Atelier E.B.

Atelier E.B. is the company name under which artist Lucy McKenzie and designer Beca Lipscombe sign their collaborative projects. Their work to date includes commissioned displays and interiors, textiles, furniture and publishing. In 2011, Atelier E.B. produced its first fashion collection, exhibition, and catalog, The Inventors of Tradition, which grew out of its research into the post-1930s Scottish textiles industry. The clothes and accessories employed the skills of artisans throughout Scotland, while drawing on the rich design histories of manufacturers including Singer, Pringle, and Ballantyne. Items were sold directly to individuals through a series of showrooms, keeping costs down and encouraging a relationship with the customer. Through this visually and conceptually complex project, Atelier E.B. examined the orthodoxies of contemporary production, distribution and promotion that attend the fields of art and fashion today.

For the month of December, Atelier E.B. will present and sell their second fashion collection, Ost End Girls, at The Artist’s Institute. It continues the partnership’s commitment to high-quality knitwear, wovens, and accessories that use the best of Scottish, and now Belgian, manufacturing. Ost End Girls contains winter essentials in the form of overcoats and cashmere tracksuits, a working wardrobe of painting coats, and for the first time, summer wear. Dreaming of warm coastlines they present t-shirts and beach throws in delirious colors. The Grecian aesthetic celebrated in classic couture and motifs from Antiquity have been reimagined for simple contemporary sportswear. Cashmere scarves and jewelry, reminiscent of holiday souviners, round out the season. It is a wardrobe for work and play, for men and women alike.

LUCY MCKENZIE

BECA LIPSCOMBE

AND PENNY MARTIN

THREE TALKS

DEC. 9, 2013

7:00 PM

Lucy McKenzie and Beca Lipscombe of Atelier E.B. join Penny Martin, editor and chief of the women’s fashion magazine The Gentlewoman, for an evening of discussion about their subjective relationship to clothing and the ways that they navigate the ever-intertwined worlds of fashion and art on their own terms.

LUCY MCKENZIE

“Just Because They’re Wearing a White Coat Doesn’t Mean You Have To Do What They Say”

Fashion has been a part of McKenzie’s visual art since she first made Soviet leotards as a student in Dundee. Yet rather than merely reference fashion imagery in her work, or allow it to be incorporated as a marketing device by the fashion establishment, she uses fashion – its history, economy, and aesthetics – to generate social events or fictional narratives. She will speak about the associations of the iconic white work coat, which are present in each Atelier E.B. collection and are worn by skilled painters, make-up counter women and scientists alike.

BECA LIPSCOMBE

“Looking at High Taste From a Low Place”

Lipscombe grew up as a teenage Casual. Rejecting the conventional path offered to her as a respected emerging talent at Central St. Martin, London, she returned to Edinburgh after her training, a city with relatively no job opportunities for a young designer and founded her own independent label. She will speak about the life of specific Atelier E.B. garments, from their inspiration and manufacture to how they have been appropriated by others within the fashion industry.

PENNY MARTIN

“Elegant Refusal”

Penny Martin is a respected editor and writer, and noted within the fashion industry for her cerebral and considered point of view. Boasting a diverse career path traversing media, academia and photo curation. Martin worked alongside fashion luminaries Nick Knight and Peter Saville for seven years, editing his online fashion website SHOWstudio, and contributes to magazines such as W, The New York Times Style Magazine: T and Fantastic Man. She will speak about how creating something new and important in women’s publishing today requires a point of view that’s defined by what you don’t do. In discussing how The Gentlewoman has developed over its four years, she will focus on the importance of specificity and opinion versus random creativity.