If you want to make Mary Jo mad, just tell her she can’t have it all: the personal resurrection of the makeover, the transcendence of fame, the fantasy of fashion, the empowerment of authorship, the joy of spectacle, the intimacy of sex, the need to be heard, to be seen, to be loved—all around the world. Why shouldn’t one have all that?
WE ALL want it all. The expectations of the spectator have changed; and riding this change has been Instant Couture™, a new kind of creative experience claiming to destroy the boundaries between audience and artist—through fashion. Since House of Diehl’s first event in October 2001, originator Mary Jo Diehl and creative partner Roman Milisic have used the Instant Couture show to entertain, connect and motivate our modern world. They’ve been called many things: “Revolutionary”; “the aesthetic gurus of the new millennium,” and even (ack) “akin to Zoolander the musical”. But they haven’t been ignored. A mere 11 gigs, in 8 cities across the US and Europe has earned coverage in print and on TV worldwide; the work itself has been exhibited in venues including the world’s largest contemporary art museum, Mass MoCA. So, four years in, what’s the status of Instant Couture?
For an experimental group that has performed less than a dozen times, each time with new members, and new script; each time to a different crowd in a different place, House of Diehl has shot swiftly to the top flight of live entertainment. The first Instant Couture show was in a bar. The latest was advertised on national TV, and sat high on the bill of a major European music festival, playing to a crowd of thousands, in the slot before Sonic Youth. (This was Greenspace Valencia, Oct 2005; V magazine called House of Diehl the “festival standouts.”) The show prior was at the historic Vienna Rathaus for the world-famous Life Ball, with Elton John, Liza Minelli, a Versace fashion show, and again an audience of thousands. Other venues have included a museum, a nightclub, a New York art gallery, the roof of an LA hotel, a London theater, and the Bryant Park tents in fashion week. It seems the show has legs. Versatile, it has defied pigeonholing. To some, it is a fashion show; to some, a rock concert; to some, theater or art. Suzy Menkes called it “a happening.” Even when it begins as a traditional fashion show, it swiftly unravels into something Hendrix-like. Live, sweaty, up close and personal. Sub out the guitar with a pair of scissors, and you got the vibe.
Some things are constant: Instant Couture is fashion-art created live for an audience, inspired by an audience. This gives it it signature style:
1. That garments created are absolutely current: for immediate trend creation.
2. That outfits are completed in limited-time: typically around the length of a pop song.
3. That the work represents the place it was created, through ambient impression, local materials and DJs of Style™ (the co-creators of the work).
4. That the audience has access to, and is involved in, the creative process—at minimum through their presence, more fully, as the model and muse of a garment.
5. That works are displayed in fashion and “celebrity” contexts (on screen, on film, on stage), within the same live time-frame, and beyond—using mass communications to reach a wider audience.
Meantime, the spectacle of Instant Couture has grown, to include a stage, a catwalk, lights, and giant screens. There are photographers, videographers, models, dancers, performers, and a DJ. There is original music, choreography, sets, fascinating clothes, audience participation, and stage invasions. Involved on different levels have been Amanda LePore, Moby, and members of Fischerspooner. “Imagine if Fellini made A Clockwork Orange,” said Fashion Wire Daily describing it in 2003.
Instant Couture is fashion from the mosh pit. Fashion as an Olympic sport. Fashion as rock’n’roll. Fashion as sex tape. Fashion as American Idol… As the boundaries between fashion and music, fashion and art, fashion and celebrity, fashion and entertainment have continued to blur these last years, Instant Couture has been an active catalyst. In Fashion Today, Colin McDowell asserts that fashion, though a minor art form “reacts more speedily and completely than any other to the social, political, and cultural nuances of its times.” If our cultural nuance is self-expression, Mary Jo Diehl suggests how fashion may play its part: “The culturally relevant message, Style, is the combination of clothes and those that wear them. Style, the interactive art of fashion, is my medium: creating community; empowering us to express ourselves; letting us wear what we mean. The Instant Couture experience is a new paradigm of interactive performance invoking Style to make social experiences fun, glamorous, creative, and meaningful.”
And it’s true: Instant Couture does seek meaningful, measurable results. Milisic and Diehl use their shows to produce at least 3 things: fashion, celebrity, and community through site-specific interactive art.
1, FRESH FASHION
An umbrella turned into a bustled skirt, wallpaper folded into a swan dress, a guitar-neck halter top, jeans as jacket, jacket as dress, gowns from shirt collars, albums covers, tape-measures... the 150 or so designs that have been created live via Instant Couture are truly viable fashion. In their irreverence, craftiness, inversions of the norm, finished IC outfits capture the same zeitgeist as works created in the studios of “deconstructionist” fashion designers such as Hussein Chalayan in London, A. F. Vandervorst in Antwerp, and Martin Margiela in Paris. Unlike those, however, Instant Couture’s immediacy— concept to creation in minutes not months—allows it to be an even more compelling social barometer. This fresh fashion is a true reflection of and reaction to what people want, from the first moment that they want it.
