EVENT CHAIR: LAURA FORDE
COMMITTEE: ALEXANDER BREBNER,
PETER BUCHANAN-SMITH,
KRISTINA DIMATTEO, CARIN GOLDBERG,
KENT HUNTER, JIAE KIM, LINDA ONG,
LUISE STAUSS
ART DIRECTION: MIKE ESSL, KENT HUNTER
SITE DESIGN: THOMAS HINES


DEBBIE MILLMAN, MODERATOR

Debbie Millman has been in the design business for more than half of her life, but it feels like a lot longer. At Sterling Brands, where she is a partner, she has designed some things she is really proud of, some things she wishes she never touched, and a lot of stuff that you have likely purchased in a big supermarket or drug store chain. She recently worked on redesigning lots of other brands that she can't talk about yet, mostly because they are being tested with consumers in various forms of market research. Debbie loves to write and you can see the fruition of these efforts on the design blog Speak Up and in the column she writes for Print magazine. She also likes to talk. This is most evident in the classes she teaches at the School of Visual Arts, the lectures she gives around the country and on her weekly internet talk show, Design Matters.


RUTH ANSEL

Brodovitch’s Babies
Ruth Ansel and Yolanda Cuomo will present their own evolution as designers as seen through the prism of Alexey Brodovitch, the man who invented modern American magazine design.

Ruth Ansel, an award winning designer was the Co-Art Director of Harper’s Bazaar with Bea Feitler in the ’60s. She then went on to art direct the New York Times Magazine, Vanity Fair, and Vogue. During that period she did the film titles for My Dinner with Andre, directed by Louis Malle. Soon after in the early ’90s she founded her New York design studio, Ruth Ansel Design. Her international fashion advertising campaigns for Karl Lagerfeld, Gianni Versace and Club Monaco were highly acclaimed. In the year 2000 she art directed the following books: The Sixties by Richard Avedon, and Women by Annie Leibovitz. She just completed a master monograph of the work of Peter Beard for Taschen. Currently she is working on a book about the life and work of Elsa Peretti to be published in 2008. She was honored with the Herb Lubalin Award for Continuing Excellence in the field of Publication Design from The Society of Publication Designers in 1994, as well as Gold and Silver medals from the Art Directors Club of New York.


PAUL BOUDENS

A is for Accident
Paul Boudens likes designs with a long shelf-life. He wants his work to be tangible, to indicate the human that created it, using paint and a variety of other materials. In 1991 he graduated from the Sint-Lucaspaviljoen in Antwerp. He immediately started working as a freelance designer for the Belgian fashion guru Walter Van Beirendonck. Assignments for fashion designers Wim Neels, Jurgi Persoons, Dries Van Noten, A.F. Vandevorst, Olivier Theyskens (amongst others), the Antwerp fashion academy, Het Zuidelijk Toneel and the MoMu-Fashion Museum Province of Antwerp followed. In 2001 Paul art directed Fashion2001 Landed-Geland, an ambitious fashion event in Antwerp. Soon afterward he became art director and graphic designer of A magazine. In 2003 Paul Boudens Works Volume 1 was published: a 248-page overview of Paul's work of the last decade. Paul is currently working for Japanese fashion designer Yohji Yamamoto.


ALEXANDER BREBNER

Hair Stories
In addition to being a Manhattan institution with two salons, a product company, a graduate school for hairdressers, and home to fashion's hardest-working session stylists, Alexander Brebner will demonstrate Bumble and bumble's role of storytellers for hairdressing craft, commerce and culture.

An exceptionally good haircut at Bumble and bumble nearly twenty years ago led to a new client for graphic designer Alexander Brebner. In 1996 he joined the company full-time and has guided the development of the brand identity, copywriting, packaging, collateral, and interiors. Previous experience includes M&Co., Wechsler & Partners, Mayo-Infurna Design, and freelance assignments at many Manhattan firms. He is a graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design.


YOLANDA CUOMO

Brodovitch’s Babies
Ruth Ansel and Yolanda Cuomo will present their own evolution as designers as seen through the prism of Alexey Brodovitch, the man who invented modern American magazine design.

Yolanda Cuomo, art director, designer and educator, has collaborated for over two decades with both visual and performing artists such as Richard Avedon, Paul Simon, Twyla Tharp, and Laurie Anderson. Her studio designed and produced the worldwide exhibition and book, Diane Arbus Revelations, the first major retrospective of Diane Arbus’s photography since 1972. Other notable book projects are Pre Pop Warhol, September 11 by Magnum Photographers, Farewell to Bosnia: Gilles Peress, Here is New York: A Democracy of Photographs, Malaparte: A House Like Me, and Kenneth Cole: Footnotes. Other notable works include CD design for artists Paul Simon and Laurie Anderson; posters for Twyla Tharp Dance; and art direction of Aperture Magazine, which received the prestigious 2004 National Magazine Award for General Excellence from The American Society of Magazine Editors (ASME). In 1994, Cuomo received the Infinity award for Design from ICP. Current projects are Performance by Richard Avedon: a collection of Avedon’s portraits of performing artists, art direction of Aperture Magazine, and CR Magazine. She received her BFA from The Cooper Union and is presently teaching at New York University and The School of Visual Arts.


