The iconic sisters of San Francisco, Vivian and Marion Brown, have always dressed alike, with the exception of “one short period [when] we decided we didn’t like it.” They share a closet and styling duties. Although, Marion told SF Gate in 2009, “She’s been ill and I’ve been doing all the dressing for the last year and a half.”
Spectrum Art Gallery is a small, non-profit photography gallery located in Fresno, California. Fresno is perhaps most famous as the home town of William Saroyan, and as the town to which Brad Pitt’s character is trying to hitchhike in Thelma and Louise, but not as a very big art and culture destination. Yet Spectrum Gallery has been successfully bringing photographic art to the area for over thirty years even in an economy where major art galleries and museums continue to struggle. Members of the gallery mount shows of their own work, and once a year invite a guest exhibit which could be either a single artist or another gallery’s collection. Past guests have included Christopher Burkett, Margaretta K. Mitchell, and Rondal Partridge.
This year, Spectrum invited Brooke Gabrielson to display 38 images from the Willem Photographic Gallery in Monterey, California.
The Willem Gallery’s main focus is fashion and women’s photography, so the images to be seen in the show at Spectrum range from the Edward Steichen photograph for the 1 November 1924 issue of Vogue at the beginning of this post, to Arthur Elgort’s controversial photograph of Keira Knightley with the Masai from Vogue 2007, to Irving Penn’s photograph of Kay Thompson and the Williams Brothers.
Henri Cartier-Bresson, Horst P. Horst’s Mainbocher Corset image and an unexpected portrait by him of Irving Penn, Cecil Beaton’s photo of Lee Radziwell and Jacqueline Bouvier at their cotillion, Lillian Bassman, and Helmut Newton are all featured. Mr Gabrielson explained at the opening night lecture that it is his own love of fashion photography — he is a longtime subscriber to American Vogue and has been subscribing to Vogue Italia, France, and UK for the last four years — which inspires his purchases. He has long had friends who worked in fashion photography, so he has seen not only the finished product, but has a deep respect and understanding of the creative process. His appreciation for the imagery he saw in the magazines he has collected naturally led to a desire to acquire the photographs themselves.
A lawyer by day, Mr Gabrielson refers to the gallery as his passion. He began collecting photographic equipment twenty years ago, and photographs in about 2000, so that the gallery now boasts a collection of over 1000 pieces all of which can be seen on their website. Willem Gallery was founded due to Gabrielson’s own desire to see his favourite pieces properly displayed and to share them with others. But he soon had more and more people asking him whether the images were for sale. Seeing the sale of one photograph as the opportunity to acquire another one that he will love as much or more, the images from The Willem Photographic Gallery are now available for purchase.
This fact is what makes this show unique among previous Spectrum Gallery guest exhibits: instead of information plaques next to each photograph, there are small numbered pegs which correspond to a price list that can be picked up at the door, enabling you to view the image and compare it with others surrounding it before knowing whose work you were looking at. This also made for an unplanned but delightful “guessing game” with patrons trying to get their friends to guess who certain portraits were of, such as the Horst P. Horst portrait of Irving Penn mentioned previously, or Richard Avedon’s portrait of Marilyn Monroe whom no one recognized in her red wig.
Less a lecture, Gabrielson’s talk was a recounting of the stories behind each and every image, discussing either how he acquired it, or the importance of a particular photographer within fashion history, or even the backstories for a particular photo, such as the unconventional portrait of Monroe by Avedon. Gabrielson explained that this photograph was part of a collaborative series by Avedon and Monroe for Life magazine where Monroe dressed up as various other famous people. This image is their interpretation of Clara Bow.
One of the most fascinating stories was behind Gordon Parks’s image of society women taken in 1949. Parks was one of the few African American fashion photographers at the time. The image was taken in Paris and whether that is because it was the fashion capital of the world at the time or due to prejudice against a black man working as a photographer in the States is uncertain, but the success of his career does at least show the boundaries that can be crossed by art.
Gabrielson has done his homework, and the volunteers at Spectrum Gallery did a wonderful job of hanging the show. A single wall might place images from the beginning of fashion photography next to Mario Testino’s photograph of Sienna Miller for the September 2007 issue of Vogue, famous portraits next to unknown models, black and white next to colour. And yet it flows perfectly. In fact the contrast in time periods, photographic processes and colour schemes keeps the exhibit interesting and creates an intriguing aesthetic dialogue which demonstrates the artistic range and validity to be found in fashion photography.
