![]() As a cool, early-fall rain fell outside, seamstresses hand-stitched fresh rosebuds into tulle veils, and Odile Gilbert wove fresh roses into models’ hair for Rodarte’s Spring 2019 show. They came after the show, wearing plant-dyed overalls, and transported the now wilting flowers to a compost facility on Long Island.You could hear the collective intake of breath as photographers, editors, hairstylists, and makeup artists filed into the multipurpose room on the second floor of the Orthodox Cathedral of the Holy Virgin Protection in the East Village this afternoon. The scavengers, a team from an event-cleanup service called Garbage Goddess, were the last to appear. A migratory flock of models arrived on Sunday morning, followed by the show’s three hundred and twenty-five invited guests-many of whom paused to photograph the pools of flowers before taking their seats. By Saturday night, the atrium was full of photographers, electricians, lighting technicians, carpenters, and musicians with dramatic hair, in addition to Johnson’s pack of closely conferring, mostly blond staffers. The work of the mind-melded florists was being subsumed into the event’s larger ecosystem.Ī minutes-long fashion show brought into existence a teeming biome that dissolved almost as quickly as it took shape. “She’s taking out the ugly,” Thompson said to a colleague. “The brown is killing me a little,” she told Thompson. Johnson, when she arrived, worried that the patches of green and brown looked too much like camouflage. “Florists are always making something out of spit and toothpaste,” she said. (“I’m very hands on,” she explained.) Thompson spent the remaining time calling in favors from flower venders more pink mums were on the way. Ulla Johnson was scheduled to inspect the lichen early that evening. “Seduction-repulsion, always!” Thompson said. Ideally, things would not get too pretty. Also marked on the plan was the “ Vogue shot”: the path down the runway that press cameras would capture in their definitive photographs of each outfit. “What I really want to see is your own ideas of how the colors blend and contrast,” she explained. The floor plan showed what looked like five continents of irregular size and shape, to be carpeted with the stemless heads of flowers placed flat on the ground. “This is not a map you’re going to follow,” she said. She handed around clipboards with a floor plan, reference photographs of lichen in psychedelic colors, and pictures of a sample lichen flower mosaic she’d assembled at her Manhattan studio. After several freight-elevator loads of blooms had been ferried upstairs, she gathered her team in a circle at the center of the ten-thousand-square-foot space. She was working with a team of fourteen other florists, who wore mostly black Thompson, who has curly hair and wore reading glasses attached to a thick green chain, was dressed in a sturdy cotton shirt and forest-green pants she compared her look to a park-ranger uniform. ![]() Thompson had biked over to greet the trucks. on Sunday, and flowers began arriving at 8 A.M. At last, she’d found a client willing to realize her long-standing fantasy of lichen-inspired floral arrangements-the fashion designer Ulla Johnson, whose Spring-Summer 2023 collection was making its début in the Brooklyn Museum’s Beaux-Arts atrium. “And, of course, the best rocks are the ones that have developed lichen.” Thompson trained as a sculptor before turning to flowers, and has created projects for fashion shows, restaurants, and the White House. ![]() “I grew up in a place with very beautiful rocks,” Thompson, who is from Vermont, said. They were the work of Emily Thompson, a New York flower designer whose tastes run toward the wild and the overgrown. The vast ruffled puddles that spread out across the museum floor-swirls of green, pink, brown, red, and yellow-were composed of approximately twenty thousand chrysanthemums, carnations, zinnias, and cockscombs. The other day, the Brooklyn Museum was overtaken by lichen of unusual composition. ![]() Lichen is made up of at least two organisms: fungus and algae, photosynthesizing in symbiotic harmony. ![]()
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