Body Geography

 

 

 

Notes on the work of Victoria Bartlett and the VPL archives words by Alessandra Cianchetta – 15 October 2022

A SENTIENT BEING

The celebrated designer and creative director Victoria Bartlett on breaking the boundaries and her sense-stimulating, thought-provoking designs. 

“As humans we have an innate sense of emotions and a need to nurture ourselves in order to shake off the shackles of life. We may become transfixed or transported by a sensual texture or a carved and rounded object which echoes memories of being protected. Surrounding ourselves with Beauty is a mirror of who we perceive ourselves to be. So design that serves the needs of sentient beings, must respond to function and form emotionally on multiple levels. Whether it be through bio-fabrications to stimulate the senses, or from an embryonic approach by immersing the body in forms that cover, replicate, or comfort the body through molded, swathed, or textural experiences.”- Victoria Bartlett

The stunning landscape of Woodstock is shaped by powerful geology. Rock formations in shades of ochre, pink, black, and silver are juxtaposed with lush vegetation and the moist atmosphere of waterfalls. Multiple layers of geological tones: dense forests and black rocks eroded and shaped over thousands of years by water and wind. This is the setting chosen for the photographic series shot by Blossom Berkofsky featuring Bartlett’s archives of VPL.

Here, two bodies different in shape and age, sometimes headless, blend with the geology in a way reminiscent of Ana Mendieta’s Silueta Works in Mexico or as if in the scene of a crime. 

British born, New Yorker based designer and creative director Victoria Bartlett is a bubbling polymath devoted to exploring new and challenging discourses between design at large, fashion, and visual arts. Bartlett has consistently challenged all dogmas “boundaries are meant to be blurred and broken,” she tells me. “All things are connected, closely linked and intertwined, and lead to one another” she continues. Her career spans from fashion editor and director for Conde Nast, styling celebrities Bowie, Bjork, Madonna, Scarlett Johansson, Pharrell Williams, and more, consulting for a roster of high-end brands including MiuMiu, Versace, Moncler, etc. to founding her fashion brand VPL, filling a niche between sportswear and lingerie, redefining the very notion of it.  Trained both in Fashion and Fine Arts, Bartlett collaborates with performance artists, including Maria Hassabi, and has worked with artists such as Kai Althoff and Ugo Rondinone on a wide range of projects and venues. Besides her work in fashion and visual arts, she is currently designing a line of transformable and collectible furniture.  

The photoshoot presented here revisits key moments and milestones of her award-winning brand, she founded in 2003.

Asked about her outlook and ethos, the first thing Bartlett tells me is how her garments were never meant to be for a male gaze and were, in a way, bold feminist statements. 

The core idea was that they could be worn in any circumstance and were meant to be fully exposed. Women would brandish underwear as their outerwear. Victoria’s motto, anywhere anyplace anytime, was about flipping both symbol and use through a range of cross-cultural references from pop culture to the arts.

 

“I wanted to reclassify the notion of sexy. Sexiness was too connected to lacey,  big underwear and big bras were far sexier than a thong.” 

Bartlett used feminine iconology and gave it a twist until it was no longer – uniquely – for a male gaze. The symbols were taken and dissected; the ideology of the alluring woman as seen by a man, broken down and decomposed, by doing so, a new genre of emboldened sexiness was defined.

The work of 1950s iconic photographer and fashion influencer Bunny Yeager has been a significant source of inspiration.  Yaeger pioneered her own (big) two-piece bathing suit and designed swimwear, together with the legendary pinup model Betty Page, the cheekiest of all pin-ups, “an underground sensation for her bondage photos.”  Yaeger’s and Page’s oversized bras and briefs were sexier versions of grandmother’s Maidenform and were ante Diem precursors of some of Victoria’s designs.

A second powerful theme running across many collections is plastic surgery, changing the body through self-imposed medical procedures and showing and exposing one’s scars.  All of this is more of a comment than a critique. Bartlett mentions the influence of artist and activist Orlan, her Carnal Art Manifesto, and her notorious surgeries from the 1990s or the early performance works of the then-edgy Marina Abramovich, submitting herself to strenuous immobility, exhaustion, endurance, pain, razor blade cutting, and much more, in a search to test the very limits of the human body. “It is about body’s geography (…) I liked the harnessing of women’s anatomy, de-structured, and flipped inside-out,” Bartlett tells me. Lines, medical sutures, surgical bandages, and elastic appendages were all used to underline and redefine the body.  Her designs played with architectural garments – pieces of underwear that were almost like armors, and with a sophisticated palette of distinctive color blocking: vermillion red, yellows, greens, blues, all skin tonalities, which would become Victoria’s trade signature.  The pieces shot here, play with skin tones from tans to nudes, off-whites, and grays. One of the images features Bartlett herself on a rock wearing a skin-toned brief made of surgical bandages shaped as a cross right on her crotch. “It is a comment on censorship,” she tells me.  Censoring bodies and censoring genitalia are particularly sensitive subjects in specific cultures – and markets – not devoid of inner contradictions – a series of underwear with female-friendly red gussets were refused by Japanese stores for their disturbing association with menstrual blood. 

