Y/Project's runway on a boat on the Seine, with a model's wearing transparent tulle tops with pressed silk flowers. Photography & cover picture by Elli Ioannou
A touch of romance and a lot of Andy Warhol with a Belgian twist were the key ingredients at Y/Project’s Spring/Summer 2017 men's show at Paris Fashion Week, reports Elli Ioannou. Photographs by our Paris special correspondent Elli Ioannou
Female models & silk flowers
ON the first hot summer day in Paris, on the banks of the Seine river, Maxim's boat with its Art Nouveau décor (replica of the famous restaurant in the Rue Royale) lay floating on the water ready for the Y/Project show. After a lengthy 40 minute delay, typical of many shows during fashion week, in the humid compact space, reggae and jam music signalled the start of the show. Out came models wearing flesh-coloured, skin tight floral tops, deconstructed denim floppy sweaters, pastel pink and blue shiny parachute track pants that reflect 90s hip-hop references.
The fitted, high-waisted denim pants with a signature diamond-shaped cut out were worn by sexy, gigolo-style male models who seemed to have stepped straight out of Andy Warhol’s Factory.
Contrasts of tough guy jackets & romantic pastels
Reminiscent of Warhol's screen tests of various male and female personalities, they included a young Lou Reed look-a-like, Basquiat and yes even two versions of Nico. There were over-sized cable sweaters handmade in Normandy and a use of contrasting materials such as moire on trackpants and tuxedos.
Creative director Belgian Glenn Martens, has taken this Parisian label to new heights, including becoming a finalist in the prestigious LVMH Prize for Young Fashion Designers. While Martens first studied interior design, his first love is Gothic architecture, he decided on a whim to apply for the prestigious The Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp. He got in and discovered a real passion for fashion. After his graduation in 2008, he joined Jean Paul Gautier to work on his G2 line.
High-waisted jeans & big sweaters
The young designer worked as Yohan Serfaty’s first assistant at the designer’s eponymous brand in 2009 before going on to work with the renowned Belgian designer Bruno Pieters. He soon started a brand of his own, before he agreed to take the job at Y/Project. Serfaty had founded his label Y/Project in 2010 and Martens took over the label when the designer passed away in 2013.
Part of Glenn Martens’ vision for the brand since becoming creative director three years ago, was to combine men's and women's pieces “to create collections that challenge classification”. The designs are also influenced by various subcultures and eras. The space, the models and the sound are all key ingredients in setting the scene for the theme of any range, and the Y/Project show had a suitably eclectic atmospheric and captured the collection's tough yet romantic aesthetic.
Tap pictures for full-screen slide show
Leather jackets and cable-knit sweaters hand-made in Normandy
Female models mixed with their male counterparts on the runway, a trend seen across all of the menswear catwalks this season
Black leather jacket over a tulle and silk flowered top reflecting the collections tough yet romantic aesthetic
Pastel blue moire suit with long jackets and slim trousers
Glenn Martern's collection had both references to the 1970s and the 1990s
Another female model struts on the Y/Project runway during the men's shows in Paris Fashion Week
Sporty tight fitting violet trousers and fluid zip jacket
High-waisted blue jeans with signature diamond pattern and flowing white shirt
The androgynous Boy by Boy collection on the runway at London Collections: Men SS17. Photograph (above) and Cover Picture of House of Holland collection by Liron Weissman
While the fashion industry is currently musing over the future of men’s fashion, London collection: Men launched its ninth season last weekend at a new venue. Our special correspondent, Limor Helfgott, looks at the changes in the business of men's fashion and the new directions for Spring/Summer 2017. Photography by Liron Weissman & Limor Helfgott
David Gandy | Liron Weissman
DYLAN Jones, editor of British GQ and chairman of London Collections:Men, announced on the opening night of the event that next season, LC:M will be relaunched as London Fashion Week Men’s. There are other changes on the way too created by the “see now, buy now” movement. More and more designers are joining in and altering their approach to the fashion week schedule. This has been a gradual change over the last few seasons, but was much more noticeable this spring. According to this new model, collections will be shown in the current season rather than six months ahead of time, the way it used to be traditionally. This puts the focus on the consumers instead of magazine editors, stylists or even fashion buyers.
