PAPER CLOTHING. Benaki Museum
RRRIPP!! Paper Fashion
Athens, Benaki Museum – Pireos Street Annexe
1/3/2007 - 15/4/2007Paper dresses first appeared in the USA in 1966, and within two years they had flooded the market, creating a fashion that perfectly expressed the pop culture of the sixties.
The cultural organization ATOPOS has perhaps the largest collection of sixties paper dresses in the world, which it is presenting in an original installation designed by Normal Studio, a French industrial design firm.
The exhibition also extends its topic to the study of the unknown use of paper in the history of garments, presenting a wide range of paper garments, ranging from Edo-era Japanese kimonos to garments for sanitary use, as well as examples of designer wear from the fertile minds of John Galliano, Issey Miyake, Hussein Chalayan, Walter Van Beirendonck and others. Pride of place goes to the 1966 FRAGILE Dress from the Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, New York, a paper dress painted by Andy Warhol for Nico.
Finally sixties fashion for paper can become a source of inspiration. ATOPOS put out a call to fashion designers and artists, to use the ATOPOS collection as their inspiration and the exhibition includes creations by Sophia Kokosalaki, Michael Cepress, Deux Hommes, Marcus Tomlinson, Dionysis Kavallieratos, Jackie Nickerson and the internationally renowned stage designer Bob Wilson.Curator and artistic director: Vassilis Zidianakis
Organization:
ATOPOS and Benaki Museum with the support of the Greek Ministry of Culture, The United States of America Embassy in Greece, the French Embassy and the Institut Francais d’ Athenes and the Japanese Embassy in Greece
OOOH I love paper dresses! We had a paper wedding dress from France at one of our bridal events- it was gorgeous. When I read this post I immediately remebered something that must have inspired Andy to do HIS paper dress (Andy was always a marketing/artist hybrid) I went and searched and this was what I found on the Scott Paper website:
Scott had developed its Dura-Weve paper fabric with the intention of marketing disposable medical products such as linens, towels, and wipes, but in 1966 it also sold 50,000 disposable dresses for $1.25 each in grocery stores to promote its new colored tissues. While the fashion fad came and went, the development of paper fabric gave rise to such modern conveniences as P & G’s Pampers, the first completely disposable paper-plastic laminated diapers. Scott’s own disposable diaper, introduced in 1969, was never a commercial success.
Imagining life without Pampers is ugly indeed!
Melanie
March 12, 2007 at 9:57 pm
Melanie. Thank you (as always) for your observations. I consider you East Coast Editor for this enterprise (as they say on the mastheads of glossy magazines). I beginning to think there’s NOTHING about paper you don’t know about, so I’m glad you found the site. I urge readers to go to Melanie’s site, The Ephemerist’s Notebook http://ephemeristsnotebook.blogspot.com for more paper (and other) stories.
whatyamazakireads
March 13, 2007 at 6:17 am