The Spring Summer 2010 collection experimented with materials and featured a sheer dress with metal boning inside microchips, peering through under layers, revealing a second skin. That was about playing around with the idea of the little “house dress” or the decorative cocktail dress women would wear to “please the man” as Bartlett puts it. A similar comment is found, with humor, in the video clip director Floria Sigismondi shot for David Bowie’s single The Stars (are out tonight) from the 2013 album The Next Day starring Tilda Swinton styled as a 1970’s housewife/wife to Bowie and a set of vampire looking celebrities disrupting the couple’s lives wearing beautifully subtle flesh-toned latex bodysuits. “Fetishizing is actually about empowering women,” Bartlett tells me while discussing her fascination with New York 1990’s über dominatrix and writer Terence Sellars – one of whose books is eloquently titled Dungeon Evidence (1997). B.A., summa cum laude in forensic (criminal) psychology, Sellars was part of the Downtown underground arts, music, and literary scene, her friends and collaborators included Glenn O’Brien (who edited another of her books The Correct Sadist), Kathy Acker, William Burroughs, etc.

Bartlett’s sporadic use of latex, merged with other materials such as mesh and nylon is much owed to that arts scene and to the charismatic persona of Sellars.

The choice of unconventional materials also plays with the notion of aging, evolving, and deteriorating. “I do not like silks and velvets but I rather prefer neoprenes, cotton”s and latex that age and deteriorates and have a second life, playing with the idea of the objet trouvé” explains Bartlett.

Bartlett’s influences and sources of inspiration are often very much linked to the art world. Underpinnings from the finale of the SS12 show include body extensions reminiscent of fossils, other mollusks and bracket fungi, a clin d’oeil, and a tribute to Rebecca Horn’s work (specifically, Weisser Korperfacher, female studies, 1970/72). A body suit splashed with wet paint screen printed on it recalls the feminist artist Adrian Piper. Influenced by Valie Export, well known to the public for her affiliations with Viennese Actionism, for controversially covering Vienna with posters showcasing her crotch or indeed for Action Pants: Genital Panic (1968-69) – the idea of not hiding, not feeling ashamed of, wearing garments inside out anytime and anywhere, and most importantly, boldly and shamelessly exposing, owes much to Export’s provocative work. 

Besides the many, layered trans-cultural references, Bartlett’s work at large- has always had some utilitarian element to it, the idea of function and form and a strong notion of duality.  A piece from the first collection FW 2003 had underwear with see-through pockets worn as a second skin, a sort of travel panty with transparent pockets big enough to be equipped with lipstick, keys, or a mace spray, etc. Utilitarian elements such as pockets or aprons were dissected and merged with other things to remain utilitarian and (also), simultaneously, protective and arousing.

Interestingly, this duality and the constant Surreal diverting of symbols and meaning is equally present in the Woodstock shoot. The black rocks are anatomical as if part of those bodies’ geographies. The model Stella Duval is Victoria’s Secret muse, and the other one is Bartlett herself. “Having Stella on the shoot was somehow a contradiction since Victoria’s Secret, whose first catwalk show live streamed in Times Square was styled by Bartlett in 1999, is all about the male gaze (…) we were un-doing that conditioning, It was about the body not about the pose. The image with the tree and the spread legs is very confrontational, and matter-of-fact – like a blonde Anna Magnani. The pin-up element is given a twist.” 

Showing bodies thirty-five years different in age is also a way to make a statement and break down taboos within the industry. Miu-Miu, with whom Bartlett collaborated on several collections and campaigns was a visionary precursor and a pioneer within an industry, that is not tender with age issues, she referenced the influence of old ladies ie the bagging stockings, the sensible shoes, the frumpy skirt, and house dress making it into a fashion statement.

In addition to her work as a fashion and furniture designer, Bartlett has collaborated with many artists among which David Armstrong, Taryn Simon, Massimo Vitali, Maurizio Cattelan, Collier Schorr, Wolfgang Tilmans, and, Jack Pierson. She has contributed to a series of works by Ugo Rondinone and John Giorno: If there were anywhere but the desert (2002-2012), Dogs Days are over, 2013 a mixed media work (live sculpture, video, and performance) creating an alter ego and modern shaman in the form of an imposing clown, color blocking body pieces, Thanks4Nothing at Palais de Tokyo in Paris, 2015 among other works. 

For And then leave me to the common swifts (und dann überlasst mich den Mauerseglern), a 2016 piece by Kai Althoff at the MoMA Bartlett created a huge off-white, womb-like fabric tent structure occupying most of the sixth floor of the Museum inside of which a selection of Althoff’s pieces (co-curated by the artist himself)  including video, music, books, paintings, fragrances and sculptures were showcased as if in a wunderkammern.

Other projects include a seven years’ collaboration with Maria Hassabi using color blocking, and different textures as well as the degrading of colors, ie shades of red bleeding into pinks for a recent performance, CANCELLED at the LUMA Foundation in Arles in 2022 and color blocking of yellows, red and blue for HERE, a performance at the Wiener Secession in Vienna in 2021.  

 

Model  Stella Duval @ Next Management

Casting Barbara Pfeister

Make up  Chichi Saito using Westman Atelier