Accessories and Photography at ITS#FIVE!
December 01, 2005
| Brand new site, brand new ITS, brand new projects! After the inauguration of the photography field ITS#PHOTO in the last edition, ITS#FIVE will see the opening of a new field: ITS#ACCESSORIES. It felt like the right time actually. Why? Well, let's imagine you're walking down the street, and you bump into someone who knows the fashion world very well. Try and ask him the importance of accessories for a fashion house. He (or she) will surely tell you: "you got no idea how much". From a purely economical point of view, most fashion houses bring in more profit from the sales of accessories than from clothes. The reason can be easily explained with an example: try and enter the shop of a so-called "top class fashion house" and take a look at the price on the tag of an outfit. After you've stopped counting the zeros, move on to the shelf where the accessories are, and have a look at the price of these: chances are you will find one which is more affordable. Open the wardrobes of the fashion victims out there who can't resist to have a piece, no matter what it is, so they can show off their beloved brand and hope that people consider them important for that reason. You will most probably find more accessories than clothes. |
Aside from economics and profits, another thing to take into consideration is that accessories can really turn a flat outfit into an interesting one. You can, for example, have the most anonymous jeans on, with the most anonymous t-shirt, and look fantastic if you have a great bag, shoe, brooch, etc. But you can't do viceversa: if you have a great outfit and an ugly bag, the bag's just ugly, no matter the greatness of the outfit. Period. All of this introduction is meant to just hint at the great relevance that accessories have. But the thing that is most interesting for ITS is that there's loads of unexpressed and unseen creativity in this field, since most fashion design students seem to give more importance to clothes rather than accessories. In many cases, their dream is to have their catwalk show with models wearing their clothes. Also, there appears to be loads of fashion competitions around that claim to tell us who's on next in clothes design...but why is there little attention paid to accessory design? ITS#ACCESSORIES: this is the answer to this question....in this new field there will be projects to show the best expressions of creativity through accessories!After last year's project with Demna Gvasalia, YKK is back with ITS again, this time as the partner for this new ITS adventure. The Accessories Competition will be upon invitation, and will involve 10 schools around the world. Their students in accessory design will produce a small collection of accessories. Among these, at least one finalist from every school will be selected, and they will come to ITS#FIVE and see their accessories displayed in a dedicated exposition in the location of the event. In addition, every student enrolled in the project will design at least one accessory foreseeing the use of YKK products. For the few who don't know what YKK is, take a look at the zip on your pants...9 out of 10 it's YKK: zips, snaps, buttons...think any kind of fastening, they do it. YKK will send two boxes to each school. One will be the project box, containing a selection of fastenings for the students involved in the competition, while the other box will be for the whole school to just play with and experiment. There will be two prizes at ITS#FIVE for the accessories: one will be awarded to the accessory collection of the year, while the other one will be awarded to the best YKK-focused accessory (go to the "accessories" section of our website for full information!). |
 This said for the new accessories field, let's talk about ITS#PHOTO, the photography area of ITS. The project for ITS#FIVE is again in partnership with MINI, and it is called "545". You might be wondering "why on earth is he writing that '4' smaller than the two fives?". It's because I don't want you to think that it's a number: the four in the middle actually means "for", so when you read it, the meaning really is "five for five". It's just that graphically it was a lot better in our opinion to keep it all in numbers, it's a bit more mysterious and interesting...don't you think? So now your next question obviously is: "all right, why is it called 'five for five' then?" Well, I'm obviously here to provide you with all of the details! |
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Last year at ITS#FOUR, the opening of the new field ITS#PHOTO, with the MINIInternational Photo Award, was a positive surprise for us. As always when you are a "beginner", you're not even thinking about a success yet: you're rather just hoping that everything works out fine and that nobody tells you that it was a flop! So when we received enthusiastic comments by the jury members (who were, among others Cecilia Dean, Lisa Naftolin and Jan Welters...), who told us they were really impressed by the quality of the projects they saw...well, we couldn't believe our ears, and were really happy and proud about how things went! MINI, with its fantastic stretch limousine "MINI XXL" and gorgeous "MINI Cooper S" and "John Works" provided for the event, also contributed to the success of it all, taking the guests of ITS#FOUR around the city of Trieste, back and forth from the hotels to the location (next year there's going to be a lot more MINI's around...). The limousine especially caught the eye of everyone! So when we had to develop the projects for ITS#FIVE, we knew that the expectations for the new project of ITS#PHOTO was high and that we had to come up with an original idea... |
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A brief description of the project (you can find an exhaustive description in the "photo" section of the website): "545", will be a fashion photography contest upon invitation for five selected schools around the world. Every school will have a maximum of five students enrolling, who will each present a set of five photos on the theme "5". In April, one finalist per school will be selected, and there will therefore be five finalists in July presenting their works at the event, with a dedicated exhibition area. I guess now you understand the name of the project, dont' you? Five schools for ITS#FIVE, five finalists working on the concept "5", each producing five photos..."five for five" sums it all up perfectly, me thinks! You think the news is over? No it's not! Danielle Mourning, the winner of the MINIInternational Photo Award at ITS#FOUR, will be back at ITS#FIVE to show the fruits of her work experience with MINIInternational magazine. For those of you who don't remember, the prize for the winner of last year was being hired by MINIInternational magazine for a photo shoot to be then published in a future issue of the magazine (in addition to €5000). As we do with the fashion competition, where we invite the winner of the last edition to present a new collection that shows what has been done during the year after the participation at ITS, we thought it would be great to do the same in the photography field. So, close to the photography exhibition for "545" will also be an exposition area with the photos by Danielle. A lot of interesting news, don't you think? Accessories, photography, other special projects which you'll discover...without forgetting our by now established fashion competition. A brand new website and a brand new location...ITS#FIVE hits the accelerator waiting to take you into creativity at the speed of light. Ready to jump on board? |
