domenica 20 marzo 2011

Beautiful Artists/6: Julia von Leliwa, fashion designer

Photo: Karina-Sirkku Kurz
When I heard Julia speaking about her work, I was fascinated by the great creativity, curiosity and also humor involved in her creations.
To quote Blandine Chambost: "Julia von Leliwa considers fashion design as a constantly evolving language which involves ever-renewed forms of creative thinking. It is an intellectual and technical journey consisting in, as she puts it, 'taming material', which one is to use 'in a good/new way'".

Photo: Cosima Hanebeck 
Before she graduated at Hochschule für Künste in Bremen, in 2008, Julia took various internships in fashion and costume design, and also one in a shoe company in Istanbul, where in 2007, inspired by historical photographs of the Turkish military, she produced a shoe collection called Souvenirs d´Istanbul. Here's what she writes: "The acrobatic formations of the soldiers often symbolized star and half-moon shapes and were shown at military parades. For the collection I made 9 shoe designs, which I produced in different leather types and colour combinations."
Here's Blandine Chambost again: "Julia’s personal work draws inspiration from the making processes which she likes to observe in factories. From Istanbul to Paris, her inquisitive mind has led her to explore different environments in which she happily immersed herself, familiarising with new materials and techniques in the process. Through direct observation, conversations with craftsmen, on-site photography and visual research on the web, Julia keeps accumulating impressions and visual references which feed into her work."

After graduating, Julia trained under the supervision of various artisans and in the fashion industry (Viktor & Rolf in Amsterdam, Balenciaga in Paris), and she's currently working as a costume design collaborator for the show “Life And Death Of Marina Abramovic”, created by Robert Wilson and Marina Abramovic.

Die Jagd. Photo: Karina-Sirkku Kurz, Julia von Leliwa
Browsing through her website, you'll find a collection of shoes inspired by car design, a collection of clothes inspired by the body building scene (On Season: "How precisely and accurately bodybuilders deal with their body is shown by one athlete’s food diary. For ten years he documented every single gram he’d eaten right down to an exact date and time.I took an extract of that diary to use as a print for one ensemble. A jacket’s cut equates to the body measurements of the diary’s author as an attempt to interpret the shape and substance of his body measurements."); another, Die Jagd, by "Diana, the goddess of the moon and fertility, protectress of women and girls". You will also find many other fascinating things, like an elaborate scarf that she made out of a blanket found in her parents' attic.

 

You can see more beautiful pictures and read more about the work on Julia's website: http://www.juliavonleliwa.de/



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