Runways were nowhere in sight on Friday, March 16, for Gen Art’s New Garde fashion show, which featured the fall collections of emerging Los Angeles designers Mintee, Alms, and Hazel Brown. In a four-year-old New Garde tradition, designers conceptualized live installations to showcase their looks, and set designer Keith Greco helped bring them to life. “With a traditional runway, people have to guess the inspiration behind a designer’s work,” Greco said. “With these installations, guests have a little more insight into the motivation behind the collections.” Greco, who worked with Gen Art event director Matt Wise, sat down with each designer and looked through fabric swatches, lookbooks, and magazine tear-outs in order to understand each designer’s vision.
The unique setup of the show meant attendees were not confined to seats; they
were free to roam the Ivar Studio space and observe the models in custom-designed habitats, such as the Depression era-inspired home setting of the Hazel Brown installation, where models peeled potatoes, worked a push-pedal sewing machine, and slept atop a metal Murphy bed. On the opposite end of the thematic spectrum was Mintee’s set, which channeled Marie Antoinette-style opulence in a French dressing room complete with a vanity mirror, French parlor doors, and a harlequin black-and-white checkered floor with built-in turntables that displayed rotating models. (For that set, Greco reused some of the furniture he had made for the Marie Antoinette premiere party in New York.) Greco endowed the less-ornate Alms vignette—which called simply for text to be projected onto the models—with comparable production value by creating a cube that was surrounded by a two-foot-wide black-glass perimeter, where models paused while 16- by 20-foot projections of erotically charged questions like “What do you like better, my breasts or my nipples?” splashed across the cube walls and the models.
—Rosalba Curiel
Posted 03.20.07
Photos: Courtesy of Gen Art Los Angeles
The unique setup of the show meant attendees were not confined to seats; they
were free to roam the Ivar Studio space and observe the models in custom-designed habitats, such as the Depression era-inspired home setting of the Hazel Brown installation, where models peeled potatoes, worked a push-pedal sewing machine, and slept atop a metal Murphy bed. On the opposite end of the thematic spectrum was Mintee’s set, which channeled Marie Antoinette-style opulence in a French dressing room complete with a vanity mirror, French parlor doors, and a harlequin black-and-white checkered floor with built-in turntables that displayed rotating models. (For that set, Greco reused some of the furniture he had made for the Marie Antoinette premiere party in New York.) Greco endowed the less-ornate Alms vignette—which called simply for text to be projected onto the models—with comparable production value by creating a cube that was surrounded by a two-foot-wide black-glass perimeter, where models paused while 16- by 20-foot projections of erotically charged questions like “What do you like better, my breasts or my nipples?” splashed across the cube walls and the models.
—Rosalba Curiel
Posted 03.20.07
Photos: Courtesy of Gen Art Los Angeles