Fashion gone Awry!
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Fiona Carswell, Smoking JacketThe other day I went to the end of the year show of the ITP masters program at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. Much of the work fell in the category of wearable technology—what most caught my attention were humorous pieces playing with the notion of function and functionless. Fiona Carswell’s work fit this category, with garments characterized by a rather dark humor, as with a Smoking Jacket with visible lungs on the front of it, which blacken over time as the wearer exhales cigarette smoke through a system of tubes; meanwhile, her Malignant Mole Bikini develops dark moles as the wearer spends time in the sun!Andrew Schneider’s Experimental Device for Performance is also alternatively humorous and unsettling. It consists of a pair of identical helmets from which a screen is held. The screen alternates footage in real time of the mouth of the the person wearing it and the mouth of the other wearer, whose voice also comes through the device. This substitution bestows a rather confounded feeling on the viewer, especially as the disembodied mouth is larger than its original. To find out more about these two projects and many others you can consult the ITP show site…Francesca
Fashion Projects #5 is devoted to fashion curation, examining the meteoritic rise in relevance of fashion exhibitions.
It features interviews with an eclectic assortment of leading practitioners from different corners of the world. The issue includes long Q&As with Harold Koda, the longtime, recently retired curator of the Met’s Costume Institute, as well as the Museum at FIT’s veteran leader Valerie Steele. It also features interviews with curators in Antwerp (the ModeMuseum’s Kaat Debo), Toronto (Royal Ontario Museum’s Alexandra Palmer) and Venice (Maria Luisa Frisa); academics studying the field (Hazel Clark, Annamari Vänskä, and Alistair O’Neill); and, giving an on-the-ground perspective, the Met’s head conservator, Sarah Scaturro. The issue’s cover stars Greer Lankton’s sculptural representation of legendary Vogue editor and Costume Institute doyenne Diana Vreeland, who continues to loom over the field years after her death.
Table of Contents
Introduction
Showmanship and History: An Interview with Harold Koda by Francesca Granata
Woman of Steele: An Interview with Valerie Steele by Lisa Santandrea
Exploring Fashion’s Openness: An Interview with Kaat Debo by Alex Esculapio
London, After a Fashion Curator: An Interview with Alistair O’Neill by Alexis Romano
Curation and Conservation: An Interview with Sarah Scaturro by Mae Colburn
Reflections on Fashion Curating
An Interview with Hazel Clark and Annamari Vänskä
Fashion in the Vast Museum: An Interview with Alexandra Palmer by Ingrid Mida
Restless Curating: An Interview with Maria Luisa Frisa by Marco Pecorari