Xander Zhou show | Liron Weisssman
Genderless looks also swept the men's catwalks in London and Milan while some brands have decided to show men’s and women’s wear in one show. Burberry already announced they are making the switch and Tom Ford cancelled his separate men’s presentations beginning in January and announced it will be pushed back to September 2016 to align with its retail schedule. Other key brands such as Alexander McQueen and Pringle of Scotland left the London Spring/Summer 2017 schedule. Ten fashion houses, inlcuding Calvin Klein, Ermenegildo Zegna, Brioni and Bottega Veneta, decided not to show at the current Milan men's fashion week where male models are strutting their stuff in shows that began last Friday. Some analysts say separate men's fashion shows, which can cost up to hundreds of thousands of dollars each, are no longer worth the money for luxury brands, which have been hit by a global sales slowdown. Annual designer menswear sales are expected to reach more than $40 billion in 2020, still up by 6.8 percent from 2015, according to Euromonitor International, while womenswear sales are expected to rise 7.7 percent to about $75 billion in the same period.
Xander Zhou | Liron Weissman
With all that being said, there are still so many good things about London Collections: Men and British fashion in general. It is still the most unique men's fashion week and stands out from Milan, Paris and New York. What makes it so different are how two very distinctive menswear worlds are combined together: traditional tailoring at one end, and innovative, artistic, fashion forward designs at the other. Those two worlds ~ Savile row tailors that have dressed generations of royalty ~ and progressive young designers plus the most daring street style, are what makes LC:M so exciting and something to look our for every season. This season was no different. We have picked some designers, looks and trends that stood out from all that LC:M spring/summer 2017 had to offer:
Ximon Lee: A Growing Boy’s Journey
Contrasts at Ximon Lee collection | Limor Helfgott
New York-based Chinese designer Ximon Lee continues to express his unique point of view through his pieces made with thoughtfully treated materials. After winning the H&M Design award as the first menswear designer in 2015, Lee decided to start his own line that made an immediate impact with its originality. His SS17 collection Hard is an exploration of the concealing and the uncovering of the body. The inspiration, a growing boy’s journey and his perception of hard and tough, is reflected in fragile materials that are tailored in hard silhouettes, playing with conventional work wear and unconventional embellishment. Harsh techniques contrast with the serene and the disturbed, including acid wash, silicone, latex coating and tailored tarpaulin.
Katie Eary: Stars, Stripes and Predator Fish
Starry silk at Katie Eary show | Limor Helfgott
Influenced by Irvine Welsh’s The Blade Artist, - the latest chapter in the lives of the Trainspotting mob, designer Katie Eary looked towards the dark and complex muse for her inspiration “its a fun collection about the dark things that preoccupy me, viewed through a prism of memory and touched by a feeling of luxury” The catwalk was split in two by a wall of red fishing nets which created a beautiful contrast against the garments in the collection. Male and female models walked onto the catwalk wrapped in the luxury of cashmere and rich, starry silk. To match the sea theme, the colour palette was made up of teals, deeps blues, corals and fish prints that helped creating a collection that had just emerged from underwater.
Phoebe English: The Designer to Watch
Phoebe English presentation | Liron Weissman
All made in the United Kingdom, with a refreshing approach to menswear, Phoebe English is a designer to watch. This season the designer presented the brand’s first Mens presentation and third Phoebe English menswear collection. This capsule collection was an evolution of some of the brand’s most recent womenswear elements combined with the shapes and fit of the previous men lines seasons, continuing the established silhouettes. Long shirt dresses for men as well as soft cotton joggers and detailed shirting were key pieces together with smart minimal coats, a play on bomber jackets and hooded smock tops in grey striped linens. Other pieces included dusty blue-grey and brushed cotton tops and crisp white shirting. A mindfulness of functionality over decoration ran throughout the collection set within neutral blank oversized embroidery frames which exposed their inner structures.
Christopher Ræburn: A Cosmonaut's Journey
Spacy Christopher Raeburn | Limor Helfgott
In his SS17 collection, Christopher Raeburn took us to the moon and back for a space-themed show inspired by George Lucas’ film debut, THX 1138, a vision of a terrestrial dystopian future. Raeburn, known for his innovative designs, certainly took it to the next level in his sleek and modern creation, reflecting the extra-vehicular activity of a cosmonaut journey via statement pieces within the collection such as leather rocket bags, bomber jackets with mesh sleeves and lunar graphics, each emulating the monochromatic out of world inspiration.
