FREE FLOWING APPAREL: A NEW Emotion

Levi´s PHOTO Workshop Soho-NYC

CONSCIOUS WORKSHOP YOGA+ACCESSORIES

CIY Create-it-yourself + Eco-PIYO: Pilates &Yoga Workshop

The DAZA Sisters

We are the DAZA sisters, Carolina and Laura, two artistic Colombians currently educating and training our talents, as well as advancing our goals in New York City. We created CIY+Eco-PIYO, an innovative workshop, by juxtaposing the principles of Yoga, sustainable fashion, and healthy eating for Freshmen students at NYU’s Third North Hall. This project was developed to assess the necessities of a community of NYU students, potentiate their talents and capacities, and inspire their artistic creativity.

As the Fashion and Textile Designer, I (Laura) started the workshop by sharing the ideals of ‘Recycling, Transforming, and Creating’ to offer students the tools to create for themselves eco-friendly accessories from wasted and colorful fabrics. I wanted to share with them artisanal techniques of sewing, folding, plaiting, and pleating.

Some of the questions I posed at the beginning of the workshop were: ‘Is it fun to buy something already made for you without know the Why-Where-When-What-Who made it? Why is ready-to-wear clothing usually the only option in the market? Could we find ways to motivate young students and empower them to create their own functional and aesthetic eco-friendly accessories that can inspire their artistic creativity?

We organized this workshop dreaming about motivating our students to be more conscious about connecting their bodies, heart, and soul, with the environment. Each student sat on their Yoga mat, and immersed themselves into their own hands-on creative world, where they experimented and played with colorful pieces of fabric, and wasted remnants thrown away by a NYC-based fashion company. As the Colombian music played Caribbean rhythms, our students manipulated the scissors, needles, and threads. In one-hour, students were able to create beautiful and unique artwork such as headbands, pins, and belts. The ambiance was full of creativity and energies to begin the magical Yoga practice, led by my sister Carolina.

As a group fitness teacher with more than five years of experience, and a Food Culture graduate student at NYU, I (Carolina) led the Ashtanga Yoga practice. We began in a child pose were students began centering themselves, deep breathing, and opening their hearts. As the flow began, they opened into a Downward Facing Dog, and slowly began energizing their bodies. The breath was connected to the cycles, and their flow to the delicate sounds of Colombian cumbia drums, Bossa Nova, and French contemporary music. As they inhaled, students transitioned at their own pace through basic cycles of upper to lower plank, upward to downward dogs, and standing mountain pose with several basic sun salutations. We open into standing poses, twists, forward and backbends, with the ultimate goal of inspiring students to set an intention for their practice, and bring the connection between their own body, soul, and heart. As students breathe, we build up a community where each one was flowing at his or her own pace, gently breathing from one movement to the other, while keeping their own heart awakened and receptive.

The practice transformed our creative space into the power of breathing, energies, and centering on top of the world. Our sky was full of students’ happiness, dreams, and passions. As the practice advanced for one hour, I began to lower down the pace of our flows, and slowly transition into different backbends. The group began smoother breaths, until gently connecting the palms of the hands into their heart center, and transitioning into their final relaxation. After hugging their knees, rocking side to side, massaging their lower backs, opening their hips, and relaxing each muscle of their bodies, students closed their eyes and laid down heavy on-top of the earth, letting go anything that might have been disturbing their own world of tranquility and wonders, and flowing into the final relaxation.

After the final breaths and the quote I read, altogether we pronounced Namaste, to be grateful with the group, especially for sharing each other’s energies, practice, and intentions with me, and the rest of the group. Each student was advised to bring their own serving cup and spoon, and after our practice, we enjoyed natural plain yogurt, crunchy maple-honey granola with coconut, dried cranberries, and pecans, bananas, strawberries, and Agave honey, amongst other delicious and healthy delicacies. The two-hour long CIY+Eco-PIYO workshop by the DAZA sisters was a community arts-based project with innovative fusions of diverse talents, passions, and dreams of making social change through the artistic creative world. It was a magical and beautiful workshop! Please share your comments or questions at: communityconnectionsnyu@gmail.com

"Breaking paradigms of human gravity" by Trisha Brown

Trisha Brown is a New York-based choreographer, and is one of the most acclaimed and prestigious dancer and choreographer of the postmodern era. She is well known for showing unconventional and emotional performances, and for always pushing the limits of what can be considered appropriate to a dance revolution in American dancers.

