CURATED

" BELIEVE "

 

Ek Thongprasert, the brilliant fashion designer and founder of Curated, has transformed the space of Broccoli Revolution, a vegan restaurant in Soi Sukhumvit 49, into a temporary art gallery to showcase his latest fashion collection alongside contemporary art. Artworks by three female artists are exhibited with the theme “believe” in a show called “Exhibition 13 ‘Believe?’” in conjunction with the Believe Autumn/Winter 2016, Curated’s 13^th collection.

Also featured at this unique presentation is a lifestyle activity with the concept of belief: delighting in haute vegan cuisine in accordance with the concept of elements (earth, water, wind and fire). This restaurant has thus been turned into an offbeat art space that perfectly blends different kinds art all united with a single concept. This inspiring event will run from September 13 to November 13, 2016.

 

 

“I had this intention two years ago that I wouldn’t present Curated in fashion show format because it can’t contain all the ideas that I would like to communicate,” Ek said. “So, this exhibition has been designed to link fashion and fine arts together.”

 

 

Curated is a daywear clothing and jewelry brand unique in its concept. The brand adopts a curator’s vision that turns inspirations from the art world into fashion items, an innovative and experimental approach that has successfully distinguished the fashion house. For this collection, Ek drew inspiration from two art exhibitions for the designing of both womenswear and menswear. The first is Where and when? Berck/Lourdes by Sophie Calle, a French artist with a unique approach.

This show was based on a reading by a fortuneteller who asked the artist to open a book and read words deemed important in order to interpret them as a prophecy. Then, the artist lived her life according to the fortuneteller’s foretelling and collected all the stories including train tickets, photos and videos for an exhibition. The other show is Decision (2015) by the Belgian Carsten Holler, who invited the viewer to make their own decision on how to look at his exhibition that had two entrances. When combined, these two contemporary art exhibitions offer an interesting view on human perception, leading to the notion of “belief” that makes people decide to do or not do a certain thing at each step in their lives.

 

 

“I’m interested in the belief system of people in society – why someone makes a decision to do a certain thing or how someone allows a stranger, in this case a fortuneteller, to decide his or her fate,” said Ek. “This collection communicates the belief system of a person, dividing the thinking system into three steps based on the psychological model of decision process or cognitive process, which consists of information, analysis and decision making. This model postulates that when a piece of information is received, it is analyzed by our memory and the analysis leads to decision making. The Believe collection employs the same thinking system. The design team imitated Sophie Calle’s artistic approach, using the birthdate of the brand to consult a tarot reader. Curated was imagined to be a young girl and a young boy aged 6-7 years old who have the same birthdate as the day of the brand’s business registration. The fortuneteller made a reading that the girl will grow up to be a single, lonely lady and nobody wants to be with her. Meanwhile, the boy was predicted to experience several accidents and bad luck all his life. This information was then used as inspiration for the designing of the collection, an unusual process that we had never done before.”

 

 

To create this collection, the prophecy inspired two design directions. For womenswear, Ek had the thinking that if a woman is foretold to be single, she then has two options. One is she will pray to a sacred being. With this idea, Ek drew inspiration from the Japanese “tying the knot” ritual and applied it as details such as knots and bows on the clothes. As for the boy, if he believes in the warning of bad luck, he will start wearing Buddha amulets or other talismans, hoping they will protect him. Graphics inspired by Thai talismans can be found in the menswear.

 

The other response to the prophecy is choosing not to believe it. Ek was drawn to a confidence a woman can have to decide to marry herself. Details often found on wedding gowns, such as lace, was adapted for daywear, and wedding rings were adapted to be worn differently. For the boy, though he does not believe the foretelling, he still needs to be careful. This idea was turned into details such as protective gear, the “Fragile” sign and other symbols related to safety on the clothes.

 

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