As Mr Gabrielson himself explained when he was discussing the 1924 image by Steichen, when they first began photographing fashion it didn’t occur to anyone to preserve or collect the images being created. This show proves that fashion photography has become a unique art in its own right worth collecting and preserving. As Cecil Beaton said: Fashion is ephemeral, and fashion is enduring. The exhibit is certainly appealing to the general public, since the opening night reception was so well-attended that Gabrielson’s talk ended up being standing-room only. Quite an accomplishment on the Saturday night before Easter Sunday.
The other thing this exhibit proves is that you can find treasure in unexpected places. The last place I had ever expected to see a Cecil Beaton portrait of Marlene Dietrich, or Patrick Demarchelier’s photo of Nadja Auermann, or any of the photographs I saw on Saturday evening was in Fresno. As Monica Murgia has pointed out, though, local museums and galleries can be wonderful resources if you give them a chance. They don’t make the news, but perhaps in some ways the work they do is far more important because they work with such limited resources to bring culture and new perspectives to such small locations.
The exhibit runs from 5 April through 29 April, and is completely free to the public. All the images are for sale, and Spectrum Gallery does accept donations of any denomination. There is a Costume Society of America Western Region meet up scheduled for Sunday, 22 April at 1:00 pm for anyone who would like to see the exhibit and see a demonstration of various photographic equipment and techniques.
My last post was On the Semantics of Creating Fashion. Semantics, the study of meaning and interpretation of meaning, can play an interesting role in any classroom. Words are inert, and derive their meaning from personal experiences and memories. This is what can make communication tricky; word meaning can vary slightly from person to person. To reinforce a lesson I teach about Roland Barthes, I created a quiz that illustrates how semantics can stimulate creativity in the design process.
I was luck enough to get in contact with two of my former students to share the results. Katherine Chinn and Tatiana Aldaco graciously shared their fashion illustrations below. Both are finishing their degree in fashion design at FIDM.
I’ve included a fascimilie of the exact quiz that I gave the students. (I recommend changing the quotation regularly to avoid any contamination of ideas.)
Philosopher Roland Barthes stated that: words inspire more creativity than images because they are open to interpretation. This means the analysis of written clothing (text describing clothing) can also effectively pave the way for the invention of real clothing.
For this quiz, you will interpret the quote below by sketching a garment. Read the quote thoroughly and consider how you can create a garment to its specifications while allowing your own design philosophy/style to be present. This can be done in a number of ways: incorporating your design signatures, referencing your folio studies for color/silhouettes/textiles, etc.
Starting with one of his first dress designs, a 1929 body-hugging sheath known as the “Taxi” dress, spiral wrapping around the armature of the body was a signature technique that “Designer X” used to fashion his sculptural dress forms. The circular top skirt of the two-piece dress falls into multilevel flutes as it spirals around the hipline.
And now, for the results:
Illustration by Katherine Chinn. Image courtesy of the artist.
Illustration by Tatiana Aldaco. Image courtesy of the artist.
Katherine and Tatiana were given 2 hours and 20 minutes to complete the assignment, and were not allowed to look at any visual pictures or clues. They were only allowed to interpret the two sentences that described the dress. You can see the variety in their designs. Both accurately depict a “body-hugging sheath” with spirals wrapping around the body. The description was taken from the Costume Institute’s description of a 1952 cocktail dress by Charles James.
Cocktail dress, 1952 by Charles James. Image courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, (2009.300.213a,b)
A picture might be worth a thousand words, but the words describing the picture might inspire you more!
The Pleasure Garden display at the Museum of London
On March 17, 2012 the Museum of London hosted a symposium entitled The Body in the Museum: New Approaches to the Display of Dress. The conference brought together local and international museum curators, conservators and researchers engaged with the exhibition of dress and textiles, and was devised by Beatrice Behlen, Senior Curator of Fashion and Decorative Arts at the Museum of London. In her welcome speech, Beatrice remarked that the conference aimed to engender the sharing of knowledge across museum dress departments, and nearly double the number of anticipated visitors registered to attend.
Eight papers were presented, in three sessions followed by lively and informative Q&A sessions chaired by Christine Supianek, conservator at the Museum of London, Helen Ganiaris, conservation manager of the Museum of London and Denis Northdruft, curator of the Fashion and Textile Museum, London. Overall, a wealth of information on new technologies as well as traditional methods of dress display was shared, and the dedication and skill of the presenters was highly evident.
