An Archaelogy of Chinese Fashion

 – by Martin Cho

The ‘looks’ of China have political strings attached – a mood board filled with political agenda and personalities. The concept of fashion disappeared during the rule of Mao’s Communist government; clothes only served to reinforce a political ideology about conformity and uniformity. The Mao suit and comrade cape, symbols of Communism, are at once universally recognizable and scorned – saved exclusively for the hipster subset or Azzedine Alaïa. Plain, cotton peasant garb in drab grey, blue and beige suffused the palette and mood of the nation. The only discernable accent – red - typified by the Red Guards and their jaunty red scarves was a color about political allegiance than a playful sartorial wink. Graphics, if any, appeared in the form of propaganda slogans.
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Deng Xiaoping’s ‘open door policy’ and economic reforms created an environment in which people were eager to make up for the ten lost years of the Cultural Revolution. Attitudes first relaxed in dress: colors, patterns and accessories emblazoned with English words like “happy” and “beautiful” replaced the old propaganda slogans. All that appeared foreign was now deemed modern and fashionable.
 The 80s saw unprecedented experimentation in dress, flowering into the first wave of fashion designers. However, the effort was crude in taste and stunk of Western imitations. The birth of the first Chinese fashion magazine in Beijing in 1979 fed a population enamored with dressing and rising consumerism. However, taste level remained unsophisticated and clumsily un-chic.
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Enter the monogram fever of the 90s, when label-dressing became a national aspiration, especially in the emerging middle class, which kowtowed indiscriminately  to the prestige and status of international luxury labels. Chinese youth especially borrowed heavily from Japanese street fashion.
In response to a long legacy of repression, cult worship of foreign labels and superficial co-opting of international (sub)cultures, new independent young designers emerge with strong personal convictions to establish a distinctly homespun point of view – one which seamlessly mines history and traditions while remaining internationally relevant. Many of China’s new designers were educated outside of China and have worked internationally, bringing more diverse, cultured and sophisticated perspectives to a nascent market hungry for definition. As you will see, made-in-China doesn’t always mean  an over-exuberance of colors and dragons, nor over-decorated, mother-of-the-bride Qipao permutations. Following are four Chinese designers who each strike a successful balance of East and West, both ushering Chinese fashion into the age of post-post-modernism: A look at Wang Yi Yang’s designs evokes humorous social observations of everyday Chinese life. His label, Cha Gong (named after the thermos carried around ubiquitously by the older generation), plays with traditional societal roles with street-smart flavors: a padded jacket ensemble in metallic oversized polka dots takes its inspiration from the silhouette of a hunch-back street garbage collector; mid-century drab peasant garbs are reproportioned in leather; Scottish kilts are rendered in the distinctive, red, white and blue plait of Chinese plastic shopping bags; Chinese characters function as prints on jackets and T-shirts.  

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Hailed as one of China most promising and avant-garde designers, Qiu Hao is the winner of 2008’s Australian Woolmark Prize, the same award won by luminaries like YSL and Karl Lagerfeld at their start. According to the designer, “All Chinese designs don’t have to be about bright colours and dragons… A subtle, Chinese philosophy underlies everything we do.” That translates into razor-sharp tailoring and fluid deconstruction, each collection is offset by an element of softness: a curve, a texture, a physical motion. The strict palette of six colours (white, black, beige, gold, silver and blue) brings forth his impeccable craftsmanship. 