MCM X Raeburn | Limor Helfgott
MCM by Christopher Ræburn: This season, the designer also collaborated with MCM, creating a capsule collection in celebration of the travel luxury label’s 40th anniversary. MCM and Raeburn re-imagined travel and boldly expressed a responsible and sustainable creativity in it's pursuit. They designed their collection around five key aesthetic attributes: seasonless, sustainable, unisex, multifunctional, and mobile. The aim was to design a new wardrobe for the global nomad and reimagine travel for future-facing millennials ~ a generation which embraces functional aesthetics and a sustainable consciousness at the same time. Form and function were at the heart of each design while Raeburn’s collection “remade” MCM’s iconic Visetos canvas into trench coats, parkas, bombers, and riding jackets, giving a contemporary twist to the chic material that has signified luxury travel for four decades. At the same time, innovation was central to the collection, specifically through the use of breakthrough fabrics and higher sustainable standards, such as Schoeller 4-way-stretch and Ecoalf Nylon.
Xander Zhou: For Grown Ups Only
Bad boys at Xander Zhou | Liron Weissman
The Beijing based designer continues to make waves in his spring/summer 2017 collection: models walked into the catwalk in bedroom hair and bad boys looks with cropped tops and long sleeves. These elements were used to compliment the enlarged waists of jeans that then clung to the hips and midrif combined with a lot of patent leather, stripes, and plenty of flesh. The show notes focused on buzz words such as Sex, Restless, Guilty Pleasures, Identity and Punk. The looks were just as bold. Punk was demonstrated as chains linked around the waist and hips, and pinned from shoulder to belt-loop, safety-pin style, and in forms of metal earrings and chokers with metal beaded messages of Freedom.
Songzio: Wearable Art
Unique textiles at Songzio | Limor Helfgott
Internationally acclaimed south Korean designer Songzio, was described as the best menswear designer in his country and has collaborated with a number of famous Asian celebrities. His current collection is a contrast between the modern and the traditional, young and old, darkness and light. The designer starts each collection with visualising ideas on canvas, later translating them on to printed textiles, resulting in a collection that merits the description of wearable art for its individuality and unique fabrics.
Biker aesthetic at Belstaff | Limor Helfgott
Belstaff: CarefreeBiker
This season, the Belstaff collection was inspired by Bruce Brown’s seminal 1971 motorcycle documentary, On any Sunday, starring Steve McQueen. Like the film, the collection celebrates the carefree attitude of the guys and girls from on and off bike tracks, reflecting the sun bleached palette of the film. Key designs references and colours are also taken from the Belstaff archive, pieces of the same era. The presentation, showed in a very British location at the Queen Elizabeth II Centre opposite Westminster Abbey, included looks from the Women’s Spring 2017 (Pre) collection, which takes the same early 1970s carefree biker inspiration and features hand-waxed suede, technical outerwear fabrics, lightweight denim and luxurious leathers all enriched with subtle racing motifs.
What Does it All Mean for Your Wardrobe
St James style | Liron Weissman
According to this season's spring/summer 2017 mens wear collections, one thing you should definitely make sure you own are a pair of shorts, which became even shorter this season, teamed with white socks and army jackets and a logo-emblazoned sweater if you insist on going for the full look.
On the other hand, British weather is very much an influence on classic English style with raincoats, macs, cagoules and outerwear designed to rebuff the rain all being key items ~ these pieces will be a big part of your wardrobe and work well with the classic British tailored look. Menswear is getting ready for whatever the future may hold for it: storms, rain, hail or shine.
