Love and War: The Weaponized Woman

Issey Miyake, molded plastic bustier, 1983. Photo by Irving Solero, MFIT. www.fitnyc.edu/museum

The Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology unveils a daring exhibition this weekend. Exploring the discourse between hard and soft, silk and steel, lingerie and armor, Love and War: The Weaponized Woman will present modern and historical fashion objects from designers like Thierry Mugler, Narciso Rodriguez, Junya Watanabe and Jean Paul Gaultier. The exhibition runs from September 9 - December 16, 2006.

FIT will also offer a special symposium this Saturday, September 9. Speakers such as Zowie Broach and Brian Kirkby from Boudicca, Dr. Valerie Steele and Jean Yu will discuss fashion's most powerful and influential dichotomy.

Saturday, September 9
9AM-5PM
Katie Murphy Amphitheatre
$30, Free to all students, and FIT Faculty and staff

Please visit www.fitnyc.edu/museum for detailed speaker, schedule, and registration information or call 212-217-7715.

Sarah Scaturro

Shopdropping: Experiments in the Aisle

Zoë Sheehan Saldaña, Shopdropping (2003)

An exhibition about Shopdropping curated by Pond is currently on view at the New Gallery in Calgari, and sounds very interesting and quite humorous. Most intriguing seems to be a gentle piece by Zoë Sheehan Saldaña—a subtle comment on mass-production versus handmade and their relation to authenticity. For the piece titled Shopdropping, the artist bought a cheap Wal-Mart woman’s blouse and duplicated it by hand using matching fabric, thread and trimmings. She then returned her version of the blouse (to which she attached the original’s label and price tag of $9.94) to Wal-Mart, to be bought by unwitting shopper.

Francesca

Waist Down

Photo from Style.com

A store may seem like an unlikely location for a fashion exhibition, but for the past several weeks the Prada Epicenter in Soho has transformed itself into a quasi-museum like environment, displaying a retrospective of Miuccia Prada’s skirts (the exhibition closes tomorrow). Stores, more specifically department stores, have a history of displaying fine art among the more quotidian purchasable goods as it was common practice in the nineteenth-century to transform a hall of commerce into a kunsthalle.

However, entering the Prada Epicenter is a bit disorienting. One’s not sure what’s on display and what’s for sale. But then again those items on “exhibition” were also for sale at on time or another. One supposes that’s the problem when the “designer who’s done more for putting women in skirts than any other contemporary designer” mounts her own retrospective. Perhaps, the exhibition would have felt less like an advertisement if other skirts from other designers were included.

But one can’t help but marvel at the sheer beauty of the displays. Skirts become artfully camouflaged wallpaper when mounted on uninterrupted yardage of the same textile. Skirts playfully twirl and kick, begging the viewer to come and pet them, something one can never do in a museum. Bug-eyed magnifying glasses emphasize tiny metal knife and fork appliqués on one skirt and crystal embroidery on another. One walks away confounded, wondering if Prada’s determination to turn clothing into exhibition-worthy art is obnoxiously pretentious or refreshing.

Sonya

Calo Mollino at Salon 94

Don’t miss the current exhibit at Salon 94. On view are a series of photographs by the Turin-born designer and architect Carlo Mollino. The photos, mainly in black and white, were taken between 1955 and 1960 using a Leica and color film. The setting is an apartment in the Villa Scalero on the hills of Turin, which Mollino partially furnished with some of his pieces from the 1940s. But what’s most intriguing are the corsetry and French lingerie which he used to cloth the models posed in risqué yet oddly confrontational stances.