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A conceptualist at heart, Ma Ke’s ethereal yet earthy clothes conjure to mind the sober, sculptural and post-modern aesthetic of early Yohji Yamamoto. Her designs, however, are purely Chinese: she champions traditional weaving, dying and embroidery technique indigenous to various Chinese ethnic groups for all her collections. She is also celebrated for her use of recycled materials and environmentally friendly fabrics. Her ready-to-wear label, Exception de mixmind, has won her critical acclaims in and around Asia; Wu Yong, her haute couture collection, has twice been recognized and shown during Paris Haute Couture.
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Zhang Da’s style and colors can appear simple at first glance, but his experiment with form often creates imaginative pieces. For instance, his “flat” collection consists of pieces that can be laid flat completely on display, yet ingeniously spring to life in sculptural, geometric form when worn on the body. Sober monochrome forms gave his clothes a decidedly quiet, sculptural quality. Meanwhile his own label, ParallelWalk is gaining a cult following.
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The prognosis for “Made in China, once an instant kiss of death for high-end fashion, is now ecstatically positive.   ◊

Report from the Dead Zone

– by Andreas Rosenfelder

I wanted to go to the dead zone. I wanted to see if the post-apocalyptic world would look how we imagine it in our most morbid dreams. Whether the ionic fires crackles in the contaminated woods. Whether the gamma rays twinkle over the graveyards of heavy machinery. Chernobyl, it seemed, had to be more than just an ineffable place that our science teachers would reference some 20 years ago.
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In April 1986, we were not supposed to drink fresh milk or eat salad, they explained. They gave us youth literature by Gudrun Pausewang, in which schoolgirls fled from radioactive clouds through endless fields of canola (a boring film was produced 20 years later from the material). In class we learned to fear radiation. I drew the warning signs for radiation onto my satchel, a grinning skull completed my logo.
Now I am standing on the border of the forbidden zone of Chernobyl, in front of Reactor 4, which on April 26th at 1:23 pm was blown apart by an explosion during an experiment with oxyhydrogen. About 100 meters in front of me the sarcophagus’ blue-grey walls, which entomb Reactor 4, gleam in the sunlight.
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The display of the Geiger-meter in my hand climbs to 600-mille roentgen per hour. The casket leaks through cracks and holes, bird’s nest in its innards. Inside the sarcophagus, 185 tons of nuclear fuel, frozen into lava, continue to radiate. Inside the tomb, the body of mechanic Waleri Chodentschuk’s, the first known victim of the accident, which couldn’t be rescued, lies still.
During the three week long aftermath, hundreds of thousands of Soviet conscripts worked on the roof of neighboring Reactor 3, gathering the heavy graphite blocs with their bare hands, trying to throw them into the reactor. German precision robots had failed in attempts to clean the roof covered in radioactive matter. They ventured too close to the edge and fell into the abyss. The radiation burned through their sturdy circuits, rewiring them for suicide. 
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In 1986, Soviet soldiers had to chose between life and death: two years in Afghanistan or two minutes on the roof of aforementioned reactor. In the images taken by daredevil photographer Igor Kostin, you see the callous, almost mocking stares of the soldiers protected merely by thin Kevlar jackets from WWII. The mysterious calm of these liquidators, some say, is inherent in Eurasian culture. They accept their own fate.
The dead zone surrounding the reactor, which was drawn with compasses onto the map by the military, cast a magical spell on people, even those who met their death in the moments after the explosion. Fire brigades recalled cesium glinting in the sunshine like beautiful crystals. Farmer’s wives reported they’d plucked strontium from their beet plants as if they were rare black petals. Of course radiation itself is invisible. Only on the Super 8 footage of a wedding, shot one day later not far from the catastrophe, were peculiar white specks from the gamma rays interfering with the film distinguishable. Fishermen returned from the riverbanks with a deep tan, although summer was a long way off.
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Myths began creeping around the zone like poison ivy only days after the incident. Wolves howled in despair, gathering on the concrete-covered mass graves for pets, which were executed by special military units in the aftermath. They must have felt the warmth of decay. Rumors spread about hedgehogs without spikes, three-headed birds and red rats, which at night gnawed drunken people to their bones. The more profound than the biological mutations was the aesthetic metamorphosis: the forbidden area instantly became a parallel world where everything looked familiar, but at the same time had mutated at the core.
