Felt Art Designer Clothing By Latifa Medjdoub

 

I was always a want-to-be fashion designer and it is for that reason I am fascinated by Latifa’s stunning designs.  She was featured in Fiber Art, Art to Wear January/February 2007 issue.   I adore the off-white dress with the provocative slit up the front that I may of considered wearing when I was twenty-one, ah yes a mere couple of, couple of years ago! LOL But, I fear that I would not have had the nerve living in Ohio.  Now the skirt and top I would have worn and loved every moment it was on my body.  I took an excerpt out of the magazine to share with you and it reads as follows.  Listening to former Paris Opera costume designer Latifa Medj-doub wax philosophical about the intent of her clothing, we might first think her melodramatically self-important. Yet once we realize that, in fact, the words theater and theory share the same Greek root, theoria, meaning “viewing,” “contemplation by the mind,” and “speculation,” it turns out that Medjdoub’s philosophical ap­proach could not be more right on.The thirty-three-year-old Paris-bom designer of Algerian descent, based in San Francisco since 2000, works ex­clusively in felted fabric made of high-end yams like silk, merino wool, cashmere, and alpaca. Large swaths of wool fabric, often with cutouts that betray the designer’s curiosity about seeing through to “secrets under­neath,” drape the body with a sculp­tural and, yes, theatrical feel. (She likens the cutout effect to the “beauty of the openings in a Moroccan lamp.”) These large pieces, whose thickness she can control during fulling (the technical word for the felting process, which involves boil­ing and agitating wool fabric in vats of water for two to four hours), allow her the “extraordinary dimensions” to create works she considers “knit­ted sculpture.”

Her clothes embody an intriguing dialectic in that they evoke stiffness and softness at the same time: stiff­ness created by the fulling and then the layering of fabric, and softness from the yarn content, as well as the addition of added details such as gold, rayon, and Lurex threads, hand-painted areas, and rich colors such as plum, caramel, chocolate, indigo, and charcoal.  This Paris born designer has adopted America as her home. Please feel free to visit her site Latifa to see more of her fashions.