'The House of Perfect' by Chatzistefanou Panagiotis

Chatzistefanou Panagiotis: ‘The House of Perfect’ at FIER Showroom in the The Wye 

Chatzistefanou Panagiotis is the multi-talented ex Editor-in-Chief of Vogue Greece.The House of Perfect is an ongoing project telling the story of a fashion house that never existed.

Panagiotis has had a varied career. He studied fashion design at Central Saint Martins, London, though his creative output is far from limited to clothes. In order to communicate his visions of dream-like alternate realms Panagiotis uses fashion collections, perfume, painting, video and sound. The artist has exhibited his works in New York, with his works making up part of the world famous Whitney Museum collection. 






Panagiotis’s current project, ‘House of Perfect’, imagines a lost fashion house, re-discovered by archaeologists in a preserved state, a monument to the fantastical elegance and romantic posturing of the old fashion houses of Europe. This combination of dreamscape and mythic power recalls both Surrealist and Pre-Raephelite themes, and exagerates the sense of stumbling across a relic of a lost time.

The decision to locate part of the project in Berlin was part of a conscious confrontation with the diverging cultural images associated with the city and other European capitals. Panagiotis intentionally chose a location where these dreamy notions of age-old elegance and status just don’t ring true. What is the relationship between these old-world ideals and the younger, prehaps more egalitarian, cultural scene in Berlin? How do Panagiotis paintings sit in the city whose recent history is so recent, and whose cultural institutions of the past are almost eclipsed by events contained within the last hundered years?


Original text by Alicia Mitchell: http://fiermanagement.com/2012/06/27/chatzistefanou-panagiotis-the-house-of-perfect-at-the-wye/