1. How do you perceive the current cultural landscape, particularly the way fashion is reacting to other advancements happening around us?
I don’t really think that fashion is responding to the current state of the world. We are running into a shift of power. It seems to me a pure decadence, a weird picture of our society. I don’t refer to the political changes, I can’t speak to having an answer on future concepts for a world of love, respect and education. But in the cultural landscape, I think turbo-capitalism is destroying what we have painfully achieved as a species over recent decades, while pretending that everything’s fine, like racing along the edge of a volcano.
Photos by Martina Borsche, printed on leather and displayed as an installation. (Munich, 2022)
2. In your career, you’ve often been associated with avant-garde approaches. Is ‘avant-garde’ still an...
1. How do you perceive the current cultural landscape, particularly the way fashion is reacting to other advancements happening around us?
I don’t really think that fashion is responding to the current state of the world. We are running into a shift of power. It seems to me a pure decadence, a weird picture of our society. I don’t refer to the political changes, I can’t speak to having an answer on future concepts for a world of love, respect and education. But in the cultural landscape, I think turbo-capitalism is destroying what we have painfully achieved as a species over recent decades, while pretending that everything’s fine, like racing along the edge of a volcano.
Photos by Martina Borsche, printed on leather and displayed as an installation. (Munich, 2022)
2. In your career, you’ve often been associated with avant-garde approaches. Is ‘avant-garde’ still an appropriate term, and do you think there is still a place for radical experimentation in the mainstream?
I don’t think that the term ‘avant-garde’ is still the best term to describe creative reaction, or the need to experiment, or to take action against the boring mainstream.
Even so, I think it’s very important to think against the tide. It is difficult today to point out a diverging vision—not speaking of the superficial diversity that we pretend to live for—experimentation these days is quite limited to resources and access to a broad audience. A strong, powerful and long-lasting (and well-thought-through) reaction needs time to develop.
Time is the most precious resource. Small brands and creatives may be willing to experiment, but facing the power of the big brands gets you easily lost in the jungle of competition.
3. You are not as well known in New York as I wish…
So kind of you—
Have you been here?
Actually a couple of times, for various reasons. The first time was in 1988. I loved it so much. Went to see the first retrospective of Robert Mapplethorpe at the Whitney and had my my first sushi ever.
4. Anything you can say about New York today?
I love New York and am hoping to visit the city quite soon again—I miss my friends there as much as I miss the energy of the city. And answering your question about New York today, I don’t know how much it has changed… but I am sure it has!
5. What comes next for Kostas?
Collaborations in new fields, like real jewelry. There is an interior project to come, among some ongoing collaborations that began last year. I would like to work on my “new – old archive,” which I started half-a-year ago, and create a book around all those pieces and ideally donate them to the right institution or person who loves and appreciates the work, making it public again.
The home of 18th century monastery in the Regola district, 500m from Rome's new Ponte district. Photo via @salvalopez
ROME—Rome is giving one of its oldest neighborhoods a new identity. This month, the city introduced the Ponte Art & Design District, a permanent zone... Text by Simona Alberi. Read More
Raphael, Self-portrait (1506–08). Florence, Uffizi Galleries, Gallery of Statues and Paintings. Photographic Cabinet of the Uffizi Galleries – Courtesy of the Ministry for Cultural Heritage and Activities and Tourism.
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Auguste Renoir, Study for The Great Bathers (1884 to 1887). Photo: The Morgan Library & Museum.
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Slip House, the brand new gallery opened at the base of a 19th-century, three-story former carriage house at 246 East 5th Street.
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Photograph by Erich Höhne. Courtesy of Deutsche Fotothek.
Wassily Kandinsky, a painter of color and form, once envisioned a future where dance would shed its ornamental constraints and move toward abstraction. In Concerning... Text by Marguerite de Ponty. Read More
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Janice Lourie's computer-driven loom transformed textile manufacturing. Photo courtesy of IBM
Textile art, or as Anni Albers said, "the poetry of materials," has had many lives. In the 40s, we loved fabric. 24 foot stage curtains.... Text by Pina Lomb. Read More
Franco Maria Ricci in 1984, at the launch of FMR U.S.A. at the New York Public Library.
Caverns were probably the first labyrinthine structures human beings came into contact with, in a distant past. And I, too, rummaged through my own past, finding a version of myself as the guise of a young amateur speleologist, equipped with the right clothes, flashlights, ropes, and climbing-irons. I was a second-year student at the Faculty of Geology and, with some friends, I had founded a so-called Cavern Society. My weekdays moved along on the surface, in the sunlight, while my weekends were usually devoted to the dark bowels of the earth. Text by fmr. Read More
