Anja Crabb | MA Fashion & the Environment | London College of Fashion 2012

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◊

FAILURE◊

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Photo: © Lara Torres

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Lara Torres is a fashion designer living and working in Lisbon. She graduated from MA Fashion Artefact at London College of Fashion in 2011 and has previously shown her collections at Lisbon Fashion week. I became aware of her work through a screening by the Centre of Sustainable Fashion of her video, which was part of her MA project titled ‘An Impossible Wardobe for the Invisible’ featuring a completely ephemeral collection of garments, which dissolve in water. Her work relates to ideas around memory, forgetfulness and loss. In July I spoke to her about the importance of failure and the meaning of fashion.

PREFACE

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LARA TORRES INTERVIEW

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Anja: Can you tell me a bit about your background and a little about yourself and your projects?

Lara: I studied fashion design at a university connectioned to industries in the North of Portugal. After that, I got an award and I went to London to do an internship with Alexander McQueen. This was quite a because I had never lived outside of Portugal – it was an adventure! And it changed the way I saw things, it gave me a different perspective on things. At the time McQueen had been sold to Gucci so it was becoming a big company. And there were about 20 internship students which surprised me; it was crazy! That experience was quite important for my decisions regarding this idea of having a small brand, because it made me think that I wanted to do something very small and strongly research-based. My work was about finding out: why is fashion considered such a shallow thing? And to find out if this was true. Or not! That brought me back to Lisbon. I also have quite a lot of experience working with industry as a freelancer and I saw how things worked and I didn’t like it either; that were already a lot of things that I didn’t like. I started a very small project at my house, not even in a studio, just thinking about fashion, what it meant and also trying to understand the importance of it as a way of communication. And trying to understand that I ended up doing reseach on the relationship between memory and clothing. I followed that path for quite a whie. I was trying to develop practice-based research while thinking of this idea of the importance of fashion and its relationship to memory because it is all about identity. So it became clear to me that it was quite important, not shallow at all and of big importance that I could perhaps research this idea for a long time.

Anja: ‘An Impossible Wardrobe for the Invisible’ - Can you tell more about the meaning of that project, being ephemeral and how it relates to memory?

Lara: After producing collections for 4 years, I decided I should do an MA as an excuse to gain some time to think about my project. At that point I had already started working with this idea of the ephemeral because all the ideas about forgetfulness are also connected with the idea of memory, because memory is something very evasive and you easily lose it. I was thinking about this for a really long time and then by accident I started working with a media that wasn’t very common for fashion designers. I was sharing a studio with several artists from different fields. And Photo: © Lara Torres

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I started thinking: do I need to work only with clothing or can I communicate these ideas through other media. I decided that I can use other media to communicate ideas that are about fashion and are about clothing. During this studio share everybody around me worked with different media which lead to a collaboration project with a ceramic artist and a jeweler. I was really lucky to get support from the government for my project, meaning we had money to spend time experimenting which was very very important. During the experimentation phase I started working with latex, as a way of keeping memory or stealing memory from objects. We were working with found objects or clothing, personal belongings mostly like a watch from you grandmother or some earrings from a member of the family. And we started to reproduce these pieces by using silicone molds for example and repeating them in latex. To get to the point of the question: I had done an experiment with latex over porcelain, it fell on the floor and broke - but it didn’t actually break into pieces because the latex had the ability to keep it together. I usually pay a lot of attention to all mistakes that happen during the process. This became fairly important and I developed a piece that was a reproduction of a tank shirt, that would break every time you would wear it. It’s a layer of latex with porcelain and every time you wear it, you move it and it breaks; so it’s always breaking and it’s always falling apart. And I thought it was a very good metaphor for memory. I used it in the performance and made a video. I was already interested in the temporary or ephemeral before but after this piece I thought this was really something that I should start investigating. When I got the opportunity with the MA, I started with this idea of creating something that is perishable. Previously I was not feeling comfortable at all with what I was producing. While I was doing very experimental research, I was also selling and going to big fashion fairs for money. I always produced locally and used Portuguese fabrics and everything but somehow I felt that I was kind of imitating what other brands were doing, the big brands, but very small scale. But I didn’t think it was a different way of doing it, although I was concerned about with where the fabrics were from and how I was producing. I didn’t have cheap labour, everyone was well paid and I knew all the seamstresses, working with me. Even with all this control and having ideas where everything was coming from I still felt that there was a lot of waste that I couldn’t control. I then stopped with the traditional clothing production because I wasn’t comfortable with it. I used those 2 years with the MA at LCF to follow this idea of the temporary, something I felt comfortable with. It was very difficult, technically but at the same time it was something that I felt like I could do. I felt that as a designer I had the responsibility of doing

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things differently - what could I give the audience, what can I offer? Maybe I can offer consciousness instead of something to wear; giving not a product but this alertness or consciousness. It was because I was starting to get very uncomfortable with the way Zara, H&M and all these kinds of companies were working.

