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Losing the fear of design By Yuval Saar One fine morning Ayala Raz decided to design jewelry. After being a fashion reporter in the 1960s, a fashion designer and head of the Department of Fashion Design in the Shenkar School of Engineering and Design, among other things, she happened to look at the drawers of materials in her workroom two years ago, at the metal wires, the beads and the fabric remnants, and at the age of 65 she decided to start designing jewelry. "I, who taught generations of students in a course for design thinking, am now designing without thinking," she writes in the catalogue for her exhibition, which opens on Thursday at the Periscope Gallery for Contemporary Design in Tel Aviv. While sitting in her workroom among carefully numbered video tapes, many loose leaf binders and overstuffed drawers, Raz says: "Jewelry is part of the fashion world, it's not that I suddenly decided to take an interest in electronics. My first designs were quite predictable. I met with Sari Paran (the curator of the exhibit and the owner of the Periscope Gallery) and showed her the jewelry. She told me that they were lovely things and that I would certainly be able to sell them, but if I wanted an exhibition I had to go wild. After getting her approval, I stopped thinking in terms of a fashion designer who has to examine whether the piece is not too heavy, whether it's comfortable, and so on." Advertisement The result is a jewelry collection that is complex in terms of color and in terms of the materials that Raz used: metal wires, glass, disassembled necklaces, chandelier crystals, fabrics et al. Raz imitated processes drawn from the world of textile, such as weaving, spinning and embroidering. In that sense, she has succeeded in adopting what she taught her students: to lose the fear of design, the fear of ruining expensive materials, or combining materials that are ostensibly incompatible. "Fashion designers see things somewhat differently, not necessarily what the creator of the object had in mind," she says. "They see the potential in an object, and in that sense there is something obsessive about us. Design can take the simplest and least valuable things and turn them into something entirely different. It drives my accountant crazy. He sees receipts for a few dozen shekels and doesn't understand how it can be sold for so much more. He doesn't understand that what makes the object is not necessarily the material, it's the design." Raz says that she always loved to create: clothes, knits, lampshades, dolls, and more. She began her writing career as a fashion reporter in the now defunct left-wing socialist daily Al Hamishmar in 1964-1965. She considers writing to be creative too, whether it is journalistic writing or the children's books that she plans to write. The same is true of documentation and research, which she did over a decade ago when she published the book "Halifot Ha'itim" ("Changing Styles: 100 Years of Fashion in Eretz Israel," Yedioth Books, 1996). The book is one of the only records of the subject. Why is there almost no documentation of the Israeli fashion world? "I think that this stems from the fact that there are still many great and good people who think that fashion is nonsense, and they have good reasons for thinking so. The media, and especially television, emphasize the less important aspects of the field: the models and the gossip. All over the world, fashion is treated as a culture through which one can read people and historical or cultural phenomena - from primitive societies where clothing is like an ID card that testifies to your family and economic situation to the society in the Land of Israel which wore khaki clothing in the 1940s. Not because they had to, or because there was nothing else, after all, there were people who could afford to wear other clothes. But it was a society that was fighting to build a state. Try to imagine a nation fighting for its freedom in evening dress." What is the difference between the old-time fashion press and that of today? "There's no difference. It looked then exactly as it looks today. I covered fashion shows that took place on Allenby and Dizengoff Streets in Tel Aviv. The editor was able to decide that something wouldn't get in because it was too bourgeois - after all, it was Al Hamishmar - but the principle was the same: coverage, an analysis of designs as well as fabrics and materials." After studying in an Israel Export Institute evening course for fashion design in ORT College, Raz decided that she had to study the field in a more systematic way, and completed her bachelor's degree in the academy of fine arts in Rotterdam. Afterwards she returned to Israel and continued to design in small fashion plants until she started working at Lodzia in 1978 and at Ata in 1983. She recalls the closing of Ata in 1985 as a traumatic event. "Ata was considered the flagship, nobody thought they would allow it to be closed. It's not like what's happening today in the world." During that period she also began to study at Shenkar, and eventually she was appointed the head of the Department of Fashion Design, a job that she held for seven years. Up until last year she still taught full time, but this year she decided to limit herself to guest lectures and to devote her time to other activities Is there such a thing as "Israel design"? "I think there is. What characterizes Israeli design is improvisation, unconventional creativity that permits itself to do unusual things, just like the Israeli character: to take shortcuts, not to finish completely, it's not so important how it looks. I'm not saying this in a critical tone, but out of an understanding that these are our unique components and we have to know how to make the best of them. On the day that we identify our statement and refine it, we will be able to create our niche in the world." When will that happen? "I don't want to guess when, but I think that there's a good chance that it will happen. Globalization has reached a point where it is no longer delivering the goods, everything has become predictable and similar, but the magic of fashion lies in the unexpected and the new. What we are seeing more and more is a personal style that does not accept dictates such as 'This summer we will all be wearing green." Bookmark to del.icio.us   The 'beauty machine' Want to optimize your looks without radically altering them? now you can. Lebanon needs unity Khamenei to Lebanese President: Iran will always stand beside Lebanon.

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