A heavy blanket of snow covers the area. Our white VW bus stops at a junction overlooking oblong hills. A whole kolkhoz is buried under the hills: the houses, the machinery even the earth itself. On top of these grave-mounds the radiation comes up to 50.000 micro roentgen. “Snow swallows beta radiation,” Maxim, our guide from Interinform-Centre informs me, “but not the gamma rays.” Gamma rays eat their way through matter like little needles. If you stood on those graveyards, you would be riddled by an invisible blaze of gunfire.
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After Chernobyl, Europe was charged with radiation phobia. Fear penetrated everything. But there is another opposing force, a peculiar kind of magnetism. Chernobyl’s remaining aesthetic radiation may be more dangerous and powerful than the actual radiation. Chernobyl projects, like no other place, a collective yearning for a parallel world, a desire only satisfied with the confines of a cinema, while watching films like Blade Runner.
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As we pass the “Red Forest”, an evergreen wood that was colored red overnight by fallout, we reach the pinnacle of radiation, located right next to a flame cast in concrete: the logo of the power station. Outside of our car, Maxim declares proudly the radiation has now reached 3000 micro roentgens. Inside the car the dosimeter reads only 420. It seems as if we’re navigating microwaves in a spaceship. Out there, the air must burn like fire.
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Some seared pine stems and young birches grow where the Red Forest used to be. Behind a wall of fog, I can vaguely make out the silhouette of the military camp “Chernobyl 2”: a 150m tall Radio antenna broadcasting out-of-control conspiracy theories. Rumor has it the Soviets used the antenna for mind-control tests on the reactor operators before the catastrophe and, by accident, altered their judgment.
Endless power lines slice the steppe of the death zone. A genuine eagle swoops across them. In this noble moment, Tarkowski should spring to mind. His elegiac 1979 movie Stalker is also set in a mysterious forbidden area.
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The forbidden city Pripyat – wrapped in barbed wire and guarded by military since the incident – resonates a defining silence. The depopulated concrete desert, built in 1970 for and by young engineers and their families feels like a bizarre mix of Beirut, East-Berlin today. Anatoli Fradis, a Hollywood producer with Ukrainian roots shot the trailer to the zombie movie “Necropolis” here. And even if the film was a total disaster, it is hard to imagine a more appropriate setting for a zombie movie.
In 1986 Pripryat had 50.000 inhabitants; the average age was 26. You don’t need panels about rural exodus or studies about changing demographics to get a taste of our future. The amusement park in the center, scheduled for inauguration on May 1st 1986, is considered particularly contaminated. A helicopter crashed between the bumper carts and the ferris wheel in an attempt to put out the fire in the reactor with sand. Maxim strides through the territory with self-assured calm and finds fresh wolf traces in the snow. The plutonium isotopes will continue to radiate here for another 40.000 years.
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I wanted to find out what radiation really is. I got a dosimeter with a digital display, nothing glittered. I felt a faint crackle in my throat and realized to my relief that I had had it in the morning when I left the hotel. Nevertheless all these ridiculous thoughts cross my mind the tales of mutations from comic books and movies. Will I turn into a green hulk? Or shrink like “Grant Williams in the 1957 movie “The Incredible Shrinking Man? Maxim leads me to a dosimeter in the information center. The machine looks like a cheap and stupid fortune-tellers apparatus on a provincial fair. When I put my hands onto the contact interface the display lights it’s green light. “This machine is very sensitive” Maxim smiles when he sees my face clouded in doubt. “It is 20 years old and works perfectly.” I was in the death zone. I am not contaminated.   ◊

Some Notes on tent cities

 – by Emily Segal

Twice a year, Berlin’s Bebelplatz is turned into a white nylon zone: a combination trade show and champagne room, guarded by people with headsets. In 1994 Fern Mallis, then-director of the Council of Fashion Designers of America proclaimed: We love fashion but we don’t want to die for it. After experimental venues had led to a series of messes, such as plaster crumbling into the lap of Herald Tribune editor Suzy Menkes, he moved the carnival and pitched tents in New York’s Bryant Park.
 

