Julia Valle: A Dialogue with Art and Fashion
fluoro spoke to Brazilian designer Julia Valle who has a unique take on the merge of art and fashion.
Born in Belo Horizonte Brazil’s third largest city, Valle originally began her creative journey studying graphic design and working as an art director for Brazilian fashion label Alphorria. A change of direction saw Valle spend time in Denmark where she studied fashion and worked with Henrik Vibskov, before returning to Brazil to work with local designers and focus on her own creations.
While working for Brazilian labels such as MaraMac, Valle founded her own studio in Belo Horizonte. Titled Casa Ramalhete, the studio allowed Valle to explore her own ideas as she focused on limited edition garments and cross-disciplinary projects.
Valle’s projects are united by their conceptual backbone, often presenting her wearable garments alongside sketches, jewellery and installations to highlight the key idea. Two notable projects include her installation Jardim (2013) and her TNWMLC (2013) collection. Jardim utilised technology to physically alter the garment, as metallic embroidery within the dress reacted to the presence of humans. While TNMWLC was a collection of garments where their structure was defined by the pattern of a word or sentence formed on a typewriter. Tracing the trail of letter-to-letter on the typewriter, the resulting shapes were used to craft patterns and later garments.
Retaining elements of fashion, Valle has recently turned her focus to academic studies of fashion as art. As her projects take on an academic focus her diverse range of work continues to form a dialogue between these two worlds.
(f) How has your experience in graphic design and art direction influenced your approach to fashion design?
(JV) I graduated in visual communication and worked as a graphic designer for two years before I really started designing clothing. At first I believe I related to textiles as if it were paper. So inevitably pattern cutting has been the starting point of any project, transforming the flat surface into lively 3D shapes.
A program called Generator changed my entire process; it was a pattern distorter and the first attempt in merging technology and clothing design. The software produced ‘failed’ patterns that were very graphic, yet when turned into garments they resulted in such fluid and feminine pieces. From then I started understanding the creative process and played a lot with the notion of distorting the patterns.
Being a graphic designer helped with being able to develop my own graphic pieces, while understanding the process as an artistic practice came later. This understanding allowed dealing with fashion at a different pace. It also brought interesting and experimental proposals about how I could commercialise pieces.
(f) Has your study of fashion as art changed your view on the industry?
(JV) Understanding fashion as artistic expression has changed my view on the industry. I have come up with proposals that alter how we usually relate to the actions of producing and consuming fashion. I have finally been able to not produce within the season schedule, allowing each project’s pace to run with the time they need.
Just recently I proposed an inversion on when clothes go on sale. At the atelier I have reductions at the beginning of the collection, as it is being sold and when less pieces are left they are set back to full price. I think that by studying a different field so deeply, I have been able to see the industry from a certain distance and raise questions about it. Why should authorial and conceptual works be sold in the same way as trend-lead collections are?
(f) What’s your view on the relationship between art and fashion?
(JV) Fashion and art sort of retro-feed themselves. Now researching in an art school I see how fashion brings inspiration in many ways.
On the other direction, fashion also takes from art as constant inspiration. What I find missing in fashion design is the focus on touching people are changing their behaviour and thoughts what you create. While art has this potential, fashion often focuses on just trying to hit the commercial markets from the last season. In that sense, I think fashion lost a lot with the financial crisis that took over all of us. Now we are trying to find new ways of producing what we believe, which is also good.
(f) How do projects such as Jardim highlight the relationship between art and fashion?
(JV) As an installation Jardim proposes that the viewers’ presence changes the visual aspects of the dress, by altering its colour and also altering the viewers’ experience with it. This comes from my understanding of art, this capability of changing those who exchange information with a piece. Clothes can undoubtedly do this in so many ways, but maybe we have lost the sense of vibrancy that the action of dressing can bring.
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Valle will continue to present collections but has moved away from the traditional frequency of presenting with the seasons. Her intention is to keep creating, but to also incorporate research on textiles, technology and visual arts. As for showing collections on the runway, Valle explains that this is “not in my plans anymore, for I don’t believe that the format fits what I propose as fashion.”
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