Berlin Fashion Week will be running from the 16th to the 20th of this month, and, as usual, it will feature an abundance of avant-garde and experimental designers alongside cross-pollinations of art and fashion. Among the many planned events is an installation featuring a group of young designers and organized by Projekt Galerie in galleries across the city. Included are Austrian designers Ute Ploier and Claudia Rosa Lukas, jewelry designer Maria Francesca Pepe—a graduate of the prestigious CSM MA program—alongside a number of other designers, artists and photographers.

Here is a full list of events, while Coutorture will offer a comprehensive coverage of the shows.

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On Tuesday, July 22 from 6 to 8pm, the School of Visual Arts MFA in Design Criticism presents an evening of sports-fueled design criticism at the KGB bar in the East Village (85 east 4th Street).

“Michael Bierut, co-founder of Design Observer, questions stadium architecture’s tendency to nostalgia. Metropolis contributing editor Jennifer Kabat scrutinizes Nike’s new uniforms for the Chinese Olympics team. ESPN sports uniform critic Paul Lukas explores the cultural history of the humble baseball cap. Finally, The New York Times car critic Phil Patton considers the curious conflation of celebrity athlete shoes and cars.”

The event is free and open to the public.

Laurie Simmons, Woman/ Purple Dress/ Kitchen, 1978

While the Victor & Rolf exhibition opened at the Barbican in London, with a gigantic doll house containing doll-size replicas of Victor & Rolf’s collections of the past fifteen years, in New York there is a much more “minute” doll-themed show by the artist Laurie Simmons.

The New York-based artist’s early work, dating from the late 1970s, is on show at Caroline Nitsch’s project room and will be on view until June 28. Simmons’ black and white photographs stage female dolls in miniature houses and rooms. Some of the houses’ façade are disassembled, while the rooms’ furniture gets “dislocated” from their proper place. These altered female interiors combined with the off-kilter placement of the figures doubles the uncanny feeling conveyed by the dolls and relays a feeling of disrupted and alienated domesticity.

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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.

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Inge Grognard for Martin Margiela

Don’t miss the current (Spring/Summer) issue of Acne Paper. Of particular interest is the interview with the make-up artist Inge Grognard, whose work often confutes traditional notions of beauty and of what falls under the category of make-up. Grognard has collaborated with a number of Belgian designer (Dries Van Noten, A.F. Vandervorst, Jurgi Persoons) and is particularly well-know for her collaborations with Martin Margiela, whose runway show often used a combination of “accessories” (such as veils and masks) and make-up to cover the model’s eyes and shield their identities.

In the interview with Anja Cronberg for Acne, she recounts her early work with Margiela, who she had met in high school, as well as of her own projects: “I use myself as a model—Grognard says—I use dolls or masks, and then my husband [photographer Ronald Stoops] documents it.”

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Mika Rottenberg, Still from Cheese, 2007.

I have been meaning to write about Mika Rottenberg’s video installation Cheese at the Whitney Biennial, which just closed. Based on the relation between the body and labor and on the generative ability of the female body, it intertwines grotesque and carnivalesque elements in an absurd makeshift farm setting.

This particular video-installation was shot in Central Florida on the property of one of several women starring in the video—all of whom sport incredibly long hair. (The performers belong to a “long-hair club.”) The piece is based on the story of the Southerland Sisters, 19th century sisters who displayed their extremely long hair in a Barnum and Bailey performance and marketed hair fertilizers: a hair growth formula allegedly made from their own hair, mixed with water from the Niagara falls.

Presented in precarious architectural structures, the footage was shown across a series of different monitors and portrayed the women wearing chemise dresses and engaging in what appear to be absurd and pointless repetitive tasks—many of which involved manipulating their long hair, on a makeshift wood structure, surrounded by farm animals.

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Original sketch for the Wedding Dress from the collection sketchbook; Fall-Winter 1988; Graphite on paper, gazar sample; Fondation Pierre Bergé - Yves Saint Laurent; Photo Fondation Pierre Bergé - Yves Saint Laurent

***Update: Yves Saint Laurent died Sunday, 1 June 2008. His obituary is here.***

The opening of this retrospective exhibition at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts has flown surprisingly under the radar for being so close to New York City. Curated by the French costume historian Florence Müller, the emphasis is on the dialogue between Yves Saint Laurent and art, both in terms of considering his garments as actual art objects and in recognition of his inspirations found in art. The display is broken into four themes: sketches, gender-bending, color usage and lyricism. The exhibition includes over 160 looks spanning his entire career culled from over 5000 ensembles and 15000 objects belonging to the Fondation Pierre Bergé – Yves Saint Laurent.

The museum’s website, while lacking a bit in object photographs, does have a few video clips along with brief biographical notes on his life.

Montreal Museum of Fine Arts
The exhibition runs from May 29 to September 28, 2008, before moving on the Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco.

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.”

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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

UE Western Regional Council Building

“Frau Fiber, activist and textile worker, will mimic the expenditure of apparel production, reconstructing a white shirt and business suit originally produced offshore. A suit and shirt, the archetypal white-collar uniform, is an American icon, standing for quality, dependability and style, enhancing the wearer’s professional image.

The remade garments will be available for purchase in the storefront, priced on a geographical sliding scale (hours worked to make the reconstructed garment multiplied by the wage scale in the original garment’s country of manufacture—China, Guatemala, Taiwan—equals KO’s cost of the uniform).”

For detailed information on dates and locations, please visit Gallery 400

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