Anja: You won a Fashioning the Future Award and mentioned local production. Would you say that sustainable values are inherent to your practice?

Lara: I think they have to, because as a human being and as a designer I have this responsibility towards the planet and the way we all live. I have to because I’m part of the whole system and as a designer I have an even bigger responsibility. That was something that was not clear for me in the beginning, this direction of sustainability, but it got stronger and stronger because I started to see on one hand how I could be effective and on the other hand how irresponsible it would be to make certain choices and I thought that with all this information that we have, if we don’t do something, who is going to do it? Because there will not be anything to save later, so I thought that even if I was not able to solve all the problems, I could create some kind of alertness and consciousness and make people think. I wasn’t sure if I was able to achieve it but that was what I was trying to, what I was committed to do.

Anja: Concerning your design practice; it’s very research and experimentation based and you’ve also collaborated with other artists and with other designers. How did these collaborations happen? Was it a natural process for you to work with others?

Lara: Well, I think so, I think it’s very natural. I think design is very collaborative in its essence, because even as a traditional designer producing with industry you always have to relate to other people for production, or pattern-makers or seamstresses. So for me it was very easy to work in a group. Also at the same time I had a lot of doubts about what I was doing, so I was always asking people around me - it could be a sculptor or a painter- who I would ask his opinion. Most of the time it would be enriching coming from a totally different field, because they would have a view that was really clear and fresh. That became really important for me. I started working with more and more people as part of the process. I’m not that interested in authorship, or this idea that it’s me but more the process. And for the process it’s more interesting if you open it up to other people from other fields, it’s really enriching.And I really feel more and more that I don’t want to work by myself, alone in the studio. I really don’t feel that it’s productive for the process itself - it

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was quite a natural way for things to happen.

Anja: I’d like to know more about your main theme of your work: memory. You use memory as a connection to identity. How did it start, how did it develop to become such an important theme of your work?

Lara: I think it was mainly because it was a problem that I had to solve. This idea about why do we dress to find out why I do this. I had a lot of questions when I finished fashion school, because I was feeling r a bit uncomfortable with working in fashion. I did the BA and although I was a very good student and I got work immediately, I was not comfortable with anything related to it. Memory appeared like an answer. It was funny because it is still fashion-related. It happened when I bought Tank magazine featuring this article about the Bosnia war, which is unusual for a fashion magazine. The article was all about a reporter who went to Bosnia and photographed objects and belongings of the dead. The article explained that they were collected so that the dead were recognized and identified because they were all in a mass grave, so not recognizable. They recognize people through their clothing, and their belongings in these mass graves. And that really impressed me. I don’t know what happened at the time but it was like this revelation moment. I felt like this is it! What I think about clothing, it’s as important as this, it’s how you recognize someone, it’s what makes you have an opinion about a person on before you speak to them. This is very strong, it’s primordial. I still have the article because it was that moment where things changed in my mind. This article made the relationship I had with fashion and design very important, something that was not shallow at all. That’s how I started this idea of memory and how it relates to my work.

Anja: You also talk about the failure of memory and how it’s fragmented and imprecise as well and your work reflects that notion. Can you tell me more about these notions of memory?

Lara: I think that there is a strong human element to all this, because it’s inherent to humans to fail. Also, we live in a society where failure seems to be neglected and a negative thing. You should not fail, you should be accomplished, have success. I’m not very comfortable with the idea of success and not failing because during my design process, I’ve always felt actually that failure is very important: it happened with the latex and porcelain piece. Failure usually takes me much further, it was very imporant to fail. When I started thinking about memory, I realized that failure in memory was very important for

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Film still:An Impossible Wardrobe forthe Invisible © Lara Torres

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our own construction and structure as human beings. It’s important to enhance both parts: the things that you can bring from memory with you and also the part that disappears and you cannot relate to. I’ve been trying to keep these both things part of my ideas, my metaphors when I communicate. I try to keep them really close. I think that failure is a really big part of my work. I am a firm believer in the importance of failure. (laughs)

Anja: I’m looking into how memory influences what we wear and clothes we keep, wear or don’t wear, and throw away. Do you see a connection between people’s personal relationships with their clothes and their memories?

Lara: I think that is quite a complicated question. I think that usually people need physical things for an extension of the self. It is in that way that people relate to their clothing and personal objects as memories, as physical existence of things past. I think people tend to keep objects and clothing that signify something, when you remember a certain occasion, when something happened or someone that you lost. They’re strongly related to people you lose during your life because death is part of life. It is a physical proof of the existence of this person. For example, I have my grandfathers watch and I would be really sad if I lose it, I always keep it very close to me. I think everyone needs physical things that keep a record of what happened before. It’s quite easy to forget things. And I am a very forgetful person, so I tend to keep hold of these things that make me remember certain periods of my life or something that happened, that is important in a personal way. But this is exactly it: we tend to make things physical. When we move, we tend to put things around us that we can relate to so that we can feel that it’s our own. So I think there’s a need, very deep need for this extension of the self.

