Last night some of the Lost City team went to see James Marsh’s documentary “Man on Wire”, a brilliant and exhilarating account of French tightrope walker Philippe Petit’s audacious walk across a wire stretched between the twin towers of the World Trade Towers in 1974. The film must rank as one of the greatest documentaries ever made- an homage to the bravest of brave guerrilla art. Petit had dreamt of walking between (what were then) the highest towers in the world even before they were fully erected. After six years of preparation, Petit and his intrepid team of corroborators pulled off a miraculous and poetic act of art which cannot be repeated. Watching the gifted (and obviously somewhat possessed) Petit step on the illegally rigged wire 1350 ft above the ground, and walk and dance in the sky for nearly an hour, above a spellbound crowd, is a life affirming experience.

After the screening, magically, the director, and Philippe Petit himself, appeared for a Q&A with the audience. In response to one of the questions, Petit said he believed that to live life is to be challenged, to go against the grain, push the limits, and do the impossible. At Lost City, we believe in Petit’s philosophy and wildly applaud his miraculous feat. Thank you for showing us we are not mad to dream of impossible things.

A Lost City employee stands next to his daredevil hero, Philippe Petit

Turkey has been a source of inspiration for Lost City for the longest time. Its beautiful, open-hearted people, its secular culture, and its heady blend of ancient and new make it a country we return to again and again for inspiration- a sort of exhilarating Utopia- almost too good to be true. We decided to shoot our new silk line in the edgy exoticism of Istanbul and the surreal beauty of the mountains and caves of Cappadocia. We had a truly nourishing experience we will present to you in our future work.

The road to Urgup is pure rock and roll. A flag of Lost City silk flutters on a vagabond tree

A local lady from Urgup invited us to her home and was happy to model Lost City’s Tulip design.

The caves of Goreme have beautiful churches that date back to the 12th century. Our fabrics are inspired by their frescos.

The launch of the Lost City Silks collection is a fantasy fulfilled. Until now, all of our embroideries were executed on robust cotton grounds, almost all of them greigh or a neutral white color. This was a deliberate choice because we wanted our fabrics to be exquisite but also hardy, practical and of consistently superior quality. Standardising a neutral, versatile ground seemed like a sensible decision. Lost City artisans had to be trained to adapt their techniques to the thick cottons we used. But the ground they most enjoy working on is silk- the choice of the nawabs and royal families of India. We love silk- its poetic sheen and infinite potential as a canvas for experimentation. However, we denied ourselves the fantasy of creating a silk line until we were good and ready. There are a lot of fabrics out there and we have no desire to regurgitate anything.

Joseff Hoffman, a force behind the Weiner Werstatte workshops in Vienna, inspired our silk collection

We had been saving inspirations- little scraps of paper, pixelated jpegs, stories read and sights seen on our travels abroad, particularly in Europe and India, snatches of songs we couldn’t forget. We began to catalog and discuss these preliminary ideas with the design and sampling team at Lost City Blue, our company in India. The unanimous feedback was to go for a no-holds-barred extravagant line, and for once give the artisans the embroidery equivalent of Bob Dylan’s Blonde on Blonde to work on.

Aftab Khan, one our master artisans, and an unlikely collaborator of Hoffman, executed our vision for the collection

Work on the collection started in the summer of 2005. The first challenge was to source ground fabric of the desired weight, width and color from a reliable source. After several failed attempts at identifying a supplier from the nearby silk center of Varanasi (the holy city of Benaras), we finally found a facility in Bangalore that wove several hundred yards to our specefication in the three colors we chose: a rich red, lustrous black and mughal gold. Next, over the course of six months and several 18 hour trans-Atlantic plane trips, train rides from New Delhi to Lucknow and back, in scorching Indian summer and frozen New York winter, we edited the several ideas we wanted to experiment with down to six or seven. We were aware that the American home furnishings market, even the top-end we catered to, was more conservative and risk-averse than Europe- afraid of color and reluctant to experiment. Emboldened by the commercial success of some of our trippier creations on cotton, we decided to listen to the feedback from our design team and not hold back.

