The Paper Fashion exhibition at the MoMu in Antwerp gave me a lot of Googling food for thought, names I had heard of vaguely but not known a lot about. One of them was Jum Nakao, the Japanese Brazilian-based designer whose S/S 05 collection A Costura do Invisível some of you might already know about. Still a revisit to this temporal fleeting moment in fashion is worth it especially if images like this exist. For this paper collection, more than 700 hours of intricate work went into it, a lot of it which is documented in the DVD A Costura do Invisível, which can be seen on this YouTube channel. Then in one crazy moment, after the models went down the runway at Sao Paolo fashion week, the paper dresses were ripped off, torn and destroyed by the models and you can actually see visible shock on spectators' faces in this show video...
Nakao must be some sort of work-destructing masochist because as if seeing his models tear his work to pieces wasn't bad enough, he then recreated the entire collection again in miniature for the Revolver exhibition at the Oscar Niemeyer Museum and put them in a glass case where mice were let loose to eat away at the dresses until they fell apart.
Paper munching aside, at least Nakao at the sense to photograph his human size pieces from the collection as a permanent reminder of how many papercuts he undertook to complete this delicate feat...