2, RADICAL CELEBRITY
Instant Couture allows audience members to participate in the fashion circus, and in the process, be transformed into celebrities themselves. Guests find themselves adored, restyled, broadcast, selling some brand or other, full-page images in trend magazines. In LA, they were beamed on a screen 40 feet high, across the city skyline. At Mass MoCA, they were immortalized in an art exhibition. In New York, they appeared on the Jumbotron screen in Times Square. With Instant Couture’s media-genic appeal, guests have seen themselves on TV and in print for months to come—the product of a self-fulfilling celebrity equation: if you’re famous, they will come. By “bottling” fashion’s approach to celebrity-making, House of Diehl allows its patrons to be—for more than a moment— famous.
This is the truly 21st century art form. Wrote Diehl and Milisic in a 2001 essay: "Today's culture is the culture of involvement. We're all famous, soon will be, might as well be. The democratization of fame epitomized in reality TV shows, the media's DIY spin on fame, the theatrical disintegration between the performer and the audience, has thrown everyone in to a wan spotlight. And held in that spotlight, we've all felt the urge to dance, to be part of the event. Do we feel we can? Of course! Andy Warhol pulled aside the curtain and debunked the "mystique" of creativity long ago. And, being the tech-whores that we are, we all know how to use the controls.”
3, GLOBAL STYLE TRIBES™
Instant Couture is also a fashion postcard. All of the elements of each show are derived from the city in which it takes place, including casting, production, and rehearsals, talent, materials, and guests. Instant Couture does not impose an aesthetic; it draws one out. The creative product thus becomes a Profile In Style of its specific time, place, and people. Some people have captured their experiences in writing, others in photographs. Instant Couture captures a moment in a fashion “sketch”. Analyzing the results from show to show, Instant Couture creates and identifies "Style tribes," fashion ideologies that transcend geographic and ethnic boundaries. In the face of cultural globalization, Instant Couture has amplified local identity, and encouraged international dialogue through art. Diehl and Milisic believe that the findings of this Global Style Tribes project can make a valuable contribution to communication today.
What’s next? House of Diehl expects to take Instant Couture to cities in Europe, Asia, and the States over the next two years, with a comprehensive exhibition of the GLOBAL STYLE TRIBES™ findings in mind. Meantime, Instant Couture principals are being migrated to other environments. For the off-Broadway show, the tour, and other variations on “fast fashion” being explored by House of Diehl as TV shows, watch this space… If you can just watch. After all, there’s no such thing as just a spectator any more.
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What people have said:“Nothing short of revolutionary!” ABC Eyewitness News
“The cutting edge of the cutting edge.” TBS Superstation
“Fashion’s punk provocateurs are burning down the house.” Radar magazine
“Provocateurs of style” Time Out New York
“Thought-provoking designers, their aim to create quirky individuality in a sea of logos.” International Herald Tribune
“The Sid and Nancy of the fashion world.” Black Book magazine
“Promising… the manifesto virtually incomprehensible… but the crowd cheered and a blonde screeched, “I’ve never seen anything like this, never in my life.”” The Washington Post
“House of Diehl is limited only by the imaginations of Diehl and Milisic, and their imaginations seem boundless” Berkshire Living
“[Among] the worlds best fashion shows” Strut magazine
“House of Diehl are the aesthetic gurus of the new Millennium” H. Revista
“A whirlwind disregard for formal constraints of design” iD magazine
“The future of couture perhaps?” Sleazenation
“Fashion as the new rock’n’roll” Glamour Italia
“Punk meets Warhol” Vogue.de
“A frenzied visual orgy. Andy Warhol would have liked.” Paper.com
“Their unconventional approach is earning them fans in the fashion and art world” WWD
“It’s practically impossible not to keep thinking of Andy Warhol… this place is the command center for a cultural revolution.” Stitch magazine
“Couturiers by way of their on the spot, play it as it hangs creations... The festival standouts.“ V magazine
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The shows
Greenspace Festival, mainstage, Valencia, Spain, October 2005
Derrick May and House of Diehl, Greenspace, Valencia, Spain, October, 2005
Life Ball, Vienna Rathaus, Austria, May 2005
Museum of Contemporary Art, Massachusetts (Mass MoCA), April, 2005
Bryant Park, New York Fashion Week, NYC, February 2005
Revelation, Tribeca Grand Hotel, NYC, September 2003
I Know What You Did Last Season, Downtown LA Standard, LA, June 2003
Priska C Juschka Gallery, Williamsburg, Brooklyn, February 2003
Gen Art’s Ignite, The Puck Building, New York, July 2002
93 Feet East, London, UK, February 2002
FashionAutomatic, Remote Lounge, New York, October 2001