Temporary Fashion Museum
"She sees what you don't see, but then again you see what she doesn't see".
Suzanne van Heerde, Social Media Art Director at & Other Stories, interviewed Ivania Carpio on her View on Fashion:
If that just left you confused, don't be. Almost a decade ago Ivania Carpio came across the world of blogging, one that was far removed from the shape we're accustomed to today. To her it seemed like a movement that spun from a general mood that had started creeping in. Brands and magazines catered to specific target groups that shared generalised interests and demographics. However, the Internet was moving at a pace and everyone was starting to see more of the world - whatever world they were in the mood for - within one click of their mouse. Social media were taking shape but hadn't yet formed a defined entity. As each individual was being exposed to more, it gave room for people to explore their individuality and show it to whomever ended up on their designated page. A page where individuals were trying to create mini platforms where they could share their curated vision and potentially meet like-minded people. It was that feeling that led Ivania Carpio to create a space where she could document things she wanted to discuss, create and share. The rest was history. Asked about her view on fashion, Ivania Carpio starts off with a rather unexpected comment:
"Everything we see today is based on references, re-interpretations or simply some form of a return. Do we really need yet another point of view?"
Time to discuss some terminology. First up is the word 'fashion' and how it has become hijacked by commerce. Ivania explains how the word itself makes her cringe, as, in her view, the actual context of the word has been lost. Communicating the word 'fashion' makes her feel that she's conveying the wrong message. She tries to work around the word, the way she worked around the act of it. It was always the clothes that sparked her vision of the current concept of the term 'fashion'. Clothes will always be the closest material objects to you as a human being. You can be obsessed with a chair but you won't be able to have that chair by your side at all times. Clothes, by contrast, become a part of you. You can't change the way you were born but you can adjust the way you dress every day. It lets people recognise you and lets you recognise others. The act of shaping herself as a person through non-verbal communication was a process in which Carpio put things together, and slowly a larger vision began to crystallize.
In theory, for Carpio, creating the perfect jacket is equally as complex as building a bridge. A different position, weight or miscalculation can turn everything around - to the good or bad. The fact that many people are unaware of this is a source of frustration for Carpio. It's this ignorance and lack of interest that has turned the industry upside down. There was a time in which fashion was a zeitgeist. Today it has been replaced with continuous competition. This was very apparent during the past few years that she has been blogging. Instead of creating a new order, offering power for individuals to speak up, it seems to have made the mass even stronger. The result is a uniform, currently glorified commercial aesthetic that girls in Asia, Europe and the USA seem to share seamlessly. All we seem to care about is who owned what first and how we can own it too in order to belong.
Ivania Carpio, unlike most of her contemporaries, has always been interested in the process of fashion. Stuff comes and goes but the state of mind is at the root of everything. White, defined as an achromatic colour, became her visual language. She has never used the word 'minimal' to describe her aesthetic, simply because it is the polar opposite of how she sees it. Today white is linked to minimalism in a commercial connotation, witness the Instagram and Tumblr feeds dedicated entirely to shades of white and sharp lines. Collecting a stream of white images and products to continuously prove that the user is attracted to white #aesthetics.
Ivania Carpio welcomes you to a world of endless beginnings.
"A fresh, new sketchbook with blank pages. An empty gallery space. A white, unprinted t-shirt. An unoccupied house without any furniture, like you're about to move in. A clean canvas. A book without a cover. Packaging without labels. Clean faces without make up. An abandoned construction site: empty land with a pile of bricks. Open spaces without a clear purpose. The sight of a flickering cursor on an all white computer screen. A bowl of noodles without the toppings. Can you imagine the possibilities?"
Contrary to contemporary popular belief, she just flipped the context of being inside a 'minimalistic white box.' It's not empty nor constraining. "When I enter a store or someone's home, I see the way they've worked with the space, the personal touches they've given it. It's not that nothing inspires me. The absence of something inspires me. When everything is set, I just admire it and move on. My mind blocks everything because everything is just as it is. If you and I both stood in an empty, entirely white room you would see a hundred possibilities and I would see a hundred entirely different possibilities. To me, that's magical."
For the Temporary Fashion Museum Ivania Carpio has created a white space that the viewer can enter and where they can be inspired. It's a vision that will transcend the space as it motivates people to see things elsewhere. Things that others won't see, which stimulates you to #ikzieikziewatjijnietziet, a Dutch children's game comparable to the English 'I spy with my little eye'. The space comprises a screen with a Tumblr page that slowly grows in unexpected ways, the same way the Internet does. By adding that hashtag to images where that vision is applicable, it might just end up right there. We have reached a point where we can agree: Nothingness is everything.