Retail-style mannequins at the Platt Hall Gallery of Costume, Manchester
As an independent curator, who works with both museum/archive and commercial garments for display, there was much information I am sure to incorporate into future projects, both in and out of museums.
My brief synopses will not serve to teach you all the information I collected, but where possible I include links to the speakers, so you may get in touch with them for further knowledge on the array of topics discussed.
Mannequins from the storage of Platt Hall Gallery of Costume
The morning session commenced with Eleanor Thompson, PhD student and former dress curator at the Brighton Museum and Art Gallery, delivering a philosophical and experiential paper entitled Death and Desire: The Body in the Museum. Eleanor offered both an historical perspective and a contemporary look at the changes, fashions and technologies of dress display. Mannequin was a key word throughout the day, and Eleanor’s paper gave foreground to the mannequin as surrogate body, uncanny being and necessary presence in dress displays. She showed wonderful photographs of the disused and mostly dismembered mannequins in storage at Platt Hall, Manchester, where her doctoral research is based. These bodies, long forgotten in storage, form an interesting history of trends and methods of dress display, and served to illustrate just how far tastes and techniques have come in the past five decades. Much of Eleanor’s quoted text came from Mark Sandberg’s excellent book Living Pictures, Missing Persons, which I highly recommend to anyone working with the display of garments and accessories.
Add it to your reading list!
Beatrice Behlen then took the floor to describe the process and challenges of populating the Museum of London’s exquisite Pleasure Garden display. Central tot he Museum’s Galleries of Modern London, this permanent exhibit consists of period dress of London’s fashionable leisured classes as would have been worn in 19th century gardens such as Vauxhall and Hyde Park.
Mannequins from the Pleasure Garden with hats by Philip Treacy and hair sculptures by Yasemen Hussein
Beatrice spoke about the design of the exhibit, the conservational concerns and the collaborations between the museum’s curators, conservators and the commissions they employed to create the stunning outcome. In order to suggest the period silhouettes more truly, the Museum commissioned custom mannequins, as well as milliner Philip Treacy and sculptor Yasemen Hussein to create fantastical hats and metal wire hairpieces for all of the display’s figures.
The morning session culminated with a similar discussion of the processes and outcomes of exhibition planning by Sam Gatley, Display Specialist at the V&A, whose talk focused on the upcoming Hollywood Costume exhibit at the V&A this autumn. As a display of film costumes worn by well-known performers that aims to highlight the art and craft of costume design, the curators were challenged with presenting the clothing on bodies that can both resemble and evoke the dynamism of the live performer.
Installation of Dorothy's dress from The Wizard of Oz at the V&A
Initially, the museum had set about to employ rapid prototyping technology to make replica bodies with true physical likenesses of the performers out of contoured sheets of corrugated cardboard. For a host of valid reasons, the hi-tech cardboard mannequins were not feasible for the project, and a variety of custom-created and no less spectacular mannequins were created.
The afternoon session kicked off with a film produced and presented by Carmen Lucini, museum consultant, that showcased a system she developed for creating custom papier mache dress mounts, in a variety of silhouettes, which are conservationally sound and can be cut away to produce nearly invisible mounts for an infinite number of garments. The “cut-away” style of mannequin is what seemed to be currently favoured among all the museums present at the symposium. This may be just a trend, but it is proving satisfactory amongst visitors and museum professionals alike according to the observations presented.
Another one for your reading list!
The afternoon continued with Lara Flecker, Textile Display Specialist of the V&A, discussing the development of of a special “petite” mannequin for the display of period dress in collaboration with Proportion London, a mannequin manufacturer well-known to dress curators in the UK and Europe. Lara showed photographs that brilliantly illustrated the conversation between the museum and Proportion, and indeed had everyone in the room celebrating the successful outcome – a versatile period female figure that is now available for purchase by anyone from Proportion. A truly heartwarming state of affairs for dress curators!
Installation view showing cut-away mannequins of The Last Debutantes at Kensington Palace
The session closed with a highly informative and technical talk by Miriam Langford, Treatment Conservation Manager for the Historic Royal Palaces. Miriam presented the results of conservation tests, and how they informed decisions about the display of garments in the collection for both temporary and long-term exhibitions. She even provided the delegates with a series of hand-outs that explicated the test results, and a directory of mannequin and museum conservation supply vendors. These are sure to remain in my valuable resource files for years to come.