JOHN C JAY with STAPLE DESIGN and SURFACE TO AIR

Freestyle
No longer just content to design graphics for clothing brands, Gordon Hull and Daniel Jackson of Surface to Air and Jeff Ng of Staple Design, created their own labels. They opened retail stores to sell their clothing lines. With cult-like followings in Paris, NYC, and Tokyo, they represent a new breed of designers pushing the limits of the role of the graphic designer. This panel—moderated by John C Jay, former creative director of Bloomingdales and current executive creative director of Wieden + Kennedy—will discuss how Surface To Air and Staple Design got started and the highs and lows of owning one's own label. Plenty of the insider's advice will be offered to designersmlooking to follow in their footsteps.


ABBOTT MILLER

Graphic Fashion / Fashion Graphics
Abbott Miller will explore the ways in which typography has been used to signify "fashion," and how clothing designers have used graphics to expand the language of clothing. The first aspect is viewed through the development of a "fashion" aesthetic through historical and contemporary examples in magazines and brand identity; the second half of the presentation considers the development of "graphic fashion," viewed against the backdrop of avant-garde experiments in clothing design.

Abbott Miller’s long-running design and editorial project 2wice magazine represents a fusion of his interests in photography, performance, and art direction. Abbott joined Pentagram’s New York office as a partner in June 1999 and is a member of AGI (Alliance Graphique Internationale). His exhibition design for a new Harley-Davidson Museum will open in April of 2008. He is the co-author of four books on design, including Design/Writing/Research: Writing on Graphic Design. A monograph of his work, Open Book: Design and Content, will appear in spring 2008 from Princeton Architectural Press.


ETIENNE MINEUR

Feel Your Way: Design Online
Etienne Mineur, designer and co-founder of Incandescence Studio (est. 2001), has collaborated with Issey Miyake for the past seven years on a number of projects, including the design and production of isseymiyake.com. Etienne has lectured and taught at schools, conferences and events in China, Switzerland, the U.S., Austria, Mexico and Japan. He graduated from Ecole Nationale Superieure des Arts Decoratifs de Paris (ENSAD) in 1992, and immediately co-founded Index Plus, a multimedia editing company at which he was senior art director. Etienne has been a member of AGI (Alliance Graphique Internationale) since 2000.


ISAAC MIZRAHI

Isaac Mizrahi is an award-winning fashion designer and was the subject of the highly acclaimed documentary Unzipped, directed by Douglas Keeve. In addition to his couture collection at Bergdorf Goodman, many of his designs can be found exclusively at Target stores. In fall 2005 the Isaac show debuted on the Style Network. He previously had a show on the Oxygen network. Isaac was born in Brooklyn, New York and attended the High School of Performing Arts as an acting major before studying fashion at the Parsons School of Design. In 1987, Isaac opened his own clothing business and is a three-time CFDA Designer of the Year award winner. Isaac has designed costumes for movies, theater, dance and opera in collaboration with Mark Morris, Twyla Tharp, Bill T. Jones and Mikhail Baryshnikov. In 1997, Isaac wrote a series of comic books entitled The Adventures of Sandee the Supermodel, published by Simon & Schuster. He appeared off-Broadway in his one-man show, Les Mizrahi. Isaac played himself in an episode of Sex and the City, and recently, he guest starred on Ugly Betty.


ANDY SPADE

Brand as Moving Image
Andy Spade co-founded Kate Spade with his wife, Kate, in 1993. Prior to pursuing his entrepreneurial ambitions, he spent eleven years in the advertising industry, working at agencies such as Saatchi & Saatchi, Kirshenbaum Bond & Partners, and TBWA/Chiat/Day. In 1999, Andy launched Jack Spade, a collection of accessories for men. In 2001, the Jack Spade line was nominated for the Perry Ellis award for New Accessories Talent. Adding dimension to both the Kate Spade and Jack Spade brands, Andy has brought his interest in the short film format into projects produced for the company. In 1998, he collaborated with director Mike Mills on an award-winning documentary, Paperboys. He acted as producer on two additional shorts, Pol Pot's Birthday and Dimmer, which was considered for an academy award nomination in its category. In addition, the shorts Richard June's Backyard (again, directed by Mike Mills) and Blondie were produced for Kate Spade. Most recently, Andy has collaborated on short films and a TV pilot with the Neistat brothers, up-and-coming filmmakers and artists. Andy lectures at schools such as Harvard, Columbia, Yale, RISD, and the Art Center College of Design.


MARKETA UHLIROVA

Fashion in Film: Between Stigma and Enigma
Marketa Uhlirova, curator, researcher and writer, has contributed to journals and publications including Art Monthly, Detail, Labyrint, Fashion Theory, and the Encyclopaedia of Clothing and Fashion. Since 2002 Marketa has been an Associate Lecturer of Cultural Studies at University of the Arts, London. Marketa co-founded the Fashion in Film Festival with Roger K. Burton and Christel Tsilibaris and is currently curating the second edition of the festival for 2008. The Fashion in Film project investigates how the moving image has represented and interpreted fashion as a concept, industry and cultural form. Importantly, it attempts to build a dialogue between the history of film and its current practices. One of its missions is to create a platform for and nurture the growing area of contemporary ‘fashion moving image’ and art which explores clothing and fashion through the moving image.