Le Petit Echo de la Mode No.5 Collage by Hormazd Narielwalla

About The Artwork

I make collages from antique tailoring patterns. My latest work mines a seam of precious found material hidden between the pages of Le Petit Echo de la Mode. Published in Paris between 1897 and 1983 was a popular fashion and lifestyle magazine. It followed fashion making it accessible to the fashionable Parisian housewife. Within it, loose and often discarded, I pluck a streak of radical abstraction. The magazine contains tailoring patterns that, for efficiency's sake, layer the life-sized templates of entire garments onto a single sheet of paper. Each facet of the garment is encoded in an intricate web of lines, dots and numbers. I challenge to view this sheet not as a means to an end but as an end in itself. Shattering the female body into precise overlapping facets flattened not as views of a subject but as the object itself. I make the radical potential loose in Le Petit Echo de la Mode real. I cut delicate sheets of coloured paper and acetate with the pride of a mother. The sheet of paper instructs the housewife, and me – the artist, to make itself. Predating Futurism and prefiguring Cubism these Le Petit Echo de la Mode abstracted the female subject to a degree more radical and precise than the highest aspirations of the 1912 manifetso Du "Cubisme". I discover once discarded but now groundbreaking artworks that were begging to become real and loved. This pattern was extracted from August 1957. Acid free archival double sided tape is used to create the artwork.

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