A selection of views of displays at the Bowes Museum
The final two presentations both looked at the aforementioned propensity for the use of cut-away or invisible style mannequin forms for the display of dress. These mannequins have the advantage of presenting a garment without the potential distations of the human face, hairstyle or anachronistic body pose. Janet Wood, Textile Conservator, presented a case study of the development of cut-away acrylic mannequins for the permanent display of dress at the Bowes Museum. The acrylic body forms are transparent, so they allow for the interior of garments to be seen in some cases.
A child's coronation dress on invisible fibreglass mount at the Museum of London
The final paper of the day was delivered by Hilary Davidson, Curator of Fashion and Decorative Arts at the Museum of London, who presented various instances and challenges of using fibreglass cut-away mannequins to display a range of garments in the museum’s Galleries of Modern London. Among the challenging pieces to display on cut-aways were a torn punk t-shirt and a body conscious keyhole dress. These pieces, as well as 51 others are on view currently on virtually invisible cut-out bodies.
As you will have supposed from reading these brief summaries, the day was a triumph for dress display with a host of dedicated, knowledgeable and extremely hard-working museum professionals reveling in the exchange and accumulation of new knowledge. And there were tea and biscuits in abundance, during breaks which were an excellent opportunity to meet and greet the experts and even pick up some more tips and advice. A splendid day indeed!
Of all the news being broadcast about the killing of Trayvon Martin last month, the most surprising to me is the focus on the young man’s attire when he died, and the statements by Geraldo Rivera that had he not been wearing a hooded sweatshirt that night, he would probably be alive today. Rivera later apologized for his comments, but even before he made them the protests and support rallies were full of people wearing their own hooded sweatshirts, and Facebook was flooded with pictures of people, including many celebrities, wearing theirs and stating that they were Trayvon Martin.
In a way, this is true. The hooded sweatshirt is a common wardrobe staple for many people around the globe, not just in America. Seeing a large number of people wearing hoodies at a protest rally would not normally have such significance, had Trayvon Martin’s killer not stated that it was the wearing of this garment which had made him “suspicious”. But did it really?
Only a month before the shooting, the Wall Street Journal ran an article entitled Why Not Wear Pajamas All Day?, which looked at the current trend among America’s teens and tweens to look as though they hadn’t gotten dressed this morningthrough the wearing of pajamas and hoodies. The article, rather hilariously, even defines the hoodie for readers. It also reveals how innocuous and common the garment truly is.
So why has it become the focus of the media and, quite frankly, those campaigning to excuse the actions of an adult man, who was not a law enforcement officer, for killing an unarmed child? Robin Ghivan of The Daily Beast has written the best analysis I have read to date. Last summer Fashion Bytes looked at the clothing of the killer in the Oslo gun attack, who had disguised himself as a police officer to gain trust. In her editorial, Ghivan points out that we all use clothes to create our identity, using the example of baggy pants: she points out that it is their very notoriety which makes them popular among young men “whether honor roll students or delinquents”. But she also points out that due to history, and undercurrents of racism within our society that only on the best of days seem not to exist at all, what a black teenager wears and what a white teenager wears can be interpreted very differently in the eyes of society at large.
The focus on Trayvon Martin’s attire seems to be an intentional steering away from the issues of race and prejudice which should instead be discussed openly in order to possibly find a solution. By focusing on whether or not Martin should or should not have been wearing a hoodie, the commentators can pretend that racial profiling doesn’t exist, and thereby not address how it can be fixed.
Do you agree? Do you agree with Robin Ghivan that the pressure on young men (and women) of colour in America to posture in order to protect themselves is that much greater than the pressure on their white counterparts? What are your thoughts concerning this focus on Martin’s clothing? If Martin had any other racial or cultural background, would we be discussing his clothing at all? Could a focus on clothing help eradicate racial tensions, profiling, and prejudice? If so, how? What other issues do you see arising from the issues surrounding Martin’s murder and the hoodie? Will this change what people wear in any way?
Please share your thoughts.
Image via Reuters.com
I have stepped away from the blackboard to fly a beautiful kite my husband and I received as a wedding present in 2010! The cloud bird (shown below) is catching good wind in Cape May, New Jersey. This is my spring break and I am attempting a new hobby.
