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As some rarely seen publicly, as Salvador Dalí paintings were seen in the USA and served as a design inspiration for fashion mode students at Kent State University, it is as much about fate as it is accident.
Two years ago, after visiting his friend Marc Nelson, who headed Marc Nelson Denim in Knoxville, Tennessee, Paolo Torello-Viera, President of Tacoring Americas, who is part of the textile company SCABAL, who is located in Brussels, was ready to call an Uber to get to the airport. But Nelson insisted that his intern Cecilia Kirk, who at that time a student of Kent State University War, drove Torsello-Viera instead. The couple talked on the way and Kirk asked Torello-Viera for a business card when she left him.
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During a semester abroad in Florence, she turned to him to inquire about Scabal deposits. (Kirk did such a great job that the company hired its full-time, said Torello-Viera.)
Later, when he spoke to Scabal’s owner about the planned restoration of 12 Dalí paintings, which was commissioned by the founder of the company Otto Hertz in 1971, Torello-Viera said that he had the idea of working with the students of the Kent State to use the painting as a source of design inspiration. It was finally how they got started. Scabal produces luxury feelings in his Huddersfield, England, mill for other companies and his skabal tailor -made and sports clothing. In 1971 Hertz commissioned the surrealistic artist Dalí to create a number of paintings that imagined how men’s clothing would look like in 2000.
Sure enough, the exhibition “Dalí Beyond Time, Fashioning The Future” and a fashion show with 29 designs from Kent State fashion students inspired by Dalí took place in the PEG’s Foundation Gallery in Hudson, Ohio. The work of art was not visible in North America and was rarely exhibited in Europe.
Over the years, Dalí’s connections to fashion have been obvious in different ways. He was one of the artists to visit Elsa Schiparell’s fashion show and work with the designer. In December 1936, surrealism inspired the window displays at Bonwit Teller, where a chaotic display was created based on sketches that were submitted itself. Hundreds of teaspoons covered the soil, dozens of cocktail glasses were hung on a dining jacket and red arms with white fingernails, which were cleared out of the wall from the wall towards the head of a man’s calf that was a mass of red roses. Other windows contained costume accessories with alarms, red lobsters and other favorite motifs from the surrealists.
His 1971 activities included Alice Cooper Publications to use his “Geopolitics Child” bidder for an album cover. They combined through a friend of Cooper who was part of the Sunset Strip Drag Group Boys. At the beginning of the year he visited Coco Chanel’s funeral in Paris.
The exhibition ended an almost one -month run on July 5. During the show, six students were awarded the winner of the Dalí Vision Awards. Now the Dalí paintings and the work of the Dalí Vision winners are exhibited for a limited time in the luxury furniture designer B&B Italia in Midtown Manhattan. You will be shown in the normal hours of the exhibition space before the work of art goes back to Skabal’s headquarters in Belgium. None of the students are sold, but Scabal has developed a number of fabrics inspired by Dalí for commercial purposes.
The alliance with the State of Kent State and PEG was crystallized at dinner after a Supima fashion show with Mourad Krifa, the director of the Kent State School of Fashion, and Rick Kellar, President and Chief Executive Officer of the PEG’s Foundation. After Kellar had mentioned that his organization had opened a gallery in Hudson, Ohio, Torello-Viera remembered: “In a few months you know that you have 12 Dalí paintings there who will be hanging there-I don’t answer.”
After Kellar only hit Torello-Viera that night, on Monday he said that his first reaction was to propose more prestigious cultural institutions such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Akron Art Museum. “He stopped me and said:” No, this is about fashion and relationships. “I said,” You just met me, man, “Kellar recalled with a laugh.
But the vision of Torello-Viera included the Kent State School of Modes Students and its up-and-coming relationship with the Kent State management and the Foundation of PEG, an organization that is supposed to improve the life of people with mental health problems. Up to this point, the PEG foundation focused more on local arts, although other areas were at the state and national level. Kellar said: “We really wanted to think about how we did our works of art, so we built this gallery. The fact that our third show has in the Salvador Dalí gallery is pretty remarkable,” said Kellar. “It positioned us with pressure. After this show, it is like” What do you do next? “
The founder of the PEG Foundation, Margaret “PEG” Clark Morgan, studied fashion and business at Kent State thanks to a one-year scholarship. Her father Howard Clark, who was a bricklayer, built many buildings from the university. In addition, the foundation issues the director of the Kent State School of Fashion. The partnership with the school will continue.
Above all, Torello-Viera said that the opportunistic aspects of the project were what he finds the most gratifying for the entire endeavor, not only for the students, but also for themselves in terms of work and learning from the students. He said: “These children see things with a number of eyes that differ completely from mine. Sometimes I was not impressed when looking at a piece of clothing to be honest. But after hearing their thinking process behind it, I was blown away.”
He also spoke enthusiastically about the chance to work with the President of the State Todd Diacon of Krifa and the President of Kent State. “It’s a privilege,” he said.
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