CND Project Journal
Something Borrowed, Something Blue, Something New For the centennial year of The New School in New York City, the parent university of Parsons Paris, fashion design juniors reflected on the question What does it mean to pursue the new? In an era of rapid globalisation, severe turbulence and increasing complexity, investigating the conceptualization and the design of the new opens a broad range of ethical issues like What is new to whom This topic was examined in the light of the reciprocal interactions between designers and users of different cultural, regional, national, religious and ethnic groups, and addressed the mutual enrichment and the tensions that may arise from such diversity. How can the design of the new promote understanding and foster mutual respect among individuals and groups of different cultural backgrounds? Can the design of newness discourage cultural intolerance, extremism and fanaticism? The collaboration with the Centre National de la Danse (CND) aimed at sharing and probing individual memories to create the new, while fostering intercultural encounters between students. Guest artist Violeta Sanchez and students examined the material and immaterial expressions of geographic and cultural center and periphery in relation to dress and fashion as a way to create new corporal expressions, social behaviors and objects. By investigating their own cultural backgrounds through narratives and shapes inspired by vernacular dress and fashion, 16 students from different regions of the world collectively imagined unexpected wearable forms with monochromatic textiles provided by Maison Yves Delorme. Their ephemeral performance was a reconstitution of shaping and assembling gestures that disrupted the conventional geographies of technique, form, design process and history in Western fashion. Equipped only with scissors, the students draped, knotted, folded and cut fabric before a live audience, revealing their cultural investigations through poetic transformations.
Leyla Neri, PhD
Program Director BFA Fashion Design
Collaborative Project with
CND, Pantin
Centre National de la Danse
Performance
CND
February 27, 2019
CND
Christophe Susset, General Secretary
Théodora Lemeur, Public Relations Assistant
Guest Artist
Violeta Sanchez
Students
Louise Boulet-Alips
Fernanda Calderon
Qianli Feng
Alexandra Maniovich
Deborah Azevedo
Niklas Ferguson
Khanh Nguyen
Victoria Zito
Amanda Augusto Castanho
Caroline Garreau
Morgan Kim
Ximena Martinez De Zorzi
Daryl Baclig
Carole Morris
Erik Pohndorff
Alexandra Reznikova
Music Composed by
Niklas Ferguson
Photography
Julien Mouffron-Garder
Graphic Design
Monica Fraile Morisson
Print
Parsons Paris
Technology Dept.