While flying a kite might not have a lot to do with teaching fashion, I know that it is essential to step away from the blackboard once in a while to refresh the wellsprings we impart to our students. I hope you find the time in your busy schedule to do something similar this week. Happy teaching!
Last week, I attended the private view opening of Re:Address, an exhibition, curated designed and produced by London College of Fashion’s MA Fashion Curation 2011-12 cohort, under the course directorship of Shaun Cole.
Installation view, photo via dazedigital.com
The exhibition was on public view from March 22 through 27, and was held in two vacant retail spaces within the multi-level Kingly Court shopping arcade off Carnaby Street. Although the exhibition was on for a regretfully limited time, you can learn more about it from the project website here.
Re:Address as an exhibition, took on a topic that inevitably grows larger every minute; the phenomena of wearing, collecting and preserving vintage clothes in archives, museums or in personal daily or occasion wardrobes. This exhibition presented a considered look at some of these modes, and displayed well-selected vintage pieces according to their ability to typify the styles of a period, and also for their resonance when re-imagined as part of contemporary wardrobes.
Tommy Nutter suit, 1970s, photo by Luke Laichena
The garments were largely borrowed from the archives of London College of Fashion and Central St. Martins, as well as from the personal archives and/or wardrobes of some key collectors and vintage aficionados. I was particularly pleased and curious to see pieces belonging to Professor Amy de la Haye and Alistair O’Neil, both faculty members of the University of the Arts; a clear and intelligent example of students tapping into the resource and expertise of some of their academic mentors.
In particular I was delighted to see on display Amy de la Haye’s own 1920s swimsuit she purchased and wore in the early to mid 1980s. A quote from Amy tells how she likened the piece to the silhouette and ethos of avant garde Japanese fashion of the time. A closer look into a series of photos displayed taped to the inside of vintage luggage reveals some photos of Amy from the 1980s, showing her sporting teased hair and ruby red lips. Imagine that with the swimsuit for a truly creative re-imagining of a vintage garment. For contrast and indeed context, Amy’s snapshots are juxtaposed with vintage archive photographs showing similar swimwear worn on the beach in its day.
Display of vintage garments with period furniture, photo via dazeddigital.com
The display of the vintage garment and photos was just one of a number of poetic and informative devices of the exhibit’s design and curation that belied the innovative thinking and research behind the show. The exhibition’s graphic identity; its logo, typographic design, labels on brown paper and video invite were all well-devised and executed. The inclusion of displays of haberdashery and trims in jars, text printed on brown paper labels, and use of vintage furniture as display fixture, were orchestrated to create thoughtful vignettes that resonated as a shorthand of traditional museum period rooms.
The overall installation felt both nostalgic as well as organised in the manner of more restrained traditional museum style display. This subtle combinative aesthetic distinguished the exhibition space from the look of both cluttered vintage stores, and minimal boutiques, cleverly situating this exhibition somewhere in between. The design as well as the content showed a consideration of audience and footfall in the area. Both texts and objects were presented in an accessible fashion with a seeming focus on educating a public perhaps unfamiliar with dress history, but engaged with contemporary fashion. However, even for vintage wearers and collectors like myself, the exhibition provided new insights, information and delightful images. The labels give clues to what dress historians glean from looking at material artefacts and also introduce key concepts in fashion history for those lesser versed in the topic.
A remarkable result of the research foregrounding the exhibition was displayed on an info panel which presented a vintage timeline. The timeline a map of vintage fashion in Britain from the Second World War until now that cleverly shows the ethos and motivations behind the wearing of vintage in different times, from ‘make do and mend,’ to the aggressive DIY aesthetic of London’s punk subcultures.
This panel was displayed in the exhibition’s separate second part a gallery, which had film, period music, photos and interviews with vintage fashionistas and shop owners. This room on opening night was a lively social space, populated by sharp looking vintage-styled guests.
photo by Luke Laichena
The MA Curation students themselves were all well turned out for the opening night each in their own personal vintage and hybrid fashion looks. As hosts to the private view VIP guests and serving as eager sources of more information they operated as a well-rehearsed machine of promotion; engaging with the public and expressing their whole-hearted enthusiasm for their work.
Photo by Luke Laichena
Sometimes, despite the excellent design, research and curated selections, the overall message seemed ambiguous – but indeed the richness and multitude of topics, approaches and modes of display speaks not for a lack, but rather a wealth of promise amongst what are certainly a talented, well-spoken and curatorially innovate group of individuals whom are sure to soon be working on a host of exciting future projects. I look forward to seeing their work to come, and to further engagement with this year’s group as they enter the dynamic field of fashion curating.
