Release Date: March 2014
Format: 24.5 × 31.6 cm
Features: 264 pages, full color, hardcover
Language: English
ISBN: 978-3-89955-522-6
Catalog Price: €39.90 / $60.00 / £36.99
Shop Price: €39.90

Publisher:
Gestalten
Mariannenstr. 9-10
D-10999 Berlin
Germany
+49 (0)30-72613 2000
http://shop.gestalten.com/books.html

THE WEATHER DIARIES

Cooper & Gorfer

A Book in Celebration of the Nordic Fashion Biennale
Europe’s most exciting and groundbreaking fashion designers come from its Nordic countries, are well-connected in international networks, and enjoy impressive commercial success.

See the Agenda expositions>

About This Book
When it comes to contemporary fashion design, the Nordic countries of Europe are anything but terra incognita. Brands from Scandinavia are well-established around the world and designers such as Henrik Vibskov have been lavished with international accolades for years.

But what is it that makes Nordic design so exemplary? How do the origins of young designers from these countries influence their inimitable sense of style and aesthetics? In The Weather Diaries, the artist duo Cooper & Gorfer explore the roots of Nordic fashion and design traditions.

Sarah Cooper and Nina Gorfer take an unusual approach to their topic by telling its story visually. The curators of the third Nordic Fashion Biennale present the work of both young and established West Nordic designers in a striking collection of photography that they shot on-location throughout Iceland, the Faroe Islands, and Greenland. Showcasing the fashion in dramatic natural settings, their images are fused with a dark romanticism and, like much of their work, are reminiscent of eighteenth and nineteenth-century painting. Defying categorization, Cooper & Gorfer’s photos bring together fashion, photography, and painting. Their work goes beyond pure documentation and is interpretive, narrative, and utterly distinctive.

Posted 13 August 2015

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With cool, arranged photos in a kind of Russian Romanticism and Symbolism Genre, the figures and clothes are fused into the landscapes, the text opens with: “Fashion doesn’t have it easy these days”. Mahret Kupca explains in On The Brink of An Abyss that fashion is “essentially something highly contradictory. The only reliable thing about it is its unreliability. In the form of clothing, each season it once again formulates the measure of all things, only to replace it a few months later with a different such measure.”
Every two years, The Nordic Fashion Biennale unites designers from a part of the world of which the natural living environment has always made extreme demands on those who live in it.

In the essay The Weather Diaries the artists Cooper & Gorfer and curators of the exposition describe the Icelandic atmosphere, the stories told, the mythical nature, and their first artistic project and the creation of their first book. Investigating fashion for two years in the West Nordic Region of Iceland, Greenland and the Faroe Islands, the main focus became to study how the cultural heritage and the place one grew up influenced one’s personal creative personality.
After the photo pages on Bibi Chemnitz, Nikolaj Kristensen, Guðrun & Guðrun, Najannguaq Lennert, Jessie Kleemann, Hrafnhildur Arnardóttir a.k.a. Shoplifter, Barbara Í Gongini, Steinunn, Jör, Kría, Mundi, some pages follow with weather diaries with photos of illustrative weather phenomena.

The interviews with Mundi, Guðrun, Jessie, Johanna; the thoughts and reflections of Bibi Chemnitz & David Røgilds; an essay on Hrafnhildur Arnardóttir a.k.a. Shoplifter, and Guðmundur Jörundsson/Jör, Nikolaj Kristensen, Barbara Í Gongini, Najannguaq Lennert, Steinunn Sigurðardóttir/Steinunn, Rannvá Káradóttir & Marianna Mørkøre/Rammatik, Rúrí describes the personal drive and motivation for their work and the book closes with pages on the designers and artists featuring the book and the Nordic House Iceland.

I am glad this book contradicts ? how it is made with so much drive, attention and skills ? the latest interview by Marie-Dominique Lelièvre from the French journal Libération with Lidewij Edelkoort published in Dutch in Lage Landen nr. 79, 4-18 June 2015, on her anti-fashion manifest:

So, read this well-made book and enjoy the message before you go and see the expositions with the same title.

Angela van der Burght

Pages book The Weather Diaries