The flower strewn runway of Charles Jeffrey'sLoverboy SS17 show and a dramatically blue-coated model with a spiky chain mail headpiece with Hell eblazoned at the neck. All photographs from the show by Chris Yates. Tap on pictures for full-screen slideshow
London Collections:Men's fashion week shows the most avant-garde menswear designers from around the world. The Man showcase, established for young designers in 2005, has launched many successful new brands in the British capital. One of the most iconoclastic new designers on this season's SS17 schedule is Charles Jeffrey, writes Jeanne-Marie Cilento
Charles Jeffrey by Meinke Klein
CHARLES Jeffrey's new Loverboy collection is a paean to his anarchic creative spirit. He deconstructs fine tailoring to form an androgynous, mystical show on a runway strewn with romantic flowers but offset by a fleshy film by long-term collaborator Gareth Wrighton, meant to symbolise birth and regeneration. The show had the designer's signature theatricality with haunting music along with the fragrant blooms scattered over the catwalk. Models strutted down the floral runway in New Look full-skirted and flounced coats, creating an eclectic mix of menswear motifs through different centuries, with the dandy as a key figure. Victorian double breasted jackets with nipped in waists and mutton-leg sleeves played with a sense of proportion and the androgyny was enhanced by the mix of male and female models.
Corsets and draped, wool track pants
While the 25 year old Jeffrey was born in Scotland, London is his home and he graduated from the MA fashion course at Central St Martins in 2015. Jeffrey is an illustrator and an ingenious and fearlessly experimental designer. He launched his first collection at Fashion East’s presentations last year before his runway debut at the MAN showcase last January. This spring/summer 2017 season in London is Jeffrey’s second runway show as part of MAN. His take on menswear reflects his work as an illustrator and his club night Loverboy, held in VF Dalston, where he has a space to create his work and collaborates with artists, photographers and musicians. A cult nightlife and art space, VF Dalston provides a base for the label and inspiration from the people who visit the venue.
This season he wanted to go beyond the party clubland motifs of his first AW16 show.
Complex yet fluid tailoring
The designer says he wanted the new collection to be rooted in real life and express a “consciously naïve attempt at something truly ascendant.” Jeffrey's aesthetic is a challenging mix of seemingly atonal elements and discplined tailoring along with a serious and more light-hearted looks. He experiments with accessories combining plasticine and wool jogging pants with Swarovski crystals and Savile Row fabrics. The overall effect, like Proust's Madeleine, engenders fleeting thoughts of centuries past in the cut of a sleeve or a wasp waist combined with a dash of post-modern contemporary chaos. For this collection, the designer creates what he calls “a dream scape ~ a new, more complex environment for my characters to exist in.”
Sharp jackets & loose trousers
As a recently graduated fashion student, Jeffrey enjoys the research behind the clothes that then becomes part of the narrative. “We’re pushing ourselves,” he says today. “This sense of us learning new things ~ I think it’s both implicit in this season, and explicit in that it’s kind of become the concept itself.”
Jeffrey's partnership with The Woolmark Company informed most of the collection as it is created using Merino wool. He says he became immersed in the wool’s properties when he visited the Bower Roebuck and Laxton Yarns mills. The Woolmark Company, Knoll yarns and Savile Row fabric suppliers Holland & Sherry, Nikke and Scabal all contributed to the richness of the collection. “The starting points were iconic couture, Louis XIV and grandeur,” Jeffrey says. “We’ve had access to such beautiful fabrics that there’s a greater respect for fabric and construction than we’ve been able to show before."
Jeffrey's drama & theatricality
The designer wanted drama and sense of character to pervade the collection and he says it harks back to the 1650s, via the 1950s to his present in 2016 East London.
The designer's team are expert tailors and have an encyclopedic fashion knowledge that shows in this collection. Jeffrey says the key tailoring styles this season are what he calls the ‘Bitch’ and the ‘Bastard'. The first features a curved fastening, changing a man's silhouette and finished with covered buttons. This is then amplified as a full skirted coat, a type of new New Look. Whereas he describes the Bastard tailoring as: “Beautiful and chaotic, nipped right in at the waist to accentuate hip movement.”
Pockets layered together suggest the form of military clothing and apparently relate to the backgrounds of both Jeffrey’s father and that of artist and his collaborator Jack Appleyard's dad. Jeffrey says the Swarovski crystal embellished boxer shorts are inspired by themes of decay and ascendancy. His collection of shorts includes ones with scalloped edging, made from wool crêpe and seersucker, as well as those with Jeffrey’s signature ‘art denim’.
