A Yves Saint Laurent jacket on sale for £2,000 may be seen as an extravagance, and it is, if you disregard the welfare of everyone who contributes to the experience, from the shop's sales assistant to the designer's studio staff to the textile craftsman, all the way down the chain of supply.
"Galleries are welcoming craftsmen and textile designers, but artisans are also open to young graduates with an artistic vision".
These are the kind of clothes that come from years of directly working with the best Italian craftsmen and textile mills.
Gonder's craftsmen produce textiles, jewelry, copperware, and leatherwork.
He even makes the city's architecture one of his characters: the Modernist crown of the Martin Luther King memorial, the Japanese lines of a Craftsman home, the textile blocks of a drive-through funeral home. .
"As I grow older," Byatt tells us, "I become more and more interested in craftsmen – glass blowers, potters, makers of textiles".
Harking back to the era when designers and craftsmen like Alexander Girard and Verner Panton were experimenting with textiles, plastic, metal and glass to create objects for spaces traditionally occupied by art, the mirror is less a look at the self than a window away from it.
In more abstract terms, he outlines an aesthetic capable of "tapping into the zeitgeist," an eclectic genre that brings artists of various media together -- from graphic designers to craftsmen to fine artists -- inside and outside of typical art world venues, bending the possibilities of textiles, posters, murals, signage, and more, all within the confines of the so-called urban space.
We need skilled craftsmen.
