New Asian Writing

My short story Durga and the Holy Cow has been selected for publication in the 2011 New Asian Writing Anthology. The print version will come out at the end of the year, but it is right now on their website http://www.new-asian-writing.com/?p=452 

My Beautiful Launderette

Review on http://www.londonfestivalfringe.com/indexposttag.php?slug=amita-murray

Trendy couples in skinny jeans and blazers, men with peroxide-blonde punk hairdos and brassy roots, and ageing heavily-made-up Dolly Parton types – and that was just the audience. Above the Stag is a hip theatre company, home to a small but versatile set that changes from bedroom to living room to Laundromat before you can turn and say The 39 Steps. Despite a creaky and stubborn blind that wouldn’t budge, the cosy mise en scene added charm and a few laughs to this fringe adaptation of Hanif Kureishi’s screenplay My Beautiful Launderette.

Full of cultural stereotypes of 1980s London, the play is the love story of Omar, a fresh faced second-generation Muslim with a pisshead father who bemoans the loss of his sentimental ideals of an enlightened Britain and worries that his son’s penis is not in good working order, and Johnny, a skinhead junkie who teeters a thin line between his life as a gay man and his role in the National Front. Their love blossoms in a seedy launderette that smells of bleach, urine and used condoms, with a hustler uncle (played with relish by Royce Ullah) who simultaneously hates and loves England – where you can be anyone you want to be if you know how to “squeeze the tits of the system,” a sleazy young man who would fit the role of a Bollywood baddie like a metal hook fits an arm, and a mistress and daughter in supporting roles.

The program notes promise that the issues of the 1980s are as relevant today as they were thirty years ago. I would like to believe that we don’t live in the same atmosphere of rampant homophobia and racism, but while the play, directed by Tim McArthur, seems a little dated, it hasn’t yet become a period piece either.

My Beautiful Launderette

Above the Stag

Till April 10, 2011

Oxford

What, Oh What, Will I Wear Tomorrow

The “Future of Fashion” exhibition, sponsored by accessories manufacturer YKK and designer Kei Kagami, held in St. Martin’s Courtyard in Covent Garden, was a fringe event that accompanied London Fashion Week. It seems odd to name one event the Future of Fashion, when, really, isn’t that what Fashion Week is about anyway? To showcase new collections, show off new “girls” from the hottest modelling agencies, and to create new fashion trends? How do new fashion trends come about, though, and what makes them so cyclical? Why are we so enthralled by the corseted velvety primness of the ladies on Lark Rise to Candleford, and what makes us drool for vintage fashion?

Kemp and Earl say in The Elgar Companion to Consumer Research and Economic Psychology that two things signal a change in fashion trends. One, a particular trend gets more and more extreme, to the point where it becomes unsustainable to run any further with it. And two, the whole point of new fashion trends is to allow the people who are “in the know” to stand out from the crowd – once everyone starts to wear cheap imitations, the trend loses its reason for being. So, the trend changes, and things move on. (In Kate Middleton’s engagement dress from Issa, have we finally reached the anti-thesis of this proposition? Will we ever see the end of it?)

This kind of trend may be true of design historically, but it seems in the fashion industry today that designing a new collection is an end in itself. As a hot designer, your new collection has to always outshine your older work, and everyone else’s new ideas, too. Where, then, do designers look for this constant flow of new ideas? Are there any new ideas, or are we resigned to looking at retro fashion to find new inspiration? Alexander McQueen’s armadillo shoes notwithstanding, are there any truly new ideas in design?

Critical postmodern theorists like Jameson and Baudrillard, in Fashion as Communication, say that everything we design, the buildings we live in, the clothes we wear, they are all a pastiche. We’ve done it all before, and our “new trends” are simply a nostalgic re-hash of old trends. As Baudrillard says, fashion is always a recycling of the past. This is not a criticism, simply a fact of the cyclical nature of trends.

Going with the flow, then, the Future of Fashion showcased a motley collection of fashion and accessories from recent London design graduates. Fully three of the eleven pieces on display evoked a distinct Isabella Blow flashback, designed either with bird feathers in the head gear, or as birds in flight. Emma Yeo’s two pieces of millinery half hid and half revealed the face, cosseting the head like a nun’s habit, or an Egyptian hieroglyphic. Both hats were made of delicate-looking but strong black mesh in the shape of a bird’s wings, and looked poised for flight. If it were up to me, I would have chosen some of the award-winning confections on her website to be featured in the exhibition. The starburst oyster shells and the delicate tiara of wood shavings are my favourites.

