Copyright Los Angeles Times
Laguna Art Museum added a wearable wrinkle to its Art + Nature celebration with the debut of an upcycled couture fashion show last year. Robin Rundle, the museum’s public programs coordinator, was optimistic at the time about its staying power following the initial runway event, and it returned to kick off the festivities on Nov. 1. “I was delighted with the designs — from concept to innovation to craft to the runway,” Rundle said. “So many of the designs featured movement and really focused a spotlight on the museum’s valued community partners.” Serving as judges were Katharine Story, a Laguna Beach resident and sustainable fashion designer; Fetneh Blake, who owns Fetneh Blake Concept boutique in Newport Beach; and Shane Nielsen, a professor of fashion history at Orange Coast College. The awards for the show will be announced after the 13th annual Art + Nature festival ends on Monday, with the overall winner receiving a one-week internship with Story herself. Laguna Art Museum’s fashion show is an eco-conscious collaboration between local arts and environmental organizations and education partners. Fourteen student and early-career designers from across the country worked this year to bring the mission statements of the organizations to life. Attendees, many from the partnering organizations, sat along rows of chairs spanning the length of the first-floor gallery. More guests filed into an overflow room to watch the models sport the sustainable styles. Holly Poe Durbin, head of costume design at UC Irvine’s Claire Trevor School of the Arts, said more than 30 schools of fashion and design were contacted. Applicants submitted examples of prior work and a statement describing how they would engage with this year’s theme, “Restoring the Future.” “The designers had eight weeks to start from scratch, consult their partners, design an idea, accumulate materials, meet with their models for a fitting, submit works-in-progress reports to us and complete their vision,” Durbin told the crowd on Saturday. “You’re about to see designs that include untold numbers of hours of hand-sewing, crochet, macramé, embroidery, Japanese Shibori, fabric braiding and custom dye work — not to mention the hours [spent] collecting new-found objects and materials to make into a garment. More than one object you’re seeing tonight was fished out of a dumpster.” Edwin Alba, a student at San Diego Mesa College, produced a plastic dress portraying the restoration of the kelp forest for the Orange County nonprofit Get Inspired, Inc. He named it “Caruso,” after Nancy Caruso, the marine biologist who founded the conservation group. “I design the way a video game designer or a cartoon designer will throw in cameos for their audience,” Alba said. “For anyone who wants to dig a little deeper, they’ll be rewarded. With my kelp design, I paired it up with the sense of community in the sense that kelp was nearly extinct along the Orange County coastline, and I wanted to show a visual sense of time. From the hemline up to the bust area, it goes from zero to thriving.” The embedded detail, Alba noted, was in the inclusion of silhouettes of people hidden between the kelp. “You don’t often see the community behind a program, so I cut out these little heads, and I blended it with the same color as the kelp. A lot of people didn’t realize this at the museum on the first go-around, but when they walked up to me, they saw these little details, and they were just blown away.” Surah Koticha, a junior at Otis College of Art and Design, operated as a designer for Laguna Art Museum, using Granville Redmond’s 1931 painting, “Talk on the Beach,” as her inspiration. “The [Laguna] Art Museum had given me a hat — a vintage couture hat — to go with my piece,” Koticha said. “The audience was really wowed by the hat and the concept of the dress itself, because they kept telling me that since the painting was from the ‘30s, it really gave off a woman from the ‘30s. “The dress consisted of three pairs of khaki pants that I’d gotten from [the] Salvation Army and a sarong that I’d created out of batik fabric. Batik is a wax painting technique. It was a print of batik fabric on a chiffon, and I created a sarong underneath the dress cover-up that I created with the khaki pants.” Natalya Sokolenko, 45, of Tustin, is embarking on a second career, pursuing a childhood dream after previously earning a master’s degree in international economic relations. The Saddleback College student strived to convey the theme of restoration in her work while representing the Laguna Beach Garden Club. “The pot is the world where we’re coming from into the current world, and the flower on the top, it’s the world where we come in after we die,” Sokolenko said. “It’s kind of [a] connection between past and future, and it’s a balance, but if you think in [the] sense of like family, that’s like a tree of life. It’s [a] connection between different generations. “I felt like the Garden Club represents really well this theory, because they really care about not only themselves. They care about what our children will have in the future … Originally, in folk culture, people used birds, but the Garden Club is so excited about bees pollinat[ing]. I decided to change it and put bees out there to complete the picture.” Student and early-career designers also appeared from Arizona State University, Cal State Long Beach, the Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising, LIM College of New York, Santa Monica College and UC Irvine. Community organizations represented through the sustainable fashion show included Boys & Girls Club of Laguna Beach, Crystal Cove Conservancy, Environmental Nature Center, Laguna Beach County Water District, Laguna Bluebelt Coalition, Laguna Canyon Foundation, Laguna Dance, Laguna Greenbelt, Laguna Ocean Foundation, LOCA Arts Education and the Pacific Marine Mammal Center.