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Even though fashion week didn’t originate in a tent, it’s an apt setting. Tents have a long history of housing temporary spectacles of frivolity: circuses, weddings, Muammar Gaddafi. In the dictionary, a tent is a portable cloth shelter, attached to the ground by cords, loops and pegs. The word comes from the Latin verb to stretch: it’s shelter stretched over the ground. A tent is also always temporary, if not in terms of material, than in site: unlike most architecture, it’s not meant to stay in one spot forever.
 
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A tent city, then, is any area of soft, mobile, low-cost temporary shelters. In abstract, it’s the idea of a city ultimately absent of real infrastructure and stability. But when you connect »tent city« with the word »camp,« which has largely the same definition (»a place with temporary accommodations of huts, tents, or other structures, typically used by soldiers, refugees, prisoners, or travelers: the enemy camp, a detention camp« 1) the somber shades emerge. Tent cities are not just abstract, fluid urban plans; in the cases of tent cities built for victims of natural or political disaster, they’re zones of desperation and poverty. Occasionally, tent cities house protesters (at Kent State in 1977, in post-Katrina New Orleans), prisoners (at Maricopa County Jail in Arizona), religious pilgrims (on the Hajj to Mecca) and even more rarely, spectacles of insane grandeur (in 1971 Shah Reza Palavi pitched one in Tehran to celebrate the 2500th anniversary of Iran’s monarchy).

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It was a horrifying coincidence, then, that the earthquake in Haiti happened during the writing of this article. With much of Port-au-Prince devastated, and millions rendered homeless, tents sprung up almost immediately. Vincent Houver, chief of mission in Haiti for the International Organization of Migration, said in a press release on January 14: »What we need is tents, tents and more tents.« UN chief Ban Ki-moon said on January 15th that the basic plan was to construct tent cities on the outskirts of Port-au-Prince »for the foreseeable future«.


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This essay is not an attempt to equalize the fashion week tent with the space that houses survivors of the disaster in Haiti (or Katrina, or the US housing crisis, or any massive emergency, for that matter). This essay does, however, see the DERZEIT Structure Issue as an opportunity to take the tent out of fashion week and look more closely at the different forms the structure takes as temporary architecture, housing and shelter. On a spectrum that includes emergency, poverty, piety, grandeur and excess, the tent – and the tent city – emerges almost universally as politically charged and symbolically variegated structures. Tent cities are about power and money.

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Until recently, predominant media images of the ›tent city‹ were the unauthorized, makeshift shelter zones of America’s homeless. Notoriously, a sprawling tent city in Sacramento, California, where 150 people squatted near railroad freight line, was widely interpreted in the media as representative of US economic decline. There are many notable and some undocumented ones throughout the US. In 2007, 250 homeless people in New Orleans erected a tent city on a grassy patch outside city hall, taking advantage of the striking visual of their conditions to protest the fucked up status of the housing situation post-Katrina, chanting »Hey, Ray! How about a house today!« into Ray Nagin’s office window. The tent city was both the problem and method of dissent – a bleakly packaged marriage of form and content.
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A very different kind of tent city happens every year in Mina, a Saudi desert valley city east of Mecca, where pilgrims stop along the journey to complete the »stoning of the devil,« one of several rituals that are part of the Hajj. The process of housing the millions of pilgrims (every able-bodied Muslim is expected to make the pilgrimage at least once in his lifetime) has cost the Saudi government almost about 4.6 billion Euro. There are 40,000 peaked white tents, plus overpasses, tunnels, electricity and water networks. Images of the site show a vast field of white points stretching into the distance. The tents were fireproofed after a devastating fire in 1997 that caused a stampede, killing over 200 and injuring at least a thousand more. Which puts the word ›temporary‹ in a new light: a tent city happens to burst into flame a lot more easily than a city made of buildings. 

