ASHION DESIGN: FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD

2004-05-01

from ABITARE, 2004 May

by Beppe Finessi

A studio packed with things. A fascinating place, replete with memories. Favourite objects mirroring a life, as is always the case, with people immersed in their work, which is also, and always, a life project. Daniela Gregis deliberately keeps a healthy distance between herself and mainstream fashion. She's both laid back and bourgeois in her attitudes, sophisticated yet simple in her choices of styles. She has a sharp eye for design of her own advertising graphics and printed materials, and a symbol to guide her on her way (''a small star I took from a tatoo I had done when I was young''). Everyone on her team can do everything, from fashion shows to crochet, and anyone who wants to join it can, like in an extended family (''Who runs the shop? A former customer''; ''And that Israeli lad? We met him by chance while we were setting up a show, and since then our paths have crossed on our travels round the world''). Self-taught, she has never lost the quirkiness and range of her unconventional training. She is instinctive and an outsider, proud of the spontaneity which is such a rare commodity in a world of perfect robots programmed to succed at the cost of disowning their own most instinctive emotions. Though her clothes are in all the best places in Milan, London and Tokyo, she wants to become neither a multinational nor a big-name maison. She wants to keep her clothes craft-made and the numbers small. Her love of what the hand can do is evident in the way she develops a collection. No pencils and brushes, no colors sketches like other stylists - she just take a sheet of paper, folds it and cuts it, and then drapes the paper model on a bobbin, which makes do as a dressmaker's dummy. Her work develops from novel production ideas, reactions to materials, or cues from everyday life and fairy tales (Adela Turin's Arturo e Clementina inspired an earlier collection). Sometimes what she does borders on design (a tablecloth-dress she did some years ago now seems an anticipation Lucy Orta's ideas). Her strongest feature is that she steers well clear of fashions that constrict the body. Her clothes are systematically, programmatically distant from prevailing styles in the use of alternatives materials, colours and shapes that make them partly experimental and partly just freer and easier. Honestly.



OGGETTI DA INDOSSARE

Taken from ABITARE December 1999


...Some objects cause an immediate reaction, either positive or negative. Some others are out of this logic. They stimulate instead an interest in the creative process they came out from. That is the case of the skirts, the aprons or the bags designed and produced by Daniela Gregis. They represent a rigorous translation of feelings, aesthetic and personal intuitions that urge to be expressed...



IDEA DI SCOMPOSIZIONE

fromABITARE September 1999


...it would be inaccurate to name her fashion designer: her work hovers undecided between design and artistic effort. It is deeply self-refering, it expresses a genuine urgency.Daniela Gregis weaves relations among different way of expression, always starting from a reflection on dressing, fabrics, shape and meaning...