Anja: I also find it interesting with the throw-away culture now that clothes may be losing meaning and I wonder if people stop attaching memories to things or weather they attach memory to different things or if it’s just not as important to preserve the memories? I find that connection really intriguing.

Lara: Yes, me too. I don’t know if I have an answer for this. It is really intriguing and it kind of bothers me. It’s very hard for me to believe that this relationship with things disappears. And it’s hard because it seems to be very behavioural. I don’t think it would disappear just like that in these last 10-15 years. It probably trends to something else, I’m not sure yet to what (laughs). It’s really fast but also relationships are being quite fast too, it’s all so quick that’s hard to have a

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conclusion about this. You really need to go deep into it and to ask a lot of people what is going on, as it’s quite hard to understand.

Anja: Indeed it is! I have one last question: what are your plans and projects for the future, and also where do you see fashion going and how do you see your role within it?

Lara: Well, I don’t think I like where fashion has been going (laughs). I think I’m a believer, so I always hold the hope that everything is going to change and things will be going on the sustainable direction. Although I think that’s not very down to earth (laughs). But I’m very hopeful and optimistic! And I would like to be able to make something practical with this idea of temporary. The videos were way of changing ways of thinking and gaining ways of consciousness and now that I started the process, I can do something very practical and objective.

Anja: So you’re back to making a product now and you’ve come full circle!

Lara: I never thought I would do that after doing no product, a negation of product I never thought that the end result would go back to product! That’s exactly what happened! It was really nice of you to ask me these questions, I’m really totally for sharing things. Feel free to contact me anytime if you need anything and I’ll be waiting for your developments and news. It was nice meeting you.

Anja: Nice meeting you too. Thank you so much.

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◊ M

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◊ M

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◊ I DECIDED THAT I CAN USE OTHER MEDIA (OTHER

THAN CLOTHING) TO COMMUNICATE

IDEAS THAT ARE ABOUT FASHION AND ARE ABOUT

CLOTHING◊

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Involuntary Memories /Effacing Series (2010)© Lara Torres

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film stills:Fragment (2008)© Lara Torres

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◊I DEVELOPED A

REPRODUCTION OF A TANK SHIRT

USING LATEX AND PORCELAIN; EVERY

TIME YOU WEAR IT, YOU MOVE AND IT BREAKS, SO IT’S

ALWAYS BREAKING AND FALLING APART. I THOUGHT IT WAS

A GOOD METAPHOR FOR MEMORY

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◊MAYBE I CAN

OFFER PEOPLE CONSCIOUSNESS

INSTEAD OF SOMETHING TO

WEAR; NOT A PRODUCT BUT ALERTNESS OR

CONSCIOUSNESS◊

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Place (2009)Lisbon Fashion Week© Rogerio Martins

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Facsimile, MimesisProject (2008)Photo © Lara Torres

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◊I’M NOT THAT

INTERESTED IN AUTHORSHIP, OR

THE IDEA THAT IT’S ME, BUT MORE THE PROCESS. IT’S MORE INTERESTING IF YOU

OPEN IT UP TO OTHER PEOPLE FROM OTHER

FIELDS, IT’S REALLY ENRICHING

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◊CLOTHING IS AS

IMPORTANT AS THIS, IT’S HOW YOU RECOGNIZE SOMEONE, IT’S WHAT MAKES YOU HAVE AN

OPINION ABOUT A PERSON BEFORE YOU SPEAK TO THEM. THIS IS VERY STRONG, IT’S

PRIMORDIAL◊

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FacsimileExhibition (2008)© Rogerio Martins

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Becoming (2008)Lisbon Fashion WeekPhoto © Rui Vasco

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◊I AM A FIRM

BELIEVER IN THE IMPORTANCE OF

FAILURE◊

◊WE TEND TO MAKE THINGS PHYSICAL.

WHEN WE MOVE, WE TEND TO PUT THINGS AROUND US THAT WE

CAN RELATE TO, SO THAT WE CAN FEEL IT’S OUR OWN. THERE’S A VERY DEEP NEED FOR THIS EXTENSION OF

THE SELF◊

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Mimesis I (2007)Photo © Rui Vasco

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Implicit Memory(2005)Photo © Rui Vasco

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◊I ALWAYS HOLD THE HOPE THAT

EVERYTHING WILL CHANGE AND THINGS

WILL BE GOING IN THE SUSTAINABLE

DIRECTION◊

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100% recycled stockDesign - williamhuxford.euPhotography - Lara Torres, Rogerio Martins, Rui Vasco

Special thanks to Lara Torres for a most insightful interview.

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