Thank you to the MA Fashion Curation group for supplying photos by Luke Laichena.
Artist, dandy and generous spirit Iké Udé spoke with Worn Through about the art of sartorial excellence, his inspiration to pursue it and the importance of costume as an index of culture. A resident of New York City, in addition to making our streets a more beautiful place to stroll, Udé shares our passion for icons of style, whom he celebrates in aRude magazine and his recent book, Style File.
I’m interested in the origins of your personal style. You certainly do justice to the idea of a modern-day dandy, but was this always your chosen form of self expression?
Since childhood, the visible/visual world has been the one constant that fascinates, excites and inspires me—perhaps above all else. Naturally, part of this visible world encompasses clothes and how we employ them to best effect.
The act of dressing—though quotidian—is essentially the act of composition. We can all agree that certain songs—whether instrumental, vocal or a combination of both—are better composed than others; we can all agree that certain pictures, buildings, furniture, gardens, etc., are composed better in relation to others. In light of these examples, in the visual hierarchy of things, some excel in using clothes to better advantage than others do. And, I fear, that those who excel in this sartorial hierarchy are a minority, especially in our age. In previous epochs, the average person’s daily style surpassed today’s “well-dressed,” you see. On one hand, clothes are an unyielding, daily performative ritual taken for granted by the majority; on the other hand, a minority of us, say, dandies, do not take the seemingly tedious demands of sartorial quotidianity for granted—but rather, with open hands, we welcome it as an exciting daily opportunity to exalt in each moment of our fickle and perishable existence!
What is it about the dandy aesthetic that appeals to you?
The discipline of it all is profound for it checks against a larger picture of the self—sloppiness of mental alertness, self-disregard, unconscious self-loathing, slovenliness, disrespect to society; it desires an overall harmony of being alive that celebrates the attendant beauty of it all, the aristocracy of it all, the Godliness of it all. Moreover, dandyism is a generous, picturesque, instructive art in which the artist shares his picturesque, well-composed self with the public, free of charge.
I wonder, like Brummel and his quest for the perfectly tied cravat, do you follow any daily rituals of dress? Do you plan ahead? Or is each morning an impromptu sartorial jazz riff?
My clothes/accessories are precisely akin to a painter’s palette and my body, akin to the canvas. I’m conversant with my wardrobe and often dress according to mood. My mood—be it romantic, wistful, edgy, impish, etc., informs my daily dress. Often, when I imagine an outfit ahead of time, it turns out that when the day/occasion arrives, my sartorial mood/desire cancels out the imagined outfit for something suitable.
That said, while composing the outfit of the day, I of course, start with say, a jacket, a trouser, a color or a garment with a particular fit and fabric—and from there on, I seek to find other elements to act as the sartorial protagonists of the overall ensemble. This completed, I submit to the mirror, with zero expectations. And depending on what the mirror decides, I may or may not return to finesse the ensemble in question. Thus, it is akin to jazz riff, to borrow your phrase.
As a resident New Yorker, is there a typical response by city dwellers? Is the response different when you travel outside of the City? Does attention drive your efforts in any way?
I’m originally from Lagos, Nigeria. I’ve lived here since the 1980s. Yet, every day, people ranging from vendors, taxi drivers and various service industry workers to the smart set I meet at various social/cultural functions, invariably assume that I’m a visitor even before I speak a word. And when I lived full-time in Nigeria, in cities such as Lagos and Enugu, I met with the same, “are-you-visiting” type reactions. Same thing when I’m in London. Moreover, the responses I get from places like say, Italy, Paris, Vienna and Berlin are even more intensely dramatic. So, I seem foreign, a perpetual visitor, wherever I am. For better or worse, I’m used to it and even use it to my advantage–in the sense that as a visitor or brother from another planet, I’m not supposed to conform to the petty, tedious, low laws/ethics of the land.
Do you consider yourself “of” the fashion world, or an observer? What about this world are you most interested in reflecting in your art?
I’m not of the fashion world. I’m more or less an observer who occasionally engages with a handful of the talents in the fashion world. Other than that, the fashion industry is mostly commercial and too unnecessarily shrill for my temperament. My work is not about fashion in the general sense, but rather about the critical role that past and present costumes/fashion—as the index of culture—play in our cultural/societal construct.
