LYDIA RODRIGUES COLLECTION

Since 2015 Lydia Rodrigues of Lydia Rodrigues Collection (LRC) hosts a biannual fashion salon, in March and October at migrating, intimate locations in downtown New York. Salon is essentially a performance art piece disguised as multi-brand trunk show. The first Salon in October 2015 featured seven designers such as Antwerp-based Stephan Schneider and New York’s Sophie Andes Gascon. LRC has since ballooned and offers pieces by more than 22 fashion visionaries, including most recently the Pratt graduate Margaret Burton, who has challenged the notion of fast, disposable clothes with her brand of fashion activism, educating people on preservation and repurposing of garments with exciting results.

Many of the designers at LRC such as Fabio Quaranta from Milan or Ligia Dias hailing from Geneva and Paris operate at the intersection of fashion and art. Last year Ligia Dias presented LRC designers Lydia and Giancarlo Montebello in her curatorial project during Independent Art Fair in Brussels. Rodrigues combs the ateliers, showrooms, and studios as actively as she attends art shows and happenings. Salon No.7’s preparatory trip to Europe brought her to the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, to watch a performance by LRC’s designers CFGNY, known to focus on the sartorial experience of Asian-Americans. Other collaborations include the experimental design brand BLESS or the Bard graduate show by Jeppe Ugelvig.

LRC channels a casual, conversational, yet highly informed sales event for the lucky few in informal settings, where hard-to-find creators and their ideas are available for pre-order. LRC ditches traditional networks of production and distribution for something of an adventure. As host and curator Rodrigues’s work defies easy classifications, she has a rare artistic sensibility, epitomizes a non-elitist avant-garde, and instills a wild urgency and drama on the stage of her style theatre. Salon features the troves one imagines finding in a future family-owned design museum, in a small Antwerp alley, the GPS is oblivious of. Most of all LRC sheds a bright light onto the blind spots of the fashion industry.

Salon dates are highlighted in the NY calendar, attendance mandatory.

SALON NO.7 FAMILY

In honor of Salon’s informal and inclusive spirit the upcoming seventh salon is penned Family. Rodrigues fosters friendships and chosen family vigorously. She embodies a kind of New York downtown artist cousin everyone wishes they had, the one who holds the key to something difficult to define, an unsnooty je ne sais quoi. Rodrigues demonstrates a deep love for people and their expressions. This Salon is all about relationships and bonds we foster between the family members we chose and those we didn’t choose.

Celebrating the soul of Salon, the Family issue will feature a collaboration of Designer Ligia Dias with her son Lubin, who have teamed up for some very special necklaces made from plastic straws, bought at Monoprix, as a last au revoir to a once ubiquitous everyday object. Another highlight is a lovely selection of knitted linen polos made in Japan by Nigerian transplant to the Lower East Side Tunji Dada. All three are co-conspirators in Lydia Rodrigues’ geographically philandering approach to creation. Herself an anchor child in the US to an Australian mother and a Portuguese dad, her English gives off just a whiff of an Australian surf breeze infliction, her own family, is generously distributed around the globe from the banlieus of Paris to Almada (Lisbon’s chilled sister town across the river), to Melbourne. LRC is one of the few tribes you’ll want to be a part of.

TEXT BY EVA MUNZ