tribune
TUESDAY, MAY 17, 2005
LONDON There is a new organic spirit in fashion - and its roots go back at least a century. A focus on the imperfectly natural and work touched by human hands is growing away from the high-tech modernism that once seemed to represent the future. Current social issues - about rampant consumerism and a loss of craft skills - also recall the ideals and concerns of an earlier era.
The 21st century seems a long stretch from the original Arts and Crafts movement, founded in the 1880s as the Industrial Revolution belched smoke through England's green and pleasant land. But an exhibition on that subject at London's Victoria & Albert Museum breathes the same air as current fashion.
"It's the right time - Arts and Crafts laid down a whole principle of living and
that has a resonance today," says Karen Livingstone, curator of the V&A show on which she worked for three years and now realizes "completely chimes with people's attitudes."
"People today are looking at the work/life balance, they are socially responsible and concerned about overconsumerism - and they want to escape the pressure of urban life," Livingstone says. She believes that those early intellectual ideas have grown, a century on, into "more fundamental issues about how to live in the world and how to treat the world."
"International Arts and Crafts," under way until July 24, does not present William Morris or John Ruskin as harbingers of holistic living, even if it shows the extraordinary influence the British movement had across the world from Frank Lloyd Wright's prairie housing in urban Chicago to Japan's Mingei (folk craft) movement in the 1930s.
The show does not even focus on textiles, which might have been given more play. Finland's wooden furniture and rus-in-urbis room sets are more in evidence than clothes, although the museum shop has been turned into a rural idyll where William Morris-patterned rubber boots are on sale.
It would be pretentious to suggest that fashion for 2005 is setting out to relive a 19th-century movement that had, in Livingstone's words, "a strong social underpinning inspiring everyday life."
As Dries Van Noten, the Belgian designer with a personal passion for gardening and a sense of nature in his clothes, says: "As an addicted gardener, I am also aware that I am only a fashion designer. I try to be conscious in that way - without trying to preach."
Yet Van Noten's clothes, with their hand-blocked prints and textured fabrics, are a fine example of the current organic spirit.
Central to the floral patterns that have sprouted this season is the idea of imperfection - or even a touch of the withering and decay that were present in the fin-de-siècle jewelry of René Lalique.
"Too beautiful scares me and too pretty becomes a little boring," says Van Noten, who showed black flower corsages, as if singed, in his latest collection.
The Belgian designer admits that he is inspired directly by his garden, even if he might choose to focus on a dahlia and then deliberately make it oversize. He also works on organic prints, as the Arts and Crafts founders did.
"I am fascinated by tradition and by skills and way of printing and all those things," Van Noten says. "But the Arts and Crafts wanted to go back to old ways - they were against modern times. I like also modern techniques."
Livingstone says that it is not true that the original movement had a Luddite desire to reject the Industrial Revolution. Its founders were sophisticated, urban and modern, even if the textiles, panels and furniture in the exhibition often look like handmade medieval-gothic images.
"One of the myths about Arts and Crafts is that it was just about things made by hand," the curator says. "It was also about improving industrial design, and they were happy to work with industry as long as it was done properly."
At Marni, a powerful Italian brand that still seems rooted in the organic, there is a similar spirit. The designer Consuelo Castiglioni, known for her textured fabrics, veined-leaf patterns, feathery accessories and a color palette of green, brown, russet and slate blue, says that up to 25 percent of each Marni collection is unique, using "motifs which have an identity."
"I like rough woven wools, cottons, linens and silks that are sometimes actually handmade," she says, describing nature as "such an immense basin into which I can plunge for ideas."
"Flowers, leaves, rocks, seeds, bird feather or fish patterns - there is such a variety of shapes, colors and combinations," Castiglioni says. "The imagination is then free to operate by simplifying or replicating patterns, changing, enhancing or neutralizing colors."
Giving nature an edge is the current mood, as thoughtful designers turn to raw fabrics and flowers that are not herbaceous border-perfect nor meadow-sweet.
"I was looking for something earthy, organic and vegetal," says Christopher Bailey of Burberry, who even picked a William Morris print of dense flowers and leaves for his latest collection. Inspired by his native Yorkshire and the beauty of the countryside, especially in its autumnal decadence, Bailey describes the effect as "less pretty and a bit more earthy with the leaves and the flowers - but still very feminine."
Bailey suggests that his vision is about more than replicating nature as part of Burberry's connection with the Great Outdoors.
"I wanted the whole mood of the collection to feel down to earth, a little bit rustic with a hand-crafted feel," he said of the corduroy caps and country style. "But it is also a little bit about going away from slightly sterile fashion that feels clinical. It is more reflective."
Bailey says that he also relates to the William Morris patterns as a reprise of London in the 1960s. That was when the prints were last taken up as part of a counterculture rejection of space-age futurism.
"It goes in cycles," says Livingstone. "People associate Arts and Crafts with the hippie movement because that had moral roots."
Van Noten also thinks that designers, obliged to turn out collections faster than a flower grows, can learn from the Arts and Crafts spirit.
"I like the way I live - I respect nature," he says. "But as a designer I always try to control everything. Once I am in the garden, I sense that someone else is taking over. It keeps my feet on the ground."
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arts and crafts is very much about a handmade aspect, with the focus on the craftsman...the idea of things having a more raw, less finished or contrived effect. I think this definitely translates into clothing and definitely responds to what a lot of people are interested in right now...natural fibres and dyes, printing fabrics by hand, unfinished edges, and visible stitching (evoking the visible craftwork in vernacular-inspired arts and crafts furniture, for example), allowing the natural beauty of the fabric and handmade aspects to show through, also the interest in traditional clothing and period clothing styles, etc...these all evoke what the arts and crafts was about. 
