Imprint (NYC): The Evolution of Motifs in Fashion

Red Babydoll dress. Jeremy Scott, fall 2009, Photo courtesy of the Jeremy Scott Studio.

I am happy to announce that students at NYU Steinhardt's Visual Culture: Costume Studies Program (some of whom I have taught in the past), in collaboration with Shannon Bell-Price (Associate Research Curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Costume Institute), have curated an exhibition of contemporary fashion designs. Titled "Imprint (NYC): The Evolution of Motifs in Fashion," it opens January 12.

"Polka-dots, stripes, camouflage, novelty/conversational prints, houndstooth, plaid, animal prints, and “digital rococo” will all be represented in Imprint (NYC) by current and emerging designers from the New York metropolitan area including Thom Browne, Norma Kamali, Diane von Furstenberg, Marc Jacobs, Proenza Schouler, Jeremy Scott, Anna Sui, and Jason Wu."

The exhibition, which runs through February 4 at NYU Rosenberg Gallery, explores the critical history, potent symbolism, and iconic contemporary use of popular motifs in fashion. Imprint (NYC) will have an opening reception Thursday, January 12 from 6 to 8pm. An exhibition symposium will be held Wednesday, January 25 from 6 to 8pm. (preceded by a reception at 5pm). The Rosenberg Gallery is located in NYU’s Barney Building, 34 Stuyvesant St. (between Second and Third Avenues). The exhibition is free and open to the public. Gallery hours: Wednesday through Saturday, 2 to 8pm; Sunday noon to 6pm.

Francesca Granata

Conferences in New York

Cover of Not A Toy published by Pictoplasma

Coming up are two conferences of interest. At the Museum at FIT, “Fashion Icons and Insiders” is taking place on November 3rd and 4th, featuring speakers including Caroline Weber (author of Queen of Fashion: What Marie-Antoinette Wore to the French Revolution and professor of French at Barnard), Thierry-Maxime Loriot (curator of the exhibition The Fashion World of Jean Paul Gaultier), and Thelma Golden (Director and Chief Curator of The Studio Museum in Harlem).

On a completely different but equally interesting topic is the conference organized by Pictoplasma and hosted by Parsons, which takes place from November 3rd to November 6th. Exploring the topic of contemporary characters in art and design, it features among its list of speakers the Wooster Collective and the American artist Mark Jenkins, known for his street installations.

Pictoplasma recently published the book Not A Toy: Fashioning Radical Characters edited by Vassilis Zidanikis of ATOPOS and accompanied by the exhibition ARRRHG! Monsters in Fashion at the Benaki Museum in Athens.

Francesca Granata

ARRRGH! Monsters in Fashion: An Exhibition at the Benaki Museum in Athens

by Francesca Granata

Currently on view at the Benaki Museum in Athens is the exhibition "ARRRGH! Monsters in Fashion." The exhibition includes the work of contemporary experimental designers and visual artists, including Martin Margiela, Walter Van Beirendonck, Bernhard Willhelm, Henrik Vibskov and Charles Le Mindu. "Monsters in Fashion" is curated by Vassilis Zidianakis, Creative Director of ATOPOS CVC, a non-profit cultural organization for the promotion of visual culture, which is also based in Athens and was founded in 2003 by Stamos Fafalios and Vassilis Zidianakis.

ATOPOS is unique in its function as an independent curatorial platform which promotes scholarship and organizes exhibitions on fashion and greater visual culture. It fills an important gap for independent curatorial voices and non-profit organizations in the field of fashion curation—a vital and established practice in the field of contemporary art, where organizations, such as Independent Curators International began as early as the 1970s. ATOPOS's touring exhibition "RRRIPP!!! Paper Fashion (currently on view in Melbourne) and the accompanying catalogue greatly advanced the scholarship on the use of paper in the history of fashion, as well as bringing forth novel exhibition practices.

The current exhibition "Monsters in Fashion" promises to do the same, as it was developed with the accompanying book "NOT A TOY: Fashioning Radical Characters," (Pictoplasma Publishing, Berlin, 2011) edited by Vassilis Zidianakis and featuring essays by Valerie Steele (Director and Chief Curator of the Museum at FIT) Gregg Duggan and Judith Hoos Fox (founders of the international curatorial partnership C2), Jose Teunissen (professor at the ArtEZ Institute of the Arts, Arnhem), the anthropologist Ted Polhemus, as well as myself. Hopefully, the exhibition will travel as extensively as the previous one did, and both eventually will be shown on this side of the Atlantic.

I am really thrilled, as I was invited to Athens to speak at the Benaki Museum on the topic of the grotesque in contemporary fashion in conjunction with the exhibition, so a more complete report on the exhibition is forthcoming!

For now I will leave you with some images of the exhibition and the curator's evocative words:

"Characters are abstract and reduced figures with a strong anthropomorphic appeal and bold graphical silhouette. Over the last decade, they have humorously sampled and remixed their way through visual codes and media, confronting the viewer head-on, regardless of cultural background. This aesthetic approach has a strong influence on contemporary fashion and costume design. International artists create playful dresses, avant-garde costumes and hairstyles, re-inventing the human body and sending their monstrous, enigmatic, radical and grotesque new Characters onto the catwalk and beyond. They redefine the relation between body and costume by mixing visual communication codes and questioning the established aesthetic norms."

Djurdja Bartlett, “FashionEast: The Spectre that Haunted Socialism” and Paulina Olowska “Applied Fantastic.”

Paulina Olowska, Ela, 2010, Oil on canvas.

Update: Bartlett will speak at the Museum at FIT Friday the 4th at 6pm

An increased interest is being paid to fashion under the Eastern Block. Chiefly, Djurdja Bartlett’s “FashionEast: The Spectre that Haunted Socialism” was recently published by MIT Press. The repository of over ten years of research by Bartlett—a research fellow at the London College of Fashion—this ground-breaking book is an in-depth and beautifully illustrated study of fashion’s relation to socialism throughout the twentieth century. By employing a vast array of sources, it traces the history of fashion under socialism in the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, East Germany, Poland and Yugoslavia.

An interesting parallel to the book was a recent exhibition at Metro Pictures showcasing the recent work of Polish artist Paulina Olowska. Titled “Applied Fantastic,” the exhibition was comprised of paintings as well as actual sweaters based on home-knitted patterns from late communist Poland, which were in turn based on adaptation and re-interpretation of Western fashion, thus showing a protracted engagement with Western fashion in communist Poland.

The title of the show is a reference to Polish writer Leopold Tyrmand, who, “describing the localized re-creations of Western styles,” coined the term ‘Applied Fantastic’ in 1954. Thus, similarly to Bartlett’s book Olowska, in a strikingly different medium, explores the Eastern block’s fascination with Western fashion, or as described in Bartlett’s book fashion’s role as “the spectre that haunted socialism.”

Francesca Granata

Paulina Olowska, Sweater 3 (Ela), 2010

I Hurt I Am in Fashion

Screen Short from "I Hurt I Am in Fashion"

A five-month old website "I Hurt I Am in Fashion" manages, through a witty juxtaposition of text and image, to parody the fashion industry (with a particular focus on the modelling industry)—one which is often so over the top to be notoriously difficult to parody. Yet through its dry wit and paucity of words "I Hurt I Am in Fashion" succeeds where many (including Robert Altman) have failed!