Pia Myrvold Gives Fashion an Art Attack

Pia Myrvold is a woman long on ideas working in an industry that is notoriously short on substance. "I decided to become a painter at 19. I rented a shack in the middle of the city for my first painting studio. To support myself I made toys, then clothes. I started to sell my paintings, but I was getting so much out of clothes, and I was relating to Japanese deconstructionists like Comme des Garçons, Issey Miyake and Yohji Yamamoto. I was also making clothes for a theatre performance group and people would come up to me and say 'Where did you get those pants?'"

Pia Myrvold considers herself as an "interdisciplinary artist." She designs furniture and tableware, makes lithographs, paints, creates installations and composes music. In1992, architect Bernard Tschumi commissionned Pia - and an American artist Randy Naylor, - to create a gigantic textile installation at Paris' urban park, Parc de la Villette.

"People who supported my painting were furious that I started making clothes and showing up in high heels and red lipstick", she laughs. "They were mad that I wasn't dressing like a beggar".

"I'm interested in clothes because they create a situation of exchange. They create links." Pia Myrvold shows the artistic experience is within the break-down of institutions, in the meeting point between fine art and ordinary life. "I take responsibility for culture, getting involved in fashion." For the cynically-inclined, it's a suspect message: buy a Pia Myrvold dress, wear it and become a thinking consumer.

Pia Myrvold's collections may be backed up by doctoral theses but it's their sexy wit that makes good fashion.

The "Paris Identity" collection (1996) answers the question "Who is the real

Parisian?" Pia used plastic bags as relics of habits and patterns of daily life. In one dress, delicate slices of a plastic bag from museum "Jeu de Paume" exist juxtaposed in a dress with pieces of a plastic bag from discount department store "Ed., L'Epicier." In another, bags from "Rough Trade" record store cover the front while "Virgin Megastore" slices cover the back. "Paris Identity" is just one of several ongoing series of clothes which explore Myrvold's notion of "clothes as media" and fashion as a forum for ideas. "The clothes are like skins reflecting the contempary language of graphic design, advertisements and the constant bombardment of images that constitute the modern marketplace, and therefore constitute the most contemporary aspect of our culture" says Pia. "After all, we all have to get dressed every day. And that’s why fashion is so very powerful. Clearly what we wear says things about us, about our culture."

Acting as an Editor in Chief for "Clothes as Publishing" -Edition number 1- , Pia invited artists, architects and musicians to submit work for publication using clothes as the medium. She offers an example: "I asked Bernard Tschumi to give me a text about identity in the city. I had him read the text over the phone from his office in New York for a recording. We then created an image of the recording using a digital sound editing program. The images of the sonic waves were printed along with Tschumi's text and became the dress' central motif".

"Internet" (1994) was influenced by this new phenomenon of connectivity via the Internet. Pia Myrvold wanted "to represent that power for people to connect". The design of the dress was inspired by microchips.

Language was the key point of the "Interface Softwear" collection (1995).

"Body Theory" is the second part of "Clothes as Publishing". The collection was born thanks to Bangladeshi poet Talisma Nasrin: Pia prints poems on clothes. She plays with the notion that clothes are ideas about the body; an idea which is easily grasped if one looks across cultures, comparing habits and ideas of beauty.

Circles turned out to be the expression of Pia's inspiration for the "Memory" collection (1997). "I was thinking about voyages... about how people arrive at places, how they leave and return. I use the circles because we so often come back to where we started, having picked up information on the way, or having forgotten everything." But it's not about nostalgia, it's about facts: each circles is a representation of an universe. "I want clothes to have inbuilt memory, different kinds of memories, sound elements, pictures, languages, they all are signs." Loading clothes with messages creates a good media for flexible society.

A woman moves toward you in the street. She is about two blocks away. She is wearing a long dress made of thin, red vertical strips on black. It looks like a venetian blind softened and turned on its side. The woman’s movements set off optical ripples in the dress, making it look like the flipping blades in rotating billboards. As she comes closer, you recognize the lettered red strips as cut-outs from a plastic Parisian supermarket bag: Ed l'épicier. You never thought a plastic bag could look so good