MOD collection by Popovy Sisters
Today as never before different kinds of art are synthesized by interpenetrating one into another and creating kaleidoscopes of new formalistic decisions. As the proof of the above statement is the thematic collection of Lena and Katya Popovy in which due to doll-models the costume haute couture comes to life and gets sense. Move of the hands, facial expressions, posture make clothes full of emotions and character. And haute couture is able to tell the story by creating an object of art from the doll.
The collection MOD done in Japanese style. The artists transformed a doll into the bright visual narration about the country where the past is inseparably linked with the present.
Feminization of the ancient armor of samurai is the reference to the past and the cause to change from the weapon of war to the weapon of beauty. Watch gears and articulated joints decipher the idea about robots as ultramodern technologies and aspiration to scientific and technical progress. But logically the question arises on your part: why doll-models are hardly similar to the generally accepted view about Japanese appearance. Moreover they match Barbie.
Today the young Japanese people are sensitive about American and European cultures, I would rather say obsequious. And in this case the prototype of Barbie has become the model of successes belonging to the other culture.
The ability of artists to stimulate intelligence of viewers by multiple meanings lets a collector to get pleasure from their dolls for a long time and like from a book-reading.
Lena and Katya worked under the collection MOD during about two years. And in the frame of one collection the static doll with imitated articulated joints evolved into BJD with 18 points of articulation. Les femmes fatales were changed by la femme enfant.
Always in a new way the artists define the concept of beauty. They didn’t want to make an ideal model and gifted a little gap between front teeth to her. Slightly “breaking”/“ball-jointed” moves and gestures of the doll remind an adolescent awkwardness.
Individuality has become the predominant criteria of beauty; something that makes the image memorable among hundreds of others.
"MOD collection is a mix of Japanese aesthetics, Japanese paper lanterns and XVIII century fashion. We decided to unite these images because we found they had a lot in common. For example, XVIII century beauties of Europe wore huge and intricate hairstyles as well as geishas of Japan. All of that merged and intertwined harmonically in our minds.
As for the "Japanese" collection, it is called MOD, like "module". We played with words naming it. First, "mod" is a super modern person, and second, "module" is a part of a complex structure. Each doll of MOD collection has a name like "model no.8", "model no.3"... They do not form a line, we picked random numbers. This collection consists of seven dolls but we'd like to make more."