User:Karen Moller
Karen Moller grew up in a small town in the mountains of Western Canada. After graduating from art school in Calgary she hitchhiked to San Francisco with a copy of Jack Kerouac's, On the Road under her arm. In 1959, that city was in the first wave of beatnik activities with Ferlinghetti holding court in his book store, City Lights. From San Francisco, she moved on to New York and Paris, where she met avant-garde artists like Yves Klein and John Cage. In London, she partied with the Beatles, Pink Floyd and the odd balls that shaped swinging London. She started her own hippie boutique on a shoestring (Twiggy modeled her clothes) and established the first textile design studio in London, which became highly successful within the design world. Later in 1985, she started the consulting and styling office, Trend Union, and became trend forecaster to the world's top designers.It was named by Time Magazine as "One of the world's foremost Fashion Futurists".
Her memoir,Technicolor Dreamin', covers the exciting developments in fashion, art, poetry, lifestyle and political attitudes of the 1960's as well as in depth information about fashion influences, textile design, fashion forecasting, and the people in those industries. Artist in training, she lived out the hottest moments in the 1960s, among them, the barricades in Paris in May 1968. Her brother, Paul Moller, invented the flying Skycar which will shortly pass the airworthy tests to become a normal form of computer guided personal transport. This memoir has now been published by Bahia in Spain and will be available From March 2014. Her new novel Forbidden Games is a passionate love story between a lonely girl, Julie and her half-brother, Tor, set first in the wilds of the Canadian mountains, then in the European world of fashion and the arts. Her father brings home his son by a former and now deceased lover, and an erotic relationship develops between the two young people, but is kept at arm’s length by the boy’s guilt-laden, Catholic upbringing. Their exhibitionistic and voyeuristic games are broken off when they go to university. Tor marries a sophisticated demi-mondaine ten years older than him, and struggles to continue his poetry studies while supporting his clever but frivolous wife who manipulates him though his masochistic desires. Julie wins a scholarship in Paris and goes to work for one of France’s famous couture houses, quickly becoming a rising star. Tor joins her in the Paris rooming house, the rundown Beat Hotel, inhabited by beatniks, Burroughs and Gregory Corso and the small time artist-criminals who inhabit that marginal world. The ambiguous and tortured nature of their passionate love-affair soon becomes overwhelming. Forbidden Games will also be available in March 2014
References
- "Karen Moller has given us a personal and critical history of the counterculture, from beatnik San Francisco and New York, to hippie Paris and London, to Fluxus, to the feminist and fashion revolutions, to the aftermath of it all. This is a delightful memoir by an artist and designer who has seen it all and done it all and who took good notes and thought hard about what it meant, all along the way." William Niederkorn – composer, playwright and New York journalist
- "Karen Moller grew up in a small town in the mountains of Western Canada. She took off at age 19, hitchhiking with Jack Kerouac’s ”On the Road” under her arm, after graduating from art school in Calgary, and went on to dazzling success in the renaissance of poetry, pop music, fashion and the arts in Swinging London. The freshness of voice and delighted wonder that permeate the illuminating, often hilarious personal anecdotes is both irresistible and touching”. - American Book Review
- "A delightful look behind the scene of the fashion world when dressing up wasn’t called fashion and creativity ruled. (Peter Golding 60's Fashion Wiz)
Herald Tribune--by Roderick Conway Morris
VENICE: Fashion is so subject to, well, fashion that the idea of setting up a think-tank to predict what will be happening to it in the future might seem a doomed enterprise.
However, unknown to the vast majority of clothes buyers, such soothsayers do exist. One of the leading players in this inexact art is Trend Union, a Paris-based team of fashion industry professionals who get together twice a year to publish a score of limited-edition books that aim to identify major trends and to guide couturiers, designers and producers of accessories and cosmetics as to what will be in and out two or more years' hence.
The series of books, each volume of which covers a specific area of fashion, such as general trends, fabrics, colors, patterns, textures, newly available fabrics from Japan and, most recently, sportswear, contain a wide range of images and samples of textiles, and cost around 10,000 French francs ($1,800) each.
One of the founder members of Trend Union, which was launched in 1984, is Canadian-born Karen Moller. Having studied dress design, she opened her own boutique in Hampstead in London in 1964 as an outlet for her own creations. Faced with a dearth of interesting fabrics, she took to designing her own, and went into this full time in 1969. She now divides her time between her house in Paris, her apartment in Venice and travel further afield.
Trend Union's books circulate in the upper echelons of the industry, did Moller think that they actually influenced the way that fashion went?
"No, I don't believe we're really setting trends, but more trying to reflect the direction of public taste, and indicate to designers emerging trends and what is available for them to work with," said Moller.
While believing that keeping a close watch on the public pulse is usually the best way to predict which way fashion will be going in the near future, Moller said that, from time to time, designers do come up with wacky innovations whose appeal is difficult to anticipate."At the moment we are in a dull moment, with a lot of blacks, grays, beiges. There's virtually no color. But I think this austerity, these pale Zen colors are going to be with us a long time, even in summer when you would expect a bit more color.
HomeAlumniMeet our alumni Karen Moller Karen Moller VISUAL ARTS ALUMNA, 1959 ALUMNI DISCOVERY INITIATIVE INTERVIEW BY ARKATYIIS MILLER, 2015 KARENMOLLER.COM
During her years spent attending art school in Calgary, when the Alberta College of Art + Design was then simply known as the art department of Calgary’s technical institute or “the tech”, Karen Moller took off hitchhiking to San Francisco where she began her lifelong journey in art and fashion.
Her fashion career flourished when she opened the first textile design studio in London in 1969 and culminated with the creation Trend Union in Paris in 1985, a design consulting and forecasting firm which TIME magazine named as, “One of the World's Most Influential Fashion Futurists”. In 2007 she wrote her memoir, Technicolor Dreamin’, a personal and critical history of the 1960’s and 70’s counterculture. Technicolor Dreamin’ was first published in Canada 2007, later re-edited as In Her Own Fashion in the U.S.A., then translated in Spain in 2014 as Sonando en Tecnicolor, and in 2017 it was re-edited in England as Technicolor Dreamin’ In her Own Fashion.
Purchase link http://amzn.eu/fjUe8Oj