Chainmail, face paint & wooden clogs
The otherworldly look of this season's show was enhanced by models' pale, painted and powdered faces that distorted the shape of eyes and lips and the stacked wooden platform clogs they wore. The designer says that collaboration is at the heart of Loverboy collections. Jack Appleyard created a collection of chain mail accessories, fellow Central St Martin's graduate Matty Bova made special pieces for the show and William Farr created the flower strewn catwalk installation. It all adds up to a ground-breaking, experimental collection that demonstrates Charles Jeffrey has an unusual vision and instinctive talent and ambition for creating new designs that will draw people to his work. His first AW16 collection will be available at stores including Dover Street Market, Joyce and VFiles.
The Zaha Hadid retrospective exhibition that has just opened at the 16th Century Palazzo Franchetti on the Grand Canal, curated by the Fondazione Berengo during the Venice Biennale. Cover picture: Zaha Hadid's painting of a projected housing development in Hamburg.
Venice Biennale: an exhausting, beautiful attempt to relinquish architecture
FROM now through November 27, architects and enthusiasts from around the globe will descend upon Venice, Italy, for the 15th International Architecture Exhibition organised by La Biennale di Venezia. The Venice Architecture Biennale is like the Olympics for architecture, bringing together a global perspective and dialogue.
It occurs every two years, alternating with the world-renowned International Art Exhibition organised by La Biennale di Venezia, with the objective of celebrating, summarising and addressing the current state of architecture and the most pressing issues in the profession. The growing success of the Venice Architecture Biennale has inspired a range of spin-offs including the recent Chicago Architecture Biennial.
The centrepiece of the event is a curated exhibition in Venice’s Arsenale, a 13th century former shipyard, showcasing 88 participants from 37 different countries. In addition, there are 62 individually curated national pavilions mostly located around the nearby Giardini, and a range of off-site events and exhibitions. The overall production takes over the entire water city, turning Venice into a hub of cultural production, discussion and discovery.
This year’s curator, Chilean architect Alejandro Aravena, is no stranger to the Venice Biennale. In 2008 his “do tank” Elemental, won the Biennale’s Silver Lion, the second place prize for Promising Young Architects for their reinvention of social housing at Quinta Monroy Housing in Iquique, Chile, and their focus on community engagement.
Only eight years later, Aravena was awarded the 2016 Pritzker Architecture Prize, the industry’s most prestigious prize, along with his appointment as curator of the 2016 Venice Biennale. A big year for Aravena, indeed.
A view of the installation ‘Reporting from the Front’, by Alejandro Aravena during the 15th International Architecture Exhibition.EPA/Andrea Merola
The 15th International Architecture Exhibition theme, “Reporting From the Front”, brings social consciousness in architecture to the forefront, responding to a turbulent time when many countries are suffering economic unrest, an ongoing refugee crisis and political discord.
Aravena wrote when he was nominated as director:
There are several battles that need to be won and several frontiers that need to be expanded in order to improve the quality of the built environment and consequently people’s quality of life. This is what we would like people to come and see at the 15th International Architecture Exhibition: success stories worth being told and exemplary cases worth being shared.
At the main entry to the Arsenale, a large sign painted on the wall explains that “the introductory rooms of the Biennale Architettura 2016 were built with the 100 tons of waste material generated by the dismantling of the previous Biennale”.
The entry to the Arsenale
The vast reception space of the Arsenale is filled with a curtain of standard metal studs hanging from above. It makes noticeable light patterns on the surfaces below, surrounded by walls made of stacked plasterboard. The plasterboard, piled at a range of depths, produces a changing surface with varied openings.
Arriving at the actual entry to the exhibition, one questions if the next curator will reuse the materials required for Aravena’s exhibition?
What follows is a broad range of dislocated projects from around the globe which as Aravena describes in his curatorial statement,
will widen the range of issues to which architecture is expected to respond, adding explicitly to the cultural and artistic dimensions that already belong to our scope, those that are at the social, political, economic, and environmental end of the spectrum.
But beyond the visual propaganda that seems to be populating the 300 meter-long Arsenale (and beautiful and intelligent propaganda it is) one might question where the architecture resides. It appears that the curator has made an attempt to relinquish architecture (the building form) in order to visualise social and political issues.
