The curious onlookers, and not the models, are the focus at a new art project by a visiting student of fashion design, says Jaideep Sen.
.jpg) Studying fashion design, for Elena-Renee Pereira, was a way of subverting the business of glamour. The fashion industry was something she “never understood and never liked”. But she went on to major in textile design in a four-year course (ending in 2008) at the Utrecht School of Arts in Netherlands, interned with Manoviraj Khosla on pattern-making and block-printing in 2007, and was part of a few shows including the Amsterdam Fashion Week in the year that she graduated. Yet, being part of “the so-called fashion industry” was never on her agenda, said the 24-year-old Dutch artist and designer, currently in residence at the gallery-studio 1, Shanthi Road, where her show of new works opens this fortnight.
In a concept note about the show, titled Fashion or Art?, Pereira said that she was intent on looking “at the futility of fashion”. In an interview, she explained that her interest in bucking trends was perhaps most crucial during her studies. “I looked at fashion as an outsider within the system,” said Pereira, who has a father of Indian origin and a German mother. Taking up fashion designing allowed her to eventually bring in different disciplines of art into her work, “and to reach beyond the fabric”, she said.
The idea of reaching beyond was to provoke thoughts and raise concerns about the fashion industry, said the artist, especially in the context of “third-world sweatshops”. Further studies in visual communication, apart from weaving, dyeing and contemporary embroidery followed at the Srishti School of Art, Design and Technology in Bangalore over the last few years, as Pereira started to document garment factories in south India. The message that she wanted to convey through her work was gradually taking shape.
.jpg) A fishing village near the Auroville township outside Pondicherry became a frequent getaway. For her new show, Pereira began putting together a series of elaborate and often bizarre dresses, fabricated with sequins, pigments, and even a bunch of electric lights, and clumps of human hair. For the shoot, Pereira roped in a few friends – the city-based artists Deepak Sachin, Shilo Suleman and Vivek Chockalingam – and headed to that village near Auroville.
Presenting the results of what she had found at the factories that she visited at the time was difficult, given the restricted access she had to work with, explained Pereira. She had begun reconsidering her approach; producing pictures revealing the work conditions and grim views of the insides of those mills and the prevalence of under-aged workers wouldn’t have the kind of impact she wanted. “Only by contrasting something, and making something look out of place, will it trigger an emotion,” offered the artist. “If I wanted to show the harsh facts, you would have only felt sad. And become immune to it ten minutes after you read it, like a newspaper with facts and figures.”
Pereira decided to “look at behaviours of consumerism in society”, and to indulge in a bit of cynicism. She consciously rejected the idea of portraying the serious aspects of the industry, she said. Creating an extreme sense of imbalance, instead – of outlandish couture placed in the setting of a village, complete with confused locals and amused children looking on – might do the trick, she figured. Getting her friends, or “people who don’t pose on a regular basis” to model her creations was the conceit. “I took to my clothes with a bit of sarcastic humour,” said the artist, explaining how she got different tailors in the city to stitch white kurtas for her to work on; each dress bears the signatures of those tailors, like designer labels. The show consists of multi-media installations based on that shoot.
Taking pictures at the village was her way of capturing the reactions of everyday people. “People who are not influenced by fashion,” she said. The responses surprised Pereira, as “they didn’t even notice the clothes, and were more interested in the newcomers roaming around”. The artist added that she had refused to employ digital photography, “because it would be easy to control the results”. She didn’t want spic choreographed centrespreads. “The glare of the media and film industry on celebrity supermodels and their narcissistic bodies tailored to fit into garments” was, after all, the focus of her dissent.
With a handful of other current projects, including the Philips Design Probes on futuristic product designs, apart from collaborations related to jewellery and film, Pereira disclosed that she would move on to Eindhoven back in her country later this year, to take up her master’s in Conceptual Design at the city’s Design Academy. For now, she’s relying on some of the bewildered expressions at her new show to raise questions about the workings of the fashion industry. “Maybe it will stay longer in your thoughts than the news you read this morning,” said Pereira.
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