Fashion V Sport

Steve Hiett for Vogue Italia

To coincide with the Olympics, the Victoria and Albert Museum organized an exhibition on the interpollination between fashion and sports. Curated by the Ligaya Salazar “Fashion V Sport” sets out to explore the ways these two major cultural and economic forces have become increasingly intertwined in recent years, with the proliferation of high-end designers working on sportswear lines (Stella McCarthy, Yohji Yamamoto) and sport stars promoting their own lines of clothing. (This is not to mention New York Ranger–cum– Vogue intern Sean Avery.) In addition to actual garments, the exhibition includes a number of films and photographs to further contextualize the work.

Exhibition View

The exhibition is roughly divided in three parts: The first explores the work of designers, such as Bernhard Willhelm and Charles de Castelbajac, who heavily incorporate sportswear in their work. Another section focuses instead on the customization of sportswear by cult designers, such as I-Saw and Nash Money, while a third section is dedicated to sportswear fanaticism, with a particular focus on sneakers’ collectors.

An accompanying book titled Fashion V Sports and edited by the exhibition curator Ligaya Salazar features essays by Christopher Breward, Sophie Woodward and Mark Simpson.

Murakami, "Mr.Pointy." Photo by Julien Jourdes for The New York Times

The Murakami exhibition which is currently on view at the Brooklyn Museum, where it traveled from the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, has been extensively discussed, particularly in relation to the inclusion of a mini-Vuitton boutique carrying the Murakami-Vuitton products in the midst of the exhibition. The debate raised by the store inclusion is a testament to the still-fraught relation between fashion, art and commerce—or rather the fraught relation between art and commerce, which seems to come in sharper focus when said art is aligned with fashion—the quintessential commodity. (The relation between art and fashion ultimately seems to highlight the status of art as commodity—one which, at least within the confines of the art museum, still seems to make people uncomfortable. In this particular case, it suggests a continuum between museum-goers and consumers, or perhaps the notion of museum-goers as consumers of culture and luxury goods alike.)

However, what I found most interesting about the presence of the Vuitton “boutique” in the Brooklyn museum is not so much how it re-activated these debates, but rather how it framed the store and the activities within it as performative. It highlighted the ritualistic nature involved in the consumption of goods (particularly luxury goods) which often goes undetected. In the process, it made these generally seamless actions strange and slightly unsettling.

Vuitton Store at the Brooklyn Museum. Photo by Julien Jourdes for The New York Times

Witnessing a couple purchasing a Vuitton-Murakami bag from the store clerks dressed in pristine white shirts, the viewer was made acutely aware of the awkwardness of the exchange—the forced niceness of the sales clerk and the equally forced (at least in this context) nonchalance of the luxury shopper. This exchange became even more awkward as the museum-goers, following the unwritten rules applying to exhibition-viewing, stared intently at the space and the activities taking place within it, trying to decipher its meaning…

Francesca

Veronique Branquinho exhibition

VB, Autumn/Winter 00-01, Photo Annick Geenen (All photos courtesy of MoMu)

If in Belgium this summer, don’t miss the exhibition dedicated to Veronique Branquinho currently on view at the ModeMuseum in Antwerp. As an accompanying article by Cathy Horyn explains, Branquinho—the daughter of a Portuguese father and a Flemish mother—emerged in the generation of Belgian designers following the Antwerp 6. After her studies at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts, she presented her first collection in Paris in 1997 as a series of photographs featuring a white-robed woman running through a forest and was soon embraced by the celebral fashion establishment.

Recounting the ambivalent position Branquinho occupies in the over-signifying market-driven and spectacle-laden fashion world, Horyn writes of the Belgian designer’s work:

“Over time, her work would encompass many of her character traits such as independence, self-reliance, tenacity, and perhaps, above all, mystery. Even if clothes cannot adequately express the complexities of human behavior, Branquinho seems to approach design with idea that not everything needs to be explained or understood.”

VB, Spring/Summer 2000, Photo Jean François Carly

On Fashion Curation

Specter: When Fashion Turns Back (V&A, 2005)

Don't miss the new issue of Fashion Theory, which is entirely dedicated to fashion curation. Edited by Alistair O’Neil, founder of the MA in Fashion Curation at the London College of Fashion (and, in the interest of full disclosure, one of my thesis advisors), it has a great range of engaging articles exhaustively covering debates on the topic, which have taken place across the academic, journalistic and museum realms.

Among the articles included is an assessment of the history and various iterations of the fashion designer retrospective and its attendant criticisms by N.J. Stevenson, as well as an account of the history of fashion photography in the museum by Val Williams, the director of the Centre for Photography and the Archive at LCF. Also included are articles by Amy de la Haye and Judith Clark, and an interview with Penny Martin of SHOWstudio (also a subject of the second issue of Fashion Projects), about the notion of virtual curatorial practice as it pertains to fashion.

In addition, the issue features a range of exhibition reviews: Caroline Evans reviews the recent Victoria and Albert exhibition "Surreal Things: Surrealism in Design." O'Neil reviews the ground-breaking exhibition by Judith Clark "Spectres: When Fashion Turns Back”—an exhibition which, in my opinion, highlighted the blurring of boundaries between curator and artist and exemplified howcuration can be understood as an artistic practice in its own right.

Francesca

Panel on Fashion Blogging at the Met

Diane Pernet, Drawing by Siggi Oddsson

This Sunday, Harold Koda, chief curator of the Metropolitan Museum’s Costume Institute, will host a panel on fashion and blogging, to which Cathy Horyn (the New York Times senior fashion critic) will participate together with Scott Schuman of the Sartorialist and Diane Pernet, editor of A Shaded View on Fashion.

It will be interesting to see whether they will address the different kinds of blogs: i.e. personal blogs (in the case of Diane Pernet) versus a blog hosted by an established editorial entity (as is the case of Horyn’s and to some extent the Sartorialist). And to what extent ethical questions (particularly when it comes to the Times) inform the various types of blogs and potentially clash with the conversational, un-fact-checked and, as a result, often un-journalistic nature of the media.

It is great that the Met is becoming interested in the phenomenon, however, I also hope that future blog panels will include younger fashion bloggers—i.e. Susie of Style Bubble and Almost Girl. The latter has in fact also started Coutorture—an umbrella fashion blog—which serves as a service to the fashion blog community.

The event is taking place Sunday March 30, 2008 at 3:00 p.m. in The Grace Rainey Rogers Auditorium and it's free with museum admission.

Francesca