Realisation: The Vestoj Storytelling Salon

Simon Costin at the Vestoj Storytelling Salon

Recently I saw a film called 'Lunchbox', all about a lunchbox... just that one object: a simple lunchbox.  The object is the cause of a complex, beguiling story and the film cleverly tells of the lunchbox's function and destination.  My favorite moments was when the lunchbox was filmed, flying its way on the back of a lorry, gleeful in its mission.

The Vertoj storytelling salon, that took place on 5th April 2014 in Paris was also about objects and how they are so fundamental in storytelling.  I wondered, on arrival, how the salon would reveal the seven objects and how they would be used in the stories.  

The Salon was created by Anja Aronowsky Cronberg, who had selected seven storytellers who had dedicated their lives to the intimate study of dress, hoping for them to throw light on their pasts, and how their chosen objects, related to dress, had influenced their futures.  How would each storyteller narrate a life episode which is woven around or linked to a garment or an object?

The audience went to each storyteller, who each had a room to pass over their story and show their chosen object.  Quickly it became clear that these objects had risen into view at pivotal moments in the story teller's lives and were often signposts of spiritual openings, revelationary awakenings and launches of new consciousness.

   

For Frances Corner it was a delicate, ivory wedding dress, chosen for its uniqueness and its ability to draw the attention on the spiritual significance of her special wedding day.  For her this day would be one to empower her future, uniting her with a very non-conventional partner who would help her launch her life trajectory and achieve her dreams and potentials. 

The beautiful Ingmari Lamy and Simon Costin at the Vestoj Storytelling Salon in Paris

For Michelle Lamy, her object was a dress that she had never actually possessed, yet for her represented her spiritual home: India, with tissue and essence that summed up all the color and love she felt for Delhi and her time in India.  Although the dress, designed by husband Rick Owens, never materialized, the dress remains like a sort of chimera, a dream, a vision, a representation of her feelings and aspirations.

For Ingmari Lamy, her chosen object was her very first collection, that she modeled in Paris.  Spotted by the photographer Bob Richardson, she was guided by him and show how to wear the garments.  She described the fascinating journey of opening to the camera from the inside, with Bob Richardson being very charismatic and special, guiding her through her first shoot with him.

She described the feeling of being dressed by him, having beads and jewels adorning her by him, and the sensual and erotic feeling of the process, including having felt spiritually supported and held in the awakening process.  When finally asking her to cry, she found the tears falling down her cheeks and that as photographer's muse, the potent experience resulted in the  launch of her modeling career. 

  

For Jean-Charles de Castelbajac, the garment that was revelationary was actually one he had to design for the Pope.  He recalls, when asked to dress the pope during his visit to Paris, a board of Directors and the tight Catholic protocol.  And yet, during the process of creation, he found that the creative process triggered a wondrous series of events.  The rainbow emblem was that of Gay Pride, Muslim seamstresses worked on the stitching, protestants worked on the materials and Castelbajac was struck by the non-religious wonder of a vital spiritual workforce uniting to create this final garment with loving care.

For Irene Silvagni, it was a huge black overcoat, resembling a soldier's winter coat, part of a collection that was for women who had lost their husbands.  The soft, black overcoat gave Irene a sense of protection but more poignant was that her own mother had lost her father during world war two, when she was only a baby, who had ben incarcerated in a concentration camp and was tracked won and shot while escaping in a forest.  

And Simon Costin's object was a top hat, designed by Stephen Jones, which had been part of a costume to launch his caravan tour of Britain while launching his project to start a museum of British Folklore.  

For Simon, the hat represented all that is important about our precious folklore.  It contains the relics from ancient customs and rituals that he feels the museum will protect and guard.  There is the pagan egg, the symbolic apple, the evergreen tree, the garden of creativity, the hare, the horned deer, the sheath of wheat and adorning the black hat is the paintwork of the traditional British canal barge.

In the form of a mad hatter shape, the hat completes a costume to draw attention to Costin's vision: a realized Folklore museum.  He is, like a pilgrim, on this sacred quest to have it materialize: a much needed venue to store the relics passed down to us from our ancient folkloric history.

Overall, the realization of the objects is so deeply entwined into the lives of the storytellers that one can hardly differentiate from personal self-realisation and the actual realization of the objects.  It is hard to tell where each begins and ends, but overall the salon was a treasure trove of story, reminding us that the tangible object is deeply connected to the intangible, a resultant product of something more deeply conceived deep down beneath the seismic shifts of deep down within brewing subconsciousness of the story teller and that storytelling itself is something that continues to connect past, present and future, giving birth to objects to signify the process and illustrate that on-going story.