Many frequent flyer miles were accumulated in bringing this collection to life

Sampling started in late 2006 right around the time our cotton-based collections were being shipped to various U.S showrooms and our artisans were itching to work on something new. We had been fans of the work done by Wiener Werkstatte Vienna workshops, and admired the philosophy of Joseff Hofmann, who opposed the mass-produced blandness of jewelry, fabric and furniture and instead promoted handcrafted excellence for the discerning few. Decades later, an unlikely collaborator- our master artisan, Aftab Khan, would breathtakingly execute some of Hofmann’s ideas as embroidery. The resulting designs- Vienna and Camille are based on some of WW’s early naturalistic textiles that are closer to art nouveau than their later more geometric work. Other influences included Ottoman robes (Cintamani), Mughal architecture (Mumtaz)- the tomb of Emperor Shah Jahan (who built the Taj Mahal), Toile de Jouy (Toile) and ancient gold leaf prints from India (Roghan).

Wajid Ali Shah, the last nawab of Avadh, was a patron of embroidery in Lucknow

By spring 2007 we had fifteen designs that could be put through the production process. Over the course of the next few months a few of them did not survive the final stages- washing and finishing. A couple seemed duplicative. In the end we decided to bring to market just 10 designs- every single one of them is stamped with the souls of Rashid, our manager, and Aftab, Haroon, Zeeshan, and Liaqat, our lead artisans, who we believe are the best in the world. In April 2008, we started shipping the display panels to our U.S. showrooms.

We have worked on hundreds of embroideries but none has inflamed our passions or imagination as the 10 designs that constitute the Lost City Silk Collection. We have poured our hearts into it. You be the judge of its beauty and craftsmanship.

A rough sketch for Vienna, inspired by an early Wiener Werstatte fabric

Vienna, above, fully embroidered by hand.

Camille, fully embroidered by hand, also based on a Weiner Werstatte fabric

A Lost City employee with Angelo Filomeno

Today was the last day of Angelo Filomeno’s “Betrayed Witches” show in Chelsea and some of us had not seen it, so we went. Once again we were struck by the genius of his work. The dark subject matter, highly sophisticated technique, obssessive details and sheer twisted beauty of his work is mind-blowing. We ran into Angelo himself and found him to be charming, gracious and modest. He told us that he had been sewing since he was seven and had embroidered all of the pieces himself using a hoop. It’s awe-inspiring to imagine this. Each of his embroidered pieces must measure not less than 5ft x 5 ft.  Knowing what we do about embroidery, it must have taken months, even years to create the more detailed works. More respect to you, Angelo. You are a rock star. Hope to meet you again soon in Lost City.

We aren’t always working at Lost City. We also make time to play. One of our favorite past times is checking out the work of photographers, painters, musicians, architects, designers, and yes, embroiderers. It’s exhilarating to see embroidery being emancipated from boring commercial collections and kitsch to a brand new universe of artistic expression.   “Pricked: Extreme Embroidery”, an exhibition at New York’s Museum of Design and Arts that has representative works of 48 artists from 17 countries, is one of the most scintillating art/embroidery shows we have seen. The pieces are breathtaking in their diversity and technique. Some of our favorites from Andre Dezso (”My Grandmother Loved Me Even Though…”) and Benji Whalen “Fast Machine” are below. Click here for a channel Thirteen video of the exhibition.

“Fast Machine”

“My Grandmother Loved Me Even Though…”

We found Angelo Filomeno’s most recent work “Betrayed Witches” , on display in Chelsea’s Lelong Gallery, quite trippy. Here is the New York Times review of it:

“In Angelo Filomeno’s embroidered paintings, scary skulls and skeletons are often tamed by glittering ornamentation and ethereal needlework. In his latest show, which has the hysterical-gothic title “Betrayed Witches,” Mr. Filomeno strikes a determinedly morbid tone.

Angelo Filomeno: “Shitting Philosopher” 

A series of paintings portraying skulls, insects and fish skeletons suggest baroque fossils. The figures are embroidered on striking backgrounds of silver or black silk, flecked with tiny charcoal-colored crystals and adorned with spikes of onyx and hematite. In “As the Water Comes Rushing Over” (2008) Mr. Filomeno uses a combination of silk shantung and silk moiré to haunting effect: ripples of moiré appear to engulf a skull that is being drowned by a taloned hand.

Angelo Filomeno: “Marianne”

Two sculptures go for, and achieve, high drama. “The Marquis’s Dominatrix”(2008), a coiled whip of leather, glass and onyx, looks as if it would shatter in the hands of a libertine. The hand-blown glass skeleton of “Cold” (2007) is splayed out on a mirrored plinth, trailing a length of black silk satin. As is characteristic of Mr. Filomeno’s art, otherworldly opulence becomes the subject as well as the medium.” Karen Rosenberg

If you are in the NYC area this is definitely worth checking out. Unfortunately, the exhibition closes April 12.

