Martin Munkacsi and Action Fashion

Lucile Brokaw on Long Island Beach, 1933. By Martin Munkacsi.

Without Martin Munkacsi, fashion photography could have been a boring medium. In the 1920s and 30s, Munkacsi's dynamic shooting style caught the increasing speed and vitality of modern life. His photographs were integral to the development of action photography, and gave fashion its first glimpse at photographs that showed the synergy between clothing, body, and motion.

In the early 1930s, he began shooting for Harper's Bazaar, the results of which are now on display at the International Center of Photography in NYC. The exhibition "Martin Munkacsi: Think While You Shoot" is up until April 29th. A comprehensive grouping of his work, we see his optimism and joy at the modern age gradually sink into darker, probing images that, by the 1940s, question humankind. Also on display are two other exhibitions for the fashion scholar - Henri Cartier-Bresson's scrapbook and Louise Brooks and the "New Woman" in Weimar cinema.

ICP Museum Gallery
1133 Avenue of the Americas at 43rd St.
New York, NY 10036
www.icp.org

Sarah Scaturro

A Walk in the Wardrobe

Photo from Poireton

"A Walk in the Wardrobe" is a suggestive exhibit recently organized by the MA in Fashion Curation at the London College of Fashion. (The group that put it together goes by the name Glasscasecuration.) The exhibit, which was unfortunately up for only a week, at the Ada Street gallery, explored the intimate relationship between fashion and memory. Trying to go beyond the visual, it set out to trigger lost and forgotten memories through the sense of sound and smell. A soundscape comprised of muffled noises—of what seemed to be people walking and rummaging through closets—was paired with bygone scents (the smell of moth and lilac) reminiscent of one’s grandmother’s wardrobe. The exhibit is comprised of two rooms: One is dedicated to the "masculine" wardrobe, with walls lined by black top hats. The other is dedicated to the "feminine" one, featuring a number of white dresses from different eras hung from the ceiling through a system of fishing wires. The color of the dresses, combined with the eerie and ghostly quality that empty clothes evoke, seem to perfectly illustrate Peter Stallybrass’s perceptive assessment that: "There is, indeed, a close connection between the magic of lost clothes and the fact that ghosts often step out of closets and wardrobes to appall us, haunt us, perhaps even console us."

Francesca

Belgian Fashion

Last week I went to Belgium, mainly to visit the collection of the Mode Museum in Antwerp. It’s one of the most interesting places for fashion exhibits thanks to their innovative installation practices, as well as their penchant for exhibitions which contextualize the designers’ aesthetics by showing how they’re articulated across a number of media and not exclusively within the garments themselves.

The exhibit that’s currently up is meant as an introduction to the MoMu collection, which has great pieces of contemporary experimental fashion alongside historical ones. And the juxtaposition of historical and contemporary garments, at times within the same mannequin, was perhaps the most interesting part of the show. In July, the museum will organize a show of Bernhard Willhelm’s work in collaboration with the designer himself, which promises to be quite comprehensive as Willhelm donated the entirety of his archives to the museum

MoMu also organized an exhibit on Belgian Fashion at the Flemish Parliament in Brussels. Called “Antwerp Six,” the exhibit is structured in four separate parts. The first is dedicated to the work of the Antwerp Academy and shows students’ work starting from the academy’s beginnings in the 1960s to the present. The subsequent section is dedicated to the Antwerp Six, as well as Martin Margiela. The third shows the work of more contemporary Belgian (or rather Belgian-trained) designers, from Raf Simons to A.F. Vandevorst to Bruno Pieters. Probably the most interesting section, it contains hard-to-find shows and garments by the now retired designer Jurgi Persoons, as well as a video of A.F. Vandevorst Spring/Summer 1999 show. Starting with models sleeping in what appear to be hospital beds, the AFV show must be one of the most lyrical fashion shows ever staged. While the fourth and final section is dedicated to the future of Belgian fashion. What was also interesting about the exhibit was its installation, as each section was made of a free-standing modular cube (whose surface was covered with press clippings about Belgian fashion). It constituted a smart way to exhibit both the garments and the fashion shows in a choesive manner, while sidestepping the fact that the room itself wasn’t quite meant as a traditional exhibition space.

Francesca Granata

Upcoming!

Freddie Robins, Craft Kills (detail), 2002 (from MAD website)

Don’t miss the upcoming exhibit “Radical Lace and Subversive Knitting,” opening January 25th at the Museum of Arts and Design in NewYork. Curated by MAD’s chief curator David Revere McFadden, the exhibit will present contemporary work “using fiber in unexpected and unorthodox ways.” One of the few exhibits (at least in the States) to take a serious look at the interaction between art, crafts and design (without reinstaing old hierarchies in the process), it sets out to spotlight "a territory in which distinctions between art, craft, and design are seen to be arbitrary and artificial,” and showcasing work which is often “socially, politically, and artistically subversive.”

Also of notice is the upcoming issue of I.D. Magazine (January and February) on design collectives (one of our favorite topics), which presents the new work of Despina Papadopoulos of Studio 5050.

Francesca Granata

Tanya Marcuse's Undergarments and Armor

Tanya Marcuse, Corset with Silk Ribbon 1880s (from the collection of the Museum at FIT)

Don’t miss the exhibit Love & War: The Weaponized Woman, which will close this Saturday. Of particular notice are the photographs of Tanya Marcuse, which have been recently published in a beautiful clothbound book by Nazraeli Press with an introduction by Valerie Steele. Marcuse received a Guggenheim Fellowship to photograph undergarments and armor in a number of museums and archives in the U.S. and England. The beautifully evocative pictures trace parallels between these seemingly polarized categories of dressing by focusing on highly structured undergarments such as bustles, corsets and cage crinolines, and on amor which mirror the bodily contour of the wearer, thus “unveiling” the inside of the body rather than shielding it. As Valerie Steele points out in the book’s introduction, Marcuse’s plates (which often capture these garments still on their museums’ forms) perfectly illustrate that “certain poetic beauty in the historical remains of the past.”

Francesca