Friday, September 05, 2008

Although I popped into the Fashion V Sport exhibition at the V&A yesterday I didn't take a notebook with me and that means I'm going to have to revisit it at a later date. It lacked a few details, it could have done with a more comprehensive explanation of the advances in textiles that have taken place, the problem wasn't the complete absence but the tantalising hint of that kind of information provided in the exhibition literature. There wasn't a real sense of the brilliance of this area, I wanted more on the speedo suit, a bit on Gore Tex. Why was the modular jacket placed so far from the viewer that you couldn't see how the modules attached to each other and why wasn't there any explanation of it if they had to place it that far away? I don't want to simply go and look at some pretty clothes, I want to learn about the individual items, what they're made of and why it's interesting that those materials were used. This exhibition focused a little too much on the aesthetic side of things and not enough on the broader picture. It needed to be bigger and more informative than it was.

It worked better from a fashion perspective because so many of the actual items were conceived of by designers. They featured a piece from Yamamoto's 2001 Three Stripes collection that just never gets old. I can't find a picture of this because the Internet seems to hate this collection and Japanese designers don't have the following that you would expect online. What looked like this piece by Sonia Rykiel was exhibited and I really appreciated it because I loved this collection when it appeared on the catwalk. A Prada Linea Rossa outfit from 1999 was also on show and I will talk about it properly if I revisit the exhibition as it requires a little more detail and again I can't find any images of clothes from that line never mind the individual garment I'm thinking of.