everybody's contemporary, Thomas, Marina & baby Michael
Thomas Megoulis, Marina Vranopoulou and baby Michael Megoulis encountering a gypsy skirt, bracelets and golden necklaces
everybody's contemporary, Thomas, Marina & baby Michael
Thomas Megoulis, Marina Vranopoulou and baby Michael Megoulis encountering a gypsy skirt, bracelets and golden necklaces
Video by Tassos Vrettos
Editing by Iria Vrettou
Listening to "Gypsy Reggae" - Arizona Dream, by Iggy Pop & Goran Bregovic
Skirt and jewelry as in the destefashioncollection, capsule of 2014 which is curated by Maria Papadimitriou.
Above items come from Miranda, Albanian gypsy who lives in the area of Metaxourgeio, Athens
ΦIRMA GYPSY GLOBALES
The dress of the Gypsies (Roma) can be the vehicle for an anthropological and sociological investigation of a way of life whose most prominent characteristic is movement and non conformity to a dominant order.
The Gypsy people have long been scattered throughout Europe and have to this day preserved their autonomy, living in closed nomadic groups that rely on a heightened sense of tradition in matters of identity, dress, physicality, sexuality, material culture, family and relations between genders.
Today a series of economic and social shifts have been the cause of widespread déclassement (a form of downward social mobility) among social groups, the result of which is a class diaspora analogous to the nomadism of the Roma that has ensured their survival to date.
The activities of ΦIRMA GYPSY GLOBALES help reconstruct the history and genealogy of a Gypsy fashion house (whose 'founders' we follow from early twentieth century Romania to France, Italy and, lastly, Greece). The brand designs and manufactures lines of accessories, apparel, and objects which are represented alongside actual objects used by the Gypsies in their attire as symbols of the rituals that inform the tribe's laws and relations, setting behavior patterns and determining cultural and aesthetic representations of the body.
Thus, a hybrid narrative device develops to explore issues of individual and collective identity, and explain the importance the Gypsies attach to their attire as a thing that singles them out visually.
ΦΙRMA GYPSY GLOBALES is a comment on the notions of appropriation, displacement, inauthenticity, copying, mimesis, and variation. It also proposes an interpretation of the constant transformation of symbols and life practices, alongside such contemporary trends as reusing and recycling.
The project includes the publication of a special edition which archives all relevant anthropological and historical content and is interspersed with instances of artistic reappropriation. (Maria Papadimitriou)