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In contrast, perhaps the most lavish display of frivolity of the last century (and possibly one of the most lavish events period) also took place in a tent city: a weeklong luxury camp built by Shah Reza Pahlevi in 1971 next to the desert ruins of Persepolis to commemorate the 2500th anniversary of Iran’s monarchy. The whole shebang was ›inspired by‹ the Field of the Cloth of Gold meeting in France between Henry VIII and Francis I in 1520. Each power attempted to out-dazzle the other’s with clothes, feasts, tents and jousts. Pahlevi’s tent city, in turn, covered 160 acres: three massive royal tents with 59 smaller ones surrounding them in the shape of a star. Guests ate roasted peacock breast off Limoges china and drank from Baccarat crystal. The contrast of the festival with the surrounding poverty was staggering; university students in Iran protested; many say that the event ultimately cost Pahlevi his throne. The event reads as an encyclopedia of excess: it was the most blinged tent city of modern history, making Pahlevi’s delusions of grandeur concrete. 


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Almost as visually striking is the tent city annex at Maricopia County Jail in Arizona, the fourth largest jail system in the world. Many people jailed there work in chain gangs and wear silent-movie-style black-and-white striped uniforms. The place is famous for its pink handcuffs and underwear, which the prisoners are allowed to strip down to when the inside-tent temperatures rocket up to 150°F during hot Arizona summers. Joe Arpaio, the county’s sheriff, responsible for all this, said 2003 AP story: saying, »it’s 120 degrees in Iraq and the soldiers are living in tents and they didn’t commit any crimes.« 
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Here, the second dictionary definition of »camp« comes in handy: »the supporters of a particular party or doctrine regarded collectively.« Tents are as much about doctrine as shelter: it’s where politics meet place.
Even in the case of Berlin Fashion Week, a struggle over the implications of temporary buildings is at play. Bebelplatz, home of the fashion week tent, is also the site where the S.A. and Nazi youth groups burned 20,000 books in 1933, and the glassed-over subterranean monument that commemorates it. A petition by the Berufsverbandes Bildender Künstler Berlin protests the presence of fashion week, arguing that holding an event like this on the spot is politically and historically unconscionable. (Oblivious) global nomads camped out in their (fashion week) tent – it’s both a lame pun and a quintessential Berlin drama, where a site of historical atrocity meets contemporary levity, and chafes.   ◊

The Character of Characters

To walk into the Buchstabenmuseum Schauplatz on Leipzigerstrasse is to enter open storage, the most gratifying kind of cramped space. Just inside the door is a neon T, twelve feet high, from an old DTV sign, just one piece of retired information in a mass of rust, paint and chrome. It‘s a grammar of factories, facades and commerce – disassembled, discharged from their origins and not exactly repurposed. – by Emily Segal

