The Art of Fashion: Action/Re-Action Fashion Show

“I create because I am created, sculpting on the human body…a dance between finding materials to design with, and composing a form to work towards...” – Julia Barbee, Frocky Jack Morgan

If you’ve been with us for a while here, you’ll know that ultra acknowledges the more mundane functions of apparel…yes, to shelter, to hide, to enhance, addressing problems of I’m cold, I’m naked, I wish I looked not quite as much like I do as I look right now. And too, apparel is tool and palette of dreamers…to invent better, multiple, and/or imagined selves through the artful selection and deployment of the ensemble parfait.

But apparel, too, in the hands of the right maker is art, is craft with a capital C: the sculptural forms of Cristobal Balenciaga or Phillip Treacy, the liquid treatment of material by Madame Vionnet, John Gallianos’ over-the-top, theatrical fantasies for Dior Couture supported by a small army of couture craftspeople.

In Portland, perhaps we may not recognize what a highly-evolved and uniquely dynamic independent fashion scene we have with fierce designers who can make the wearable yet highly individual with one pass of the sewing machine (to pay the rent) and create the exquisite, the fantastical, finely wrought, one-of-a-kind and artful pieces the next (to engage with something other than, something more rarified than commerce and body covering).

ultra is always interested in process. More than, “How did they do that?” we are curious about the whole arc of making that starts with a seed of inspiration (from who-knows-where), kicks into solutions and more problem-solving, additional inpiration, most likely, and a successful (or satisfactory) outcome.

A dozen Portland-based fashion designers—Adam Arnold, Julia Barbee, Genevieve Dellinger, Elizabeth Dye, Gretchen Jones, Emily Katz, Leanne Marshall, Liza Rietz, Emily Ryan, Holly Stalder, Kate Towers—will show tonight in the Action/Re-Action Runway Show at the Museum of Contemporary Craft (724 NW Davis), a collaboration between ultra and the Museum. Each designer was invited to choose an object from the Museum’s current exhibition, Touching Warms the Art, and create a garment in response to it. We suggested they might “interpret ‘inspired by’ as loosely as you like.” And the designers responded to shape, texture, repetition, and free-associative suggestion of narrative.

The designers have dealt with form, unique material, and embellishment. There will be clouds and waves, petals, facets, feathers, and actual leaves from the lotus tree.

You can think of Action/Re-Action as an invitation to think about the inspiration behind any dress you see on the runway, on the rails, or on the street. What’s more, when the last model has walked her circuitous route throughout the Museum, you can both spend some time looking at the designers’ work and pick up their source of her inspiration and hold it in your hands, an object from the Museum’s jewelry show, Touching Warms the Art. All of the jewelry in the show is meant to be touched, to be held, to be tried on by Museum visitors.

Action/Re-Action is tonight, Wednesday 7 PM at the Museum of Contemporary Craft (725 NW Davis). Tickets are $10 and can be had by phoning the Museum for a reservation at 503 223 2654.