I completely agree with the idea of costume as the index of culture, and I’m sure many of our readers will as well. Can you address how it is reflected in your work, especially in the Cover Girl and Sartorial Anarchy series. In Cover Girl series (1994) I employed magazine titles such as Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar to critique the exclusionary practices and tendencies of massive media organs to exclude and marginalized those in the minorities—be it ethnicity, gender, sex, religion, weight, intellectualism, individualism, etc. It also served as self-portraits but that was secondary to the critique.
The charting of men’s attire, across the board—across geographies/cultures and time/epochs and reconciling the various found items in respective self-portrait, is the aim of Sartorial Anarchy. By mixing varied men’s costumes in concert with the now and then, we begin to realize how arbitrary, subjective, fleeting, even absurd—no less wonderful—our “real” cultural construct is. Sartorial Anarchy demonstrates a debt to artifice while acknowledging an on-going, back-and-forth between culturally subjective ambiguities in men’s dress codes and their attendant beauty, flaws and contradictions.
You’ve been wonderful and an inspiration. What is the perfect thank-you gift for an artist and dandy? An excellent art-book or perfume of my choice!
A friend forwarded me this hilarious Victorian history of fashion from 1893-1993 — published by The Strand Magazine in 1893. It was obviously difficult for the author to conceive of the modern, svelte silhouette of the ’20s — to say nothing of the rest of the 20th century — and this really demonstrates how radical the 20th century abandonment of the corset and padded girth really was. Hats, too, are included in all the projected future ensembles, indicative of the necessity of millinery to complete a respectable outfit in the 19th century through the early 1960s. I enjoy how theatrical all the proposed designs are, calling to mind capes and billowing veils of fairy tales more than The Distant Future. It’s just fascinating to be reminded that fashion, for all it tries to anticipate the next season / next year / next decade, is still firmly rooted in contemporary ideals of beauty and functionality.
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Artists take their inspiration from many places, especially when those artists are the Mulleavy sisters. Their recent LACMA installation took its inspiration from the murals of Fra Angelico and the sculpture of Bernini. The Rodarte Spring 2012 collection took its inspiration from the Australian Outback, which has drawn criticism from Megan Davis, a UN Expert on Aboriginal and Indigenous rights, who called the entire collection “offensive”. However, as the Fashionista.com editorial explains, the Mulleavy sisters legally licensed the artworks which inspired their prints, meaning that the original artists will be sharing in the profits from the collection.
This incident arose at the same time that the New York Times ran an article entitled “An Uneasy Cultural Exchange” about the relationship between the Navajo Nation (which recently won its lawsuit again Urban Outfitters), and fashion. A contentious relationship which was best summarized by Minh Ha Pham (of Threadbared) for The American Prospect in November. Fashion Bytes has recently explored the “casual racism” that can be found in fashion, and explored the potentially racist attitudes behind France’s burqa ban, but the Rodarte collection is not an appropriation. The licensing and receiving of permission to use the native artwork instead makes it a collaboration. A very important distinction. The Mulleavy sisters will not be profiting from indigenous artforms, but with indigenous artists.
The Washington Post article which reported Megan Davis’s anger over the Rodarte collection ended by stating that those involved on both sides need to do their homework before they either denounce a collection as racist, or decide to use a particular artwork or aesthetic in their own work. As the Rodarte Spring 2012 collection has shown it is possible to be both culturally sensitive and not hamper your own creative vision. These seem to be the same issues that arose during the recent Richard Prince copyright trial, as discussed here in January.
Where does inspiration end, and appropriation or intellectual property theft begin? It is a fact that inspiration can come from everywhere, but should artists or fashion designers be held responsible for “citing” their sources? How would such a citation be done? The Navajo Nation lawsuit is based on United States law which states that products can not be licensed under a First Nation’s name unless it is made by that people, Urban Outfitters and Proenza Schouler therefore were not simply insensitive, they violated the law with their collections. Is this due to ignorance or arrogance? What other examples of casual appropriation or racism have you encountered in fashion? What other examples of over-reaction before the facts were known? How can we teach the next generation of fashion designers and historians to be more culturally sensitive? Since these issues are being more openly and widely discussed, is it possible that we are becoming more culturally sensitive through these debates? Do these debates raise any awareness at all?
Please share your thoughts.