The Museum for Letters, Characters and Typefaces is really only these 200 square meters, packed with signage and vernacular type from public spaces in Berlin and surrounding areas. It feels like a walk inside an erector set or typesetting kit, with the kind of pleasurable violation of aura, scale and proximity also found in cargo holds, Costco and Vegas. 
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Curators Barbara Dechant, a type designer, and Anja Schulze, a press agent for the Stadtmuseum Berlin, started the project in 2005 based on Dechant‘s private type collection, and moved into the Schauplatz in 2008 when their cellars were full. The goal was to set up an archive and ‚recycling center‘ for three-dimensional lettering (not print) – a space for reading letters not just as text but as physical objects. The museum, which houses more than 300 pieces, is currently open only every second Saturday of the month.
Negotiating the chaos – which is dotted by official museum wall tags explaining the fonts‘ history – the curators point out their oldest example, a white handmade script that spells Schuhe, 50 or 60 years old. Then there‘s an M, one of 8 or 10 Ms left over from the big DDR Markthalle complex, next to a big white A from Kultur Kaufhaus Dussmann.  The thin bright blue „Rundfunk“ in the corner was scored „unofficially“ last year from the former Deutscher Demokratischer Rundfunk media center.
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Usually the acquisition process is classic urban rummage: Dechant and Schulze hear about a building about to be demolished, rent a half-ton truck and go rescue the letters themselves. But in the case of a set of big yellow letters that used to label a building in Lichtenberg, it was actually in the contract for demolition that the letters should be taken down neatly and delivered to the Buchstabenmuseum, which suggests the possible future of the museum as an official repository for landmarked type. The curators plan to move into a (much) larger space, where the letters could be spread out and the viewer could „see their patina.“ The imagined Buchstabenmuseum would have a permanent exhibition on the history of type with room for experimental shows and artists‘ projects.
The sole exception to the museum‘s three-dimensional-letters-only rule is an original menu from the „legendary“ Cafe Adler at Checkpoint Charlie. And not everything has a rich historical patina – there‘s a bright white neon sign from a 2009 H&M ad. Dechant finds the LED lights and attenuated R of a contemporary, chrome Daimler-Chrysler sign so „delicious“ she‘s painted full scale replicates of the letters on her bedroom walls.
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There isn‘t much room to walk among the piles. Hopping through, it‘s easy to take a turn and catch a view of the letters that isn‘t legible at all. All of a sudden, it‘s just stuff, junk, architectural detritus. When all textual, commercial and mnemonic qualities are lost, these materials could be as much cornice as phrase. This  moment –  when a letter‘s physical dimensions stand in the way of its interpretation as text – is the principle of the Buchstabenmuseum. For one, the curators see it as a semiotic challenge for exhibitions: „When we see an A or a B we know what that means, but when we look at the lettering of another culture we don‘t know the semantic content,“ remarks Schulze. „It would be an interesting approach for an exhibit, how signs of different cultures function as documents.“ This extends to other ideas Schulze outlines for the future: exhibitions about special characters, ligatures, the &-sign and the @-sign, plus the relations between letters and food, music, and cars.
It‘s underwear in the case of the Palmer‘s Unterwäsche P, books in the case of the DTV T that dominates the space: the letters wouldn‘t exist without the commercial production that the signs hawked in the first place. The Buchstabenmuseum‘s ‚method‘ of piling up letters as three-dimensional objects only emphasizes how the these big neon signs and rust angles are, first, artifacts of the world of manufactured things and second, things themselves.
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The museum‘s mission statement mentions „the increasing homogenization of the urban landscape“ and the „rise of the Corporate Logo“ as reasons why traditional signage must be rescued. One excellent example, the entire phrase ‚Rathaus Passagen‘ in acrylic, was recovered after the old sign was retooled in Plexiglas three years ago. But this kind of corporate rebranding and urban turnover is both scourge and source. Regarding a set of landmarked signage from the Karl Marx Buchhandlung in Friedrichshein, Schulze explained: „We‘re obviously happy that those letters have been preserved as a monument – they‘ll stay on the facade regardless of what business comes next in that space – though of course we had the hope that we‘d be able to take them in. On one hand it‘s a shame that these traditional companies close and are torn down, but at the same time we have an opportunity here to further explain the histories of these places. We‘re ambivalent.“
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Despite the museum‘s purported mission to present „the letter as a content-free sign,“ every letter in the room is not only an alphabetic sign but also a trace of what‘s left behind: either a building that‘s been torn down, or the new sign in its place. Every letter is a trophy of its origins. The Buchstabenmuseum can‘t help being about urban development; it is as much a typography museum as an archive of branding, logos, and corporate identities stamped on urban space. In light of this, it seems fitting that the store room is financed as a kind of public service by Tobias Wilmerhold, who‘s building a Motel 1 across the way in the clearing on Leipzigerstrasse –  the museum‘s own space is predicated upon this kind of regeneration and displacement.
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Dechant points out that the font on the wall labels is the standard font used on all German highway signs: unobtrusive, easily read, commanding. „It‘s like a system font on your computer,“ she says, „a font that‘s nothing.“ In any case, the Buchstabenmuseum itself proves that when it comes to letters, there‘s no such thing.   ◊