Pascal Gautrand / Design is a puzzling patchwork /
DESIGN IS A PUZZLE, A LANGUAGE, A SYMBOLIC FIELD
Most of my work, of my reflections about design, fashion and the fashion world and system evolve around one single but complex idea: the paradox between singularity and multiplicity. The puzzle, the patchwork, appear as the sum of many elements, of many pixels, that give sense to the whole, to the group, to fashion, design and to myself.
In fashion you always need to tie together different pieces, and the same happens every morning when you are in front of your wardrobe and have to put yourself together as a new puzzle, a puzzle made out of the different elements found in your wardrobe that day… Every morning when I wake up, I am inspired by La vie mode d’emploi by George Perec, and I feel I need to reassemble my own puzzle that got disassembled during the night.
As a designer you also make puzzles, when you put together a certain type of shoulders, many different types of fabrics, various colors, with details borrowed from different cultures…
Fashion is like writing: you mix words you heard before in other contexts and put them together to create a new piece. Fashion is a language with its own grammar, a way to express oneself, “talk” to the others and everyday create new words, new sentences, assembling accessories, garments, colors, fabrics, to tell something new about oneself. I talk to you with the fashion I design, you talk to me with the fashion you wear. The strange thing is that everyone should know how to write and to read fashion, but there are no schools where this language is taught… Life is the only place to learn fashion.
We live with cultural, ethical, political, symbolical, sociological values – whether we are aware of it or not, we project these values on the garments. Fashion and design thus become symbolic fields where we express our values, as are art or literature or music…
THE FLAG PROJECT
The flag project reflects the same paradox between singularity and multiplicity, between an element and the group. My flags reflect a number of shared rules and laws and represent a group. Donatella Versace, Valentino, Giorgio Armani,… are icons: in one single image they summarize a given group. None of these icons could exist by themselves: they incarnate and represent the group and need the values of the group to exist. These designers’ images – Donatella Versace, Valentino, Giorgio Armani – are like the title of a book. The title of the book is not equal to its content but it has to tell what is inside – as does La vie mode d’emploi. And at the same time, Donatella, Valentino, Giorgio, are very singular individuals…
Another interesting paradox in fashion and design is that they is based, on the on hand, on a culture of techniques, savoir-faire and expertise, and on the other, on a very visual culture, a culture based on image. Those two cultures, the savoir-faire and the image, need each other to make fashion exist. However, the culture of image has taken over the culture of fabrication and today, fabrication is not anymore the essential part of the everyday’s fashion culture it should be. The flag project wants to inverse the hierarchy between image and fabrication: without fabrication you cannot create any valuable image. It is about values and paying attention to what we have left on the side for too long: the fabrication and how the puzzle resonates once it is completed. My flags are like a manifesto for re-balancing fabrication and image. And so is KVA…
THE CLUE FOR “READING”
In the future, we should become able to “read” and understand fashion – including the invisible choices that have been made to create any garment, and how and where it was made and assembled and by whom. But in order to read fashion, you need a distance, a global view. And so are my flags: from close you see the savoir-faire; from a distance the image comes true. Both are essential and embrace each other.
INTERVIEW BY BARBARA POLLA, PARIS, JULY 2011 / LONDERZEEL NUMBER 2 / DRAW ME A GAZE