IRENE CLÉMENTINE ORTEGA
DESIGN
Bilbao, 1986. Since 2008 she is actively involved in artistic creation, fashion design and in the historic research of textiles. In 2011 she moved to Berlin where she specializes in the dating of antique fabrics and identification and classification of pre-industrial garments and civil clothes from the beginning of the 20th century. Throughout this period, she continued her learning in Italy, the country which gave her direct contact with high fashion and archives of private wardrobes.
In 2015 she inaugurated her own textile archive with a considerable number of pieces. Among her most distinguished clients: Vogue, Esquire, Vice, Preassure Paris, Glossa Music or Universal Music. She also takes on art management for Palazzetto Bru Zane, a dependent organization of the Foundation Bru with its headquarters in Geneva, Paris and Venice.
In 2018 she settled in New York where she has participated in grand fashion campaigns in collaboration with important professionals of the sector: Galore Magazine, the international campaign of GAP with the stylist Beth Fulton or DAZED Magazine with the stylist Emma Wyman.
Share:
I develop the exhibition of my textile and stage project in an enigmatic space of the city of Rome; as if it were a tableau vivant of a courtesan party, an illusory feast that takes place far from the eyes of the spectator. A festive fashion show, baroque bacchanal, pastiche of a theatrical sort that makes more sense within the narrative discourse of this project. The statism of the stage, more adequate for the pictorial, represents what is permanent, what is immovable.
A spectacle with out-dated characters, eternal while ephemeral, who communicate their message through their clothes, through the basic visual: colours, textures, shapes. I suggest the return of using the gesture as information, suggestion, defiance, to the emotional of the divine revelation that furthers itself from Nature to invention and convention. I propose creating a clothing object, a series of unique pieces, exuberant and timeless that bestow the person wearing them with a transformative power, allowing them to play with the established roles and escape everyday banality breaking with the marked established social rigidness.
It was necessary to be able to experiment with the materials freely. I used pure pigments for the dyes, I returned to sewing by hand, the elaboration of fantastic headpieces, recuperating fabrics and the modifying and reuse of antique garments.
The evolution of my creative and production process was deeply tied to a series of happenings that took place over this year. After a period of adaptation and the concretion of my ideas through studying memoirs of wardrobes, visiting museums, exhibitions, and theatres, I began to actively collaborate with persons who could contribute organization and structure to my image archive. Giulia Venerandi, in fashion consultancy, or Maria Elena Masetti Zannini in theatre staging, as well as fashion and textile artistry professionals in the city who helped me give an identity and body to the initial idea of my project. Concerning the tailoring and elaboration of pieces and prototypes I chose to primarily work with Italian suppliers, who also offered their knowledge and experience in classic tailoring, difficult to find in other cities.
As a consequence of the unprecedented circumstances of the health emergency that we lived from March on, my production process was partially interrupted. Despite that, I continued producing in a more intimate and reflective way, accepting the change in timings. Rome is not a closed chapter for me, and after this strange summer of limbo, I will return and submerge myself in its eternal romanticism to complete this and many other future projects.
My stay at the Academy gave me the necessary tools to develop, full time, a design project and create a wardrobe with complete creative freedom, without deadlines or timetables.
Italy has always been a country where I have had and maintained very close relationships, emotional as well as professional. My first contacts with the world of textile, antiquarian, art history and love, were in this country, that nurtured my motivation and knowledge.
The city of Rome, throughout my stay in the Academy, offered me the perfect stage to completely immerse myself in the history of the 7th and 8th centuries, in its innumerable pictorial collections, its circular architecture, its secret passages, in short, the Barroque world that inspires and illuminates my fantasies.