Signage reading “Does permanence matter?” or “Is it possible to create a public space within a private commission?” further reduces architecture to slogans and one-liners.
But of course within this mix, a range of stand-out projects begin to demonstrate that design can be socially active and play a significant role in the reshaping of the environment. For example, Kunle Adeyemi’s Makoko Floating School, a prototype for a floating community in the rising waters of the Lagos Lagoon in Nigeria, was reconstructed and docked in Venice. The project uses only local materials such as reused plastic barrels for floating. It was the deserving recipient of the Silver Lion award.
Rural Urban Framework, looking at the conflict between the nomadic nature of the past and the sedentary nature of the present, develops housing prototypes for those left out of the urbanisation process in Mongolia.
In the Giardini exhibition, which breathed a bit more life compared to that of the Arsenale, Eyal Weizman’s Forensic Architecture uses architectural design logic working from images, films and satellite footage to trace wrongdoings, such as a drone attack in an Afghan building made legible by video footage from a neighbouring building.
Eyal Weizman, Forensic Architecture
Beyond Aravena’s exhibitions in the Arsenale and Giardini, the individually curated national pavilions offer a wide range of insight into the current state of architecture. The intensity and variation can be overwhelming.
At one end of the spectrum are pavilions that are overloaded with information, such as the deconstructed German Pavilion, which has literally removed four of its walls so that it is always open. Inside, documents that demonstrate how cities and buildings have been transformed with the recent influx of refugees cover the walls from floor to ceiling.
Image from the Belgium Pavilion
At the other end of the spectrum you have Australia’s “The Pool”, an immersive sensory experience where curators Michelle Tabet, Isabelle Toland and Amelia Holliday have designed a swimming pool surrounded by seating so guests can sit back or even take a dip while listening to interviews about the pool and its influence on Australia’s cultural identity.
Little written or visual information is provided in the pavilion but a take away leaflet expands on the relevance of the swimming pool, addressing issues such as:
a backdrop to the good times, the pool is also a deeply contested space in Australian history, a space that has highlighted racial discrimination and social disadvantage.
Australian Pavilion, Venice Biennale 2016
Other pavilions that should not be missed include the British pavilion and its show Home Economics, exploring new models for domestic life based on hours, days, months, years, and decades. The Russian pavilion exhibits the wild Urban Phenomenon, which examines the Exhibition of Attainments of the National Economy, a 1939 Soviet exhibition and park complex reincarnated as a public multi-format cultural and education space.
Belgium’s Bravura Pavilion investigates,
what craftsmanship can mean during a period of economic scarcity as, according to the curatorial team, dealing with scarcity demands a high level of precision.
The Spanish Pavilion’s show Unfinished was the winner of the Golden Lion, the top award at the Biennale. Spain presents a survey of photos and drawings of incomplete construction projects prompted by its 2008 economic crisis alongside 55 recent buildings that demonstrate innovative solutions or responses based on economic constraints.
The Spanish Pavilion show Unfinished won the Golden Lion
But one of the most powerful and thoughtful installations came from Ireland with its project titled “Losing myself.” Offering insight into the unimaginable – the experience of dementia – the project works directly with patients suffering from the disease. It explores alternative ways of redrawing a building collectively witnessed by sixteen people throughout one day, based on subjects that:
cannot use memory and projection to see beyond their immediate situation and can no longer synthesise their experiences to create a stable model of their environment.
Irish Pavilion, Venice Biennale 2016
The results are beautiful representations of a very real and frightening experience but more importantly, returning to Alejandro Aravena’s curatorial statement, this is a project that is an “exemplary case” where architecture made a difference.
Last stop on the Biennale circuit was the off-site Zaha Hadid retrospective at the Fondazione Berengo, an homage to the late architect who died in March at the age of 65. While the exhibition has a strong focus on the late architect’s current projects, (which are really the brainchild of Zaha Hadid Architect’s Director Patrik Schumacher) a large portion of the space displays some of Hadid’s most influential works.These include her large scale paintings in which architecture grows out of the surface of the canvas, as well as models in paper relief and 3-D printing, line drawings, photographs, and videos.
Zaha Hadid retrospective.