If Rob Goodwin’s funky leather bustier is the future of fashion, though, then I’m in. Delicately and softly moulded to the chest, the jacket buttons all the way up the neck, and leads up to one of Goodwin’s acclaimed leather helmets, some of which have been commissioned by British Vogue and Vogue Italia. Going with the retro trend, the gear wouldn’t be out of place on a Roman gladiator, if she were young, petite and sexy.

It is true that the Future of Fashion event featured David Longshaw’s mouse Maude, who is supposed to be a spawn created by the (im)possible mating of British fashion’s favourite muse, Isabella Blow, brewery-goddess and walking-pastiche, Daphne Guinness, the effervescent Beatrix Potter, and several other colourful characters. It also featured Mason Jung’s uniform “Camouflage,” that evokes, for him, the strict discipline of his childhood. Still, my biggest thrill on visiting St. Martin’s Courtyard was the discovery that Bill’s from Brighton has now stormed London. I’m not totally convinced that this small fashion-fringe event was indeed the Future of Fashion, but I do know that Bill’s is the Last Word in Food!

The Joys of Spring

Joys of Spring is an Outline Editions exhibition of prints on Berwick Street.

It features works by Beyond the Valley designers, David Foldvari, Morag Myerscough from the London Design Festival, Emily Forgot, and others.

Read review on London Festival Fringe

“London born, London bred, then I die, then I’m dead,” reads Morag Myerscough’s photographic print of a woman in a polka-dot dress, black tights and white trainers, who is peering through a shop window at a summary of her own life. Featured in the V&A’s 2009 London Design Festival, this print is a part of an exhibition of spring-themed prints on display in Outline Editions’ The Joys of Spring. A lecturer at Central St. Martin’s, Myerscough describes herself as a label-hating gal who likes to cause outrage.

Another featured artist with little charity for labels – the ones people stamp on us, and the ones in which we confine ourselves – is David Foldvari. He creates prints of personalities as widely divergent as Mickey Mouse and the turbaned Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, caught in moments of freedom or constraint, release or crippling debt. In one print, a red-breasted robin sits at a crossroads, looking hopefully away from the road signs that point to rain, wind and misery. On his blog, Foldvari warns design students to stop looking at him for inspiration, and to look, instead, at their personal and cultural history.

Many of the featured artists turn for inspiration to an idiosyncratic and glorious interpretation of nature. The Beyond the Valley series of prints and clothes showcases richly-plumed birds, four-headed lions, and two-necked peacocks that could be the result of a nuclear experiment gone horribly wrong, or an absinthe-generated midsummer night’s dream. Another print, though, turns to less otherworldly locales. In a black-and-white sketch, a woman displaying an expanse of décolletage, and adorned with ostrich feathers, waits on the periphery of an area that could be Soho. The neon signs invite the clientele to delve into the delights of a non-stop sex shop, bum gravy, horsemeat and a sex dwarf.

Read full review at http://www.londonfestivalfringe.com/indexposttag.php?slug=amita-murray

New Short Story

Check out Brand Literary magazine. They will publish my short story Anywhere Town in May 2011.
http://www.brandliterarymagazine.co.uk/ 

Future of Fashion

Calling this tucked away pop-up exhibition The Future of Fashion is overstating it. While a London Fashion Week fringe event that features designs from London’s recent graduates is a good idea, the title may smack of delusions of grandeur, and would serve the exhibition better by saying it like it is. So, I am re-naming the exhibition Eat Some Pie at Bill’s because the thing that gave me the biggest shock and awe in this trip to Covent Garden was the discovery that Bill’s from Brighton has now stormed London (or it will once people know St. Martin’s Courtyard exists.)

Still, some of the exhibits are worth a visit. Emma Yeo’s award-winning hat confections give rise to a spooky Isabella Blow flashback, with their quality of half-hiding the face, their combination of fragility in a sturdy frame, and their inevitable bird-in-flight air. Though I admit I am more lustful for the quirky designs on her website, which include millinery in the effervescent spirals of a sea shell nestling a pearl in its heart, and a tiara of silk flowers that look like curly wood chips.

Three exhibits in this collaboration between accessories manufacturer YKK, and designer Kei Kagami feature bird feathers. Besides Yeo’s, there is Rob Goodwin’s funky leather bustier, that moulds the chest like a Roman gladiator’s habillements, with buttons lacing up the neck, and feathers on the head gear. Vogue Italia and British Vogue have commissioned Goodwin’s leather helmets. Then there is Yunus and Eliza’s complicated metal frame that supports hawk feathers on the head, with a chandelier hanging from the helmet.

The loft-like space that houses the exhibition could be a hip fringe-art gallery with a vintage clothing rack and a platform for indie bands, but may be sadly on its way to becoming a shoe shop.

Check out my new review of The Future of Fashion exhibition on London Festival Fringe.
http://www.londonfestivalfringe.com/indexposttag.php?slug=amita-murray