Fifty years of work, wit, local vision: Dorin Frankfurt at Ashdod Museum of Art

The past, in her hands, is not a fixed record but a living conversation with herself. Day after day, alongside exhibition curator Lisa Peretz, Frankfurt traces the exhibition’s journey as they strive to select, arrange, and connect five decades of work. Together, they construct the exhibition from the inside out, choosing, removing, rearranging, arguing, and insisting. What emerges is not just a display but an intricate reconstruction of Frankfurt’s own creative universe: a world stitched from thread, memory, and a stubborn refusal to look away from the local sun.

The designer, now 74, is both subject and maker, shaping how five decades of work are seen, connected, and allowed to speak.

She confronts this moment in time with characteristic suspicion, not interested in being crowned a visionary, let alone a fashion icon. “Fashion worker” will do just fine, she says. It is a title she adopted early on, and she still wears it with a mixture of pride and irony. Her shrug suggests that she never quite understands the fuss.

The term is not a pose. Anyone who has known Frankfurt since the beginning will remember that this was always her definition of herself, long before it sounded like a manifesto.

Fashion, for her, is labor: daily, physical, repetitive, and imperfect. It is not about seasons or silhouettes as much as about reacting, sometimes instinctively, at other times stubbornly, to the political, social, and cultural pressures of the country she lives in.

The Ashdod exhibition reflects this sensibility. It is not a nostalgic victory lap but a careful excavation of a lifetime of consistent, unintentional agendas.

Frankfurt has little patience for grand narratives. Asked about sustainability, she laughs at the word itself. “It didn’t have a name,” she says flatly. “We just did what we did.”

She grew up in a household where nothing was thrown away; recycling was not an ethical stance but a practical one.

Instead, they scoured the abandoned warehouses of closing factories and worked with what they found. Cloth diapers, kitchen towels, quilted blankets, and materials that had suddenly become obsolete in the age of disposable paper and plastic. Out of these remnants came loose, breathable cotton garments. Some were dyed orange, black, or gray, and designed for a Mediterranean climate without air conditioning.

“I’m exhibiting them now, can you believe it?” Frankfurt says, half amused, half incredulous. “A few were my partner’s gardening clothes.”

Frankfurt remembers that period with unfiltered pleasure.

“It was abnormal fun,” she says, using the phrase with affection. She was naive, she admits, and perhaps overly optimistic. At the time, she even gave the collection her own name, which now makes her smile at herself. Still, that naive beginning grew into a factory, and the factory became a central axis of her life. “So who am I, anyway?” she asks rhetorically, always quick to deflect individual credit. Forty years of partnership, she insists, is not a solo achievement.

This early instinct to use things up rather than discard them never left her. By 2016, long after sustainability had become a marketing slogan, Frankfurt launched a project inviting customers to return their old denim garments. The process was laborious and, by her own admission, slightly insane. Each piece was washed, unstitched, ironed, and then embedded into a new design.

“People have clothes that tell a long story,” she says, “and they don’t even know it.” She pauses, then adds, with mild self-criticism, that she never wrote this story onto the garments themselves. No labels, no embroidery explaining the concept.

“So yes,” she says dryly, “I missed that message.”

The workers in the factory, however, did not miss it. They understood exactly what it meant to take apart a garment that had lived a life and painstakingly rebuild it. Frankfurt speaks about this labor with visible respect. Meticulous devotion to craft has its own quiet value, she says, acknowledging those “who sand every seam with perfect precision.”

She is quick to acknowledge the irony in her own practice. While she champions sustainability, she admits she once felt a twinge of embarrassment around those who treated recycling as a moral crusade.

FRANKFURT’S WORK has always been deeply entwined with the visual language of Israeli culture. She dressed musicians and performers at moments when image began to matter as much as sound.

She applied the same logic to Jerusalem, a city she describes as endlessly complex rather than symbolically pure.

For the 1995 “Wearing Peace” fashion show, she created garments referencing Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, inspired by the song “Jerusalem of Gold.” It was not an act of optimism as much as an insistence that the runway become a space where coexistence could at least be imagined.

For decades, she ran a factory in South Tel Aviv that employed over 100 people from every sector of society, ethnicity, and religion – talented people who remained with her from the 1980s onward.

Maintaining that factory, she admits, was “a crazy, insane act of faith.” She refused offers to move production elsewhere, not out of nationalism but out of loyalty. “Was I going to tell people who’ve been with us since 1984 that they’re no longer economically viable?” she asks. The answer, clearly, was no.

Dorin Frankfurt is known for always wearing black, a signature color that has become part of her public persona. Black, which many designers treat as a safe default, became for Frankfurt an ongoing study. She describes it with mock solemnity, comparing her approach to textual analysis.

Black garments from the early 1980s sit beside pieces from 2022, and none of them feel apologetic. They were never trend-driven, she explains, which is precisely why they aged well.

Editing the exhibition was, for her, “a big lesson in giving up ego.” Some of her most extreme pieces were left out so that the clothes could exist as a coherent world. “You can’t do an exhibition about agendas without editing,” she says.

Frankfurt’s agendas extended well beyond fabric and cut. She openly rejected what she calls “social age ghettos,” long before inclusivity became a corporate requirement. She worked with older models and diverse body types, refusing to categorize women by age.

“Women come in ranges,” she says, sounding more amused than ideological.

Her designs never aimed to discipline the body or hide it, but to accommodate it. Comfort, she admits, was never framed as an agenda, yet it permeates her work. She recalls explaining to a young customer why the inner seam of a pair of trousers must be ironed carefully. “That part touches the thighs,” she says simply. “It has to be pleasant.”

FRANKFURT’S HUMOR surfaces most clearly when she reflects on her own stubbornness. She recalls fundraising fashion events for AIDS research in the mid-1980s, when some accused her of inventing an epidemic. She remembers arguments with critics more interested in foreign validation than local context. “Adam Baruch understood,” she says, referring to the late art critic. Others, she implies, were less curious.

Her sources of inspiration remain resolutely local: Israeli painters, poets, photographers, landscapes, and the textile traditions of Jewish communities from Georgia, Cochin, and Ethiopia. She smiles when admitting that only once did she stray entirely, inspired by Wong Kar-wai’s 2000 film In the Mood for Love, after discovering kimono-like fabrics in her parents’ attic. Even then, the detour led straight back home.

Frankfurt walks Tel Aviv daily, not for exercise, she says, but for observation. She enjoys absorbing the city’s noise, contradictions, and gestures.

“I am a manufacturer,” she says, with a smile that acknowledges how unfashionable the word has become.

“I have a factory, and I am probably the only delusional one still producing everything in Israel.” It is a statement delivered without bitterness. For Frankfurt, quality is not a matter of taste or branding but of values – an inheritance, she says, from her parents.

Her life’s work suggests that clothes are never just clothes. They are labor, memory, and place stitched together, imperfectly and persistently.

“To err and fail and act,” she says, quoting herself with faint irony. “That’s how it is.”

In that continuous act of doing and of digging back into her own past to uncover what was forgotten, she suggests, is where real success quietly resides.

The Ashdod exhibition is neither a farewell nor a monument but a record of continuous work and persistent self-excavation.■