Ximena Valero and the Art of Transformation

Ximena Valero

Ximena Valero, the acclaimed designer, calls her line "Transformables".  I asked, where did the concept come from?  "I was working in New York and began experimenting with folding garments into shapes, and how the shape created from the folds inspired the next fold and then shape."  This reminded me of Jackson Pollock, entranced by the free, impulsive and immediate drips proceeded to the next ones in a controlled accident.  She smiled and took from her purse a fabric swatch with patterns echoing the great American abstract expressionist painter.


         
                               Transformable in Action                                        

Stop Staring!

Eva and Alicia Estrada

The sisters Alicia and Eva Estrada, CEO/Designer and Assistant Director respectively of Stop Staring! admired for their "retro-evolutionary" dresses came to the bookstore hunting for anything new about the '50's, the '40's, and the roaring 20's.  I asked Alicia, how did you come to call your company Stop Staring!  "In high school I wore outlandish clothes of my own design and other kids constantly made fun of me, so one day I wrote across my skirt 'STOP STARING', and promised myself if I ever became a fashion designer, I would call the line after that moment of confident defiance.

Fashion Statements (2) Wittgenstein and Clothes

“Language disguises the thought, so that from the external form of the clothes one cannot infer the internal form of the thought they clothe, because the external form of the clothes is constructed with quite another object than to let the form of the body be recognized.”   

Ludwig Wittgenstein
                                                                                      
                            Student Fashion Show Wittgenstein House, Vienna 2010