2019

ANNA SCHWARZ & LISA EDI “THINGS WILL CHANGE”

Anna Schwarz’s collection “Ready-to-Carry” (2016) combines straight, geometrical and linear cuts with solid contoured sculptural elements, which are applied as accessories or simply carried next to the body. 
Cuts and draping of garments, as well as sculptural applications, trigger associations with antiquity and its statuesque elegance, which always appears timeless and everlasting. Yet, the title “Ready-to-Carry” implies another temporal dimension - the one imposed by the fashion system - which produces garments not only ready to be worn by the models on the runway, but from there immediately integrated in the accelerated consumption machinery. 
As a designer, who also works as a model and fitting model, Anna Schwarz adds an additional layer of meaning to her collection - as she describes it — a layer that examines the performativity of the fashion model: “To put something on, to wear it, suggests that you will wear it out, that your body and your environment are alive and make demands on the things you put on. ‘Ready-to-Carry’ quotes clothes and thematises the show. It honours individuality and expresses a respect for diversity and otherness, but also for adhering to role expectations.”
As a designer and artist with experience in modelling, Anna Schwarz questions the female stereotypes the fashion industry creates, exploits, perpetuates, and only very rarely breaks. 
Conventionally, models don't speak. They can only be viewed, but even then, they are just styled and retouched images. A construct which imposes dominating beauty ideals, triggers mechanisms of the production of desire, and exploits female insecurities about their looks and their body. 
Anna Schwarz, in collaboration with a photographer, Lisa Edi, explores these issues through a series of editorial projects, photo shoots, and videos that question the relationship between the model and the photographer, as well as the indispensability of the model's presence in fashion photography. 

Lisa Edi was trained as a fashion designer before redirecting her professional interest to photography, and even though she can't be strictly defined as a “fashion photographer,” her work is pervaded by reflections on ways of ‘framing’ fashion. 
As a photographer, she seeks to establish a deeper level of closeness and intimacy with her subjects. She looks for a contact, an exchange, a transfer between her and her subject to make an image. Even if carefully structured, her photography carries the allure of a ‘visual note’. She is interested in capturing some accidental and vaguely mysterious situations, like the series in which garments appear as ‘left’ accidentally to swing in the breeze, hung on a branch of a tree, or some ‘mysterious’ things portrayed in the series entitled “Collection of Absurd Hangers”. 
Unlike most fashion photography, which needs a model to animate and interpret garments, in various series of Lisa’s photographs, the body is omitted, staging is reduced to a minimum, and yet the visual effect she achieves is profoundly poetic, just because it's simple, basic, and ‘natural’. At the same time, her work plays with estrangement, either through her interest in fragments, details, and abstraction, or through her taste for games and paradox.

Together, Anna and Lisa realised a series of images to construct a look-book for the collection “Ready-to-Carry” in which the model is like a ‘present absence’: face hidden, static pose, body just outlined through a strong graphic contrast between the figure and the background. In a second series of photos inspired by the “Ready-to-Carry” game of allusions, the focus goes even further. Instead of the model and garments, there are only some of the collection's accessories, which appear almost abstract and barely recognisable. 
After working together on images, Lisa and Anna continued their creative dialogue, making the video “Things Will Change” for “Transfashional,” using existing fashion photographs as material to be newly re-edited, manipulated, and multiplied. Through this constant re-elaboration of images, they question the idea and need for the “New”, which is one of the main fashion imperatives, and put the discussion about aesthetic ideals that fashion creates on another level.