7: Fashion and Architecture with Anna Telcs

““Fashion is unsolvable and touches everyone.””

Seattle based fashion designer and performance artist with a background in industrial design, Anna Telcs discusses our relationship to clothes, and the rituals of dressing, as modalities of expressing our selves, our bodies and our place in the world. Discussion topics include donning church dresses, uniforms, and the male body.

Timestamp Outline

1:32 Why fashion?
2:38 Music as a performance of fashion
3:34 DIY as punk: “I don’t know what I want / but I know how to get it.”
4:24 Central St. Martins creative atmosphere: “everyone was terrified”
5:37 Louise Wilson teacher at St. Martins
7:00 “Interior Landscape”
7:56 The ritual of dressing
8:41 Episcopalian church and the acolyte uniform’s power to cleanse and “become more me”
11:30 The Dowsing, 2013
12:20 Basic layers, body aesthetics, the naked body and the gendered body in fashion
16:02 The role of touch and posture in the spatial performance
18:46 Ancient garments: slow stitching techniques and smocking
20:18 Entanglement of the “inner landscape”, slow stitching labor, research in layering of menswear and volume in women’s dressmaking to build ritual and richness in garments
21:38 The designer as servant: “Humans used to be dressed by other people if you were of a certain class.”
24:13 Red Square at University of Washington as the ritualistic site for The Dowsing: Suzzallo Library and Kane Hall demand theater
25:03 The first Dowsing in 2012: between the woods and runway
26:16 St. Mark’s Cathedral or Red Square?
27:11 Slippery red bricks and open sky: “If you’re not going to try to contain something and let it be its own, put it outside...the energetic exchange that happens when performance happens is either going to imbibe or patina the clothes that the models are wearing. But I hope that it also changes the space or the chemical nature of the people watching the show.”
30:18 Uniforms as a reset button and design challenge
33:04 “Fashion is unsolvable and touches everyone.”
35:12 Ritual process of dressing as inventing the self: “Who do I want to be today?”
37:04 Requisite architect glasses; buildings and rhythm as uniforms for architecture