The release of a new Nick Cave album is a very big moment for his fans and the Lost City team had been excitedly awaiting “Dig Lazarus Dig”,  which officially hit the street last week. We have been deeply immersed in the new record and are happy to report that it is a masterpiece from start to finish. To the uninitiated we recommend the Wiki for an in-depth understanding of this dark and brilliant master of punk, rock and goth who is also an accomplished writer, poet and film composer. “Dig Lazarus Dig!!!” has Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds making the best music of their career.

The new album is melodic, accessible and provocative, with fantastic songwriting and all the other Nick Cave ingredients: scintillating lyrics laced with sardonic humor, spiritual turbulence, love and lust tightly packed inside edgy music tinged with electro, blues and gospel. “Dig Lazarus Dig!!!” is a continuation of the previous (fantastic) Bad Seeds double release “Abattoir Blues and the Lyre of Orpheus” but surpasses it. It is also better than last year’s Grinderman project. “More News From Nowhere”, the closing track of the album is worth the price of admission in itself but every track on the CD could be a movie.

We have been Nick Cave fans for a long time. In fact two of our best selling designs have been directly influenced by his music. BOUQUET (below) was conceived after a two week Nick Cave immersion, particularly the video for “Where the Wild Roses Grow” whose gothic, hyper-romantic imagery informed the color palette and luscious, exquisite flowers.

Lost City’s BLACK design (below) was a direct result of our infatuation with Nick Cave’s “Black Hair” which we first heard on “B-Sides and Rarities” two years ago.

“Full of all my whispered words, her black hair
And wet with tears and good-byes, her hair of deepest black
All my tears cried against her milk-white throat
Hidden behind the curtain of her beautiful black hair”

We consider ourselves incredibly fortunate to have so much to be inspired by. We recommend you get the new Nick Cave CD and discover the influence that he and many other artists have had on our fabric collection.

“And what more could I possibly ask as an artist than that your most precious visions, however rare, assume sometimes the forms of my images. ” (Maya Deren)

Maya Deren was born in Kiev 1917 and died in New York City in 1961. She was a woman ahead of her time- a photographer, dancer, poet and writer. But her best artistic expressions were the surreal and experimental films she made between 1943 and 1958 including Meshes of The Afternoon, At Land, and Rituals in A Transfigured Time, starring another iconoclastic woman- Anais Nin. At Lost City we admire Maya Deren’s non-conformist spirit. She was not afraid of going against the grain and starting a new and provocative genre of cinema.  Unbearably beautiful, surprising and dreamlike, each of her films was a contemplative work of art that liberated viewers and took them on a flight of fantasy.

Maya took on the Hollywood establishment and defied the confining traditions of her time. For many years she lived in Haiti studying and filming its music, dance and voodoo. While the films of her contemporaries and disciples like Jean-Luc Godard, Sergei Eisenstein and David Lynch have been celebrated, the work of this important artist remains obscure and has never been given its rightful place in history. A shame, because her art, like her life itself is inspiring and fresh to this day and she is revered by students and filmmakers. Check out her biography and clips from two of her most fascinating films, right here on the streets of Lost City.

Maya Deren Biography

Meshes of the Afternoon (Part 1)

Rituals in Transfigured Time 

So here we are. Meeting on the shaded streets of Lost City, a city of dreams and feverish beauty, richly appointed with memories and fantasy, detailed with the most exquisite and precious materials- the synapses inside an artist’s brains, the light in a craftsman’s eyes. Welcome to our website. A perpetual work in progress, the unending beta, a laboratory to share our ideas and engage in a dialog with you.

One exciting aspect of writing a blog is that we can connect you to artists we admire and things that inspire us. The work of multi-disciplinarian artist Ghada Amer is inspiring. The Brooklyn Museum has mounted the first U.S survey of her work titled Love Has No End, as part of a the Elizabeth Sackler Center for Feminist Art that also feature’s Judy Chicago’s historic The Dinner Party installation.

Immersive, subversive and revolutionary, Ghada Amer’s art stings, cleanses and lifts the spirit. The Lost City team is particularly delighted with Ghada’s use of embroidery as a medium to communicate provocative ideas related to sexuality, gender and repression, and the misrepresentation of Islam in Western media. Rock on Ghada!