The work celebrates the role form plays in the production of space. Here, the architect, unlike many witnessed at the Arsenal and Giardini, truly manifests the role of both the public intellectual and a maker of space.
The dichotomy between social activism and Architecture with a capital “A” is blurred here. Certainly refreshing following days of sensory overload.
In 2000, I visited the Venice Architecture Biennale for the first time. It was 7th International Architecture Exhibition directed by formalist Massimiliano Fuksas, with a title “Less Aesthetics more Ethics”. It also claimed to abandon previous Biennale structures, “no longer based on architecture as buildings.”
Fast forward 16 years and we seem to be approaching a similar cycle. The big question is: has architecture made a substantial contribution over the past 16 years, or are we just experiencing a case of déjà vu? Is architecture more innovative today?
We cannot deny the amazing array of talent and work presented at the 15th International Architecture Exhibition but did I leave feeling that when it comes to solving the world’s problems “architecture makes the difference”, as Aravena puts it?“ It would be almost impossible for any exhibition to live up to the expectations of its own publicity.
I leave the Venice Architecture Biennale thinking more about the world in its current state. The problems. The issues impacting our profession. I think that we can all learn a lot from the late, great Dame Zaha Hadid whose seminal work, along with her fearless attitude, challenged the state of architecture through design.
But I also leave inspired (and exhausted) by the amount of work I have been exposed to, and optimistic that we can continue to ask the same questions while challenging them through new paradigms.
Enjoying the buzz of Cannes: a pair of entrepreneurial festival goers hold up placards for tickets to the film premiere of The NeonDemon by Nicolas Winding Refn. Cover picture and all images below by Elli Ioannou
Artist and photographer Elli Ioannou captures the spontaneous joy and celebration at this year's Cannes Film Festival along with the more prosaic moments waiting behind the scenes
Photographers & locals crane to see the stars
THE sparkling water of the Côte d'Azur, the music floating from party-fuelled yachts, the glamour of arriving film stars and the festive, expectant air surrounding the launch of new films plus the frenetic deal-making for upcoming ones, all create a potent and fizzy atmosphere that keeps the Festival de Cannes buzzing for eleven glorious spring days in May. The film screenings and market where production companies set up their stands are all housed in the Palais des Festivals overlooking the blue sweep of the bay. The occasional downpour does little to dampen the spirits of festival goers as the cinematic crowd meet up with old friends and make new ones.
Limousines disgorge actors on to the red carpet
The town's famous hotels like the Carlton, Martinez and Majestic are strung like ornate pearls along the Croisette and look out over Cannes' golden curving beach that sweeps past the red carpet at the Palais des Festivals and then around the rocky base of the steep, sleepy streets leading up to the original 15th Century old town. Traditionally a festival for independent art house cinema, Cannes also provides another stage for film stars to saunter along the international red carpet. Film students and fans crowd around the entrance to the Palais des Festivals hoping for a glimpse of their favourite actors and hustling for last minute tickets to film screenings.
Yolanda Ross: "Which way for the red carpet?"
You need to be a film aficionado to recognise many of the film directors, cinematographers, producers, sound and costume designers who crowd the Croisette or exclusive night clubs like David Lynch’s cool Silencio and the fashion parties at the Hotel Majestic where the façade of the building is lit up with projections of scenes from the films in competition at Cannes.
David Lynch's cool Silencio club in Cannes
But both the press and the public at Cannes are star hungry and when anyone in a tuxedo or a long slinky dress exits a limousine or the Ritz Carlton, banks of cameras begin flashing. The actors, directors and producers make a leisurely walk along the red swathe of carpet encased by a phalanx of photographers, (Quentin Tarantino made a memorable dance all the way along it in 2014) that leads up to the Palais des Festivals where the films will be screened. When they reach the top of the stairs, the stars turn and make a final photo call before disappearing into the screening.
Climbing ladders to the stars
It's also a tradition in this pretty seaside town for locals and visitors alike to line up overnight with their ladders and portable seats so they get a prime position for a first glimpse of the actors walking up the red carpet. A buzz of excited conversation and layers of ladders and garden chairs form small communities around the pathways leading the actors up to the broad entrance of the Palais des Festivals. Everyone is in a festive mood. And why not? When in Cannes, it feels like you can.