Laura at NYC!!!

B K N O / A new T-shirt concept

‘BKNO is a new concept of t-shirt design mixing cultural capital and innovative design, created by Laura and Carolina Daza, two Colombian sisters living in New York City and working in collaboration with Tisch’s Office of Community Connections.’

N Y FASHION WEEK / An experience with Preen

Preen, a London based brand, is one of the top favorites because of their fresh touches of mixing high-end clothes with casual cuts and fabrics, especially because of their asymmetrical designs. Their collections aim at understanding the feminine silhouettes and needs, by using a masculine and deconstructed tailoring, which delicately fits the body.

Z E R O+Maria Cornejo / Pre-show NYC

P R E E N / backstage show NYC

P R E E N layered juxtaposed textures / NYC

Justin Thornton and Thea Bregazzi, Preens designers, evolved the elegantly deconstructed masculine-tailoring-with-femininity story they started to tell last season. 

J a p a n e s e / textiles and fabrics

L I N D A M A S O N / THE ART OF BEAUTY NYC

In 1979, the fashion world was rocked by a revolution, with makeup artist Linda Mason at the forefront. Designers brought fashion to an art form creating runway shows that weren’t simply a marketplace, but full throttle theatrical performances.

NY Fashion Week Articles..

Brand Recognition Is the Issue

By SUZY MENKES

Published: March 15, 2010

PARIS — What is the final assessment on the 321 collections shown over the last month in London, Milan, New York and Paris? There are, of course, strong trends — particularly in the powerful return of outerwear and a new focus on a more womanly and rounded figure.

But there is also a test that each designer has to pass.

Brand recognition  is the vital issue, especially now that collections go global and viral before buyers have even had a chance to get to the showroom and make a choice, and way before advertising campaigns or editorials can express the look of the season.

One definition of branding in fashion is how quickly a seasoned viewer is able to identify a look. This is nothing to do with logos or overt symbols. Ultimately, the power of a designer is to be able to register a vision and to project that for the consumer.

With nil advertising and an aversion to promoting himself or his clothes, Azzedine Alaïa has achieved such clarity that every single piece in his privately shown collection — princess-line leather coats, skating-skirt dresses, shapely knits and flirty ankle boots — definitely belong to the aesthetic of this designer.

Miuccia Prada gave her usual spiel after the MiuMiu show, that everyone should have “fun with fashion.” She might have said “sex” with fashion. Because the defining character of this Prada satellite brand is of nymphettes who, by the curving rise of a skirt at the back, a half-moon scoop of bared-flesh below the bosoms or a strategically placed bow at the rear of the thighs, are provocative beyond their years.

Typically this season, the focus was at the back, rather than on the womanly bosoms at Prada. Tossing their ponytails, these fillies came out in short, geometric 1960s dresses, perhaps in orange felt and with all sorts of childish embellishment, especially silvered rosettes. And it really was sex with everything. Even the shoes — the company’s heartland — had an over-layer like a tongue emerging from open lips.

LAURA DAZA at showroom...

LAURA DAZA's vibrant campaign...

LAURA DAZA fashion showroom @ Miami!!!

"FASHIONING NOW-changing the way we make and use clothes"

Fashioning Now: changing the way we make and use clothes
A project from the University of Technology,Sydney

The  Fashioning Now project aims to investigate the way in which clothing is produced, used and discarded. The project outcomes focused on providing educational activities that comprised of an exhibition, a symposium, a project website, and a book that feature innovative research projects from Australian and international scholars and practitioners. Through these activities Fashioning Now proposes to highlight the diverse range of sustainable solutions currently being explored by researchers, designers and manufacturers, while predicting possible scenarios for a future fashion industry. Project led by: Alison Gwilt and Timo Rissanen

This project has been assisted by the New South Wales Government through its Environmental Trust.  Fashioning Now is also supported by the University of Technology, Sydney, and UTS Gallery. NEWS: Fashioning Now opens at the Fremantle Arts Centre, Western Australia from 24th July until 19th September 2010. Seehttp://www.fac.org.au/exhibitions.aspx for more information.

Image: Romance Was Born,  The Garden of Eden, performance at the Kaliman Gallery, 2008. Photography by Limuel Martine


http://www.fashioningnow.com/

ZERO-WASTE FASHION....

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/15/fashion/15waste.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&ref=fashion 

YOU wear organic T-shirts. You hang your clothes to dry. You recycle your unloved suits and dresses.

Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times

Simon Collins, far left, of Parsons, Scott Mackinlay Hahn and Fiona Dieffenbacher with a five-pocket jean pattern.

But frankly, that’s just the tip of the green iceberg.

Today’s truly fashion-forward have a more radical ambition: zero waste.

That may sound more like an indie band than an environmental aspiration, but it’s a new focus of top fashion schools.

Zero-waste design strives to create clothing patterns that leave not so much as a scrap of fabric on the cutting room floor. This is not some wacky avant-garde exercise; it’s a way to eliminate millions of tons of garbage a year. Apparel industry professionals say that about 15 to 20 percent of the fabric used to produce clothing winds up in the nation’s landfills because it’s cheaper to dump the scraps than to recycle them.

A small but impassioned coterie of designers has spent the last few years quietly experimenting with innovative design techniques, and some of their ideas are starting to penetrate the mainstream.

Next month, Parsons the New School for Design — which inspired a generation of would-be designers through the television series “Project Runway” — will offer one of the world’s first fashion courses in zero waste. The book “Shaping Sustainable Fashion: Changing the Way We Make and Use Clothes,” by Alison Gwilt and Timo Rissanen, zero-waste pioneers, will be published in February by Earthscan. And an exhibition of zero-waste fashions, curated by Mr. Rissanen and another zero-waste designer, Holly McQuillan, will be held in New Zealand next spring and in New York the following fall. Also in March, an exhibition, “No Waste/Zero Waste” will open at the Averill and Bernard Leviton A + D Gallery in Chicago, part of Columbia College Chicago.

http://zerofabricwastefashion.blogspot.com/

"ENERGY WATER FASHION" by Emma Rigby

“Wearing unclean clothes is a social taboo. Yet behind this everyday routine there are some major resource, pollution and social problems.” (Designer Emma Rigby, Energy Water Fashion)

WASH-LESS

http://www.energywaterfashion.org/information 

"Water & Oil"-Italian Vogue inspired by oil spill...

Abigail Doan, writer, editor and environmental activist behind ecco*eco, alerted us to this Italian Vogue editorial (via of Refinery29) through her Facebook fanpage. Of course, like any good editorial, the reviews have been mixed. Here are a few that stand out:

“Wow, how insensitive! What next, a photo shoot inspired by the recent floods in Pakistan? A better idea would be to do a minimal photo shoot DEDICATED to the event and donate the cash that would have been spent on an extravagant shoot to the charities trying to sort the mess out.”

“I don’t think its glamorization at all…putting ourselves in the animals shoes so to speak…imagining if it were us living directly in the disaster…It’s poetically beautiful”

“Steven Meisel was successful in depicting the ugly truth of such a catastrophic event. Fashion isn’t only about the clothes; it is an idea or message that can often times stir up controversy and bring awareness to industries and people that might not otherwise not be affected.”

Earth Inc.- Gregory Unruh's seminar...

Don’t use too many fossil fuels. Don’t waste paper. Don’t over-package your goods. For years companies have been hearing what not to do when it comes to making their business practices more sustainable.

But what can you do to make your company both ecologically responsible and financially profitable?  What are the rules, ideologies, and methods that will guide your business toward sustainable practices?  How can you successfully implement ecological theory into your everyday business practices?

In this interactive seminar Gregory Unruh will show you how to embed sustainability into everything your company does – profitably. Provide prescriptive steps that will inform your business decisions, Unruh will help you launch your company into eco-minded practices.

Papery shoes...