Condensation: Chen Chieh-jen at the Asia Society

Still from Chen Chieh-jen's video Factory (2003)

The Asia Society organized the first solo show of the Taiwanese video artist Chen Chieh-jen. Among the harrowingly uncanny videos on show, the first, "Factory" (2003) stood out for me. It focused on garment workers returning to an abandoned factory where they had worked for the best part of their lives, prior to its sudden closing in the mid-'90s due to the decline of the Taiwanese manufacturing sector. Shot in Super 8mm and shown at a slow speed without a soundtrack, the video lyrically captures the female garment workers’ feeling of mourning and loss for the abandoned building (whose previous bustling rhythms are shown through interspersed historical footage). The work they once completed there is symbolized by a leftover men’s suit jacket, held up at the beginning of the video. This ordinary looking jacket stands as a statement to the complex personal and collective narratives which imbue even the most simple of garments. (For an extract of the video and exhibition info, click here)

Francesca

101 Dresses

Mimi Smith Camouflage Maternity Dress, 2004, based on 1966 "Maternity Dress

If you are in or around New Haven don't miss 101 Dresses, an exhibition curated by Linda Lindroth and Denise Markonish at Artspace, which will be up until June 23.

The exhibition "celebrates the theme of fashion in contemporary art. On view are 101+ examples in all media, by a mix of local and national visual artists as well as the work of fashion designers and collectors. It takes its inspiration from Eleanor Estes' 1944 classic children's book, The Hundred Dresses."

The selection of artists and designers in the exhibit span generations as it includes the work of Zoe Sheehan, Marisa Jahn, and Despina Papadopoulos alonsgside that of Yoko Ono, Mimi Smith, and Laurie Simmons. (Here, you can find a full list of the artists and designers included.)

Francesca

Modabot: Internet Fashion Week

I have been meaning to write about Modabot for quite some time, as I find it one of the most interesting fashion sites out there. The Berlin-based website primarily covers topics in that slippery area known as “avant-garde fashion” in an intelligent yet unpretentious manner. The fact that it’s written in German—a language that doesn't come easy to me, despite having briefly lived there—makes it hard for me to give a full assesment! Though what I do know is that they recently interviewed Giana González of Hacking Couture, and they are introducing an internet fashion week concomitantly with Berlin fashion Week in July.Francesca

The Power of Poiret

Paul Poiret, date and location unknown. Photographed by Lipnitzki. (Via www.NewYorker.com)

Poiret: King of Fashion is one of the most exciting fashion exhibitions that New York City has seen in quite awhile. It certainly helps that the Costume Institute had such an alluring topic to begin with, but it is the abstracted in-situ backdrops, thoughtful wall text and amazing objects that come together to form a heady exhibition. This show, the first on Poiret in 30 years, serves as an inspiration to our emerging generation of fashion designers, collectors and scholars.

Fashion historians have long known that it was the designer Paul Poiret that freed women from the corset a hundred years ago by creating an empire-waist, tubular dress that looked backwards to a revolutionary France, and even further to Classical times. However, one really starts to understand the power of Poiret by listening to the curators' (Harold Koda and Andrew Bolton) argument that Poiret essentially created modernist fashion by using a reductive geometrical approach that emphasized draping rather than tailoring. Combine Poiret's innovative silhouettes with his embracement of exoticism and luxury, his concept of lifestyle branding, and his muse and wife Denise as his main advertisement, and we get a very strong sense as to why Poiret called himself the king of fashion.

However, there are a few minor issues I have with the exhibition:

While the thematic groupings (exoticism, historicism, collaboration, etc) contribute to a richer understanding of Poiret's work, the lack of a clear timeline proves disconcerting to the more literal-minded visitor. For example, dresses from early in Poiret's career still show up midway through the exhibition, mixed in with dresses from the end of his career. As some of the objects shown are really costume rather than fashion, this jumble makes it difficult for the casual visitor to get a clear sense of the development of Poiret's line. Another problem is the missing attributions for the accessories on the mannequins. The accessories definitely complete the look, but the visitor must ask if these too are from Denise Poiret, and thus a truly tangible reincarnation of Poiret’s vision? The catalog complicates this, as it overwhelmingly shows only the garments on the mannequins and not the exhibited accessorized look. There is a case at the end of the exhibition filled to the brim with shoes, fans, perfume bottles (lent of course by the owner of the world's greatest perfume bottle collection, Christie Meyer Lefkowith) that does contain attributions, but what of the other pieces in the show? These details are minor, but irritating.

A more important critique about the exhibition is that, while Koda and Bolton mention the hobble skirt in their writings, they fail to examine this controversial issue at all, or even produce an example of this garment that supposedly shackled women. Perhaps that was their point though – to emphasize Poiret’s inherent modernity about clothing’s relationship to the body, rather than a simple misstep. The exhibition in general is a poetic and powerful look at pre-modern fashion. The lush color of the garments and backdrops, the decorative art accents, and the computer-simulated patterns projected onto screens hiding and revealing actual garments prove a transporting experience into Poiret's world.

Press coverage of this exhibition has been justly positive, if not that critical. Roberta Smith's article in the NY Times is exemplarary of this: a pleasantly dull snapshot of the exhibition and the top ten facts about Poiret. Perhaps limited word space is the problem, as Judith Thurman's article in the New Yorker gives us a more engaging look at Poiret, if not exactly the exhibition itself. A better look at the exhibition has to be via New York Magazine, with its video tour by curator Andrew Bolton. His explanation of Poiret lends insight to the exhibition's thesis, and also gives us a glimpse at how the curator perceives Poiret's influence today.

There is also this entertaining interview with Head Curator Harold Koda. Perhaps my favorite bit of press comes not from recent times, but rather this contemporary's view of Poiret, simply titled "The Egotist."

"Poiret: King of Fashion" is on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art through 5 August 2007.

Sarah Scaturro

Museums, Art, Fashion and Commerce

MoMu Museum, Antwerp

With a slew of fashion exhibits being staged across the United States and often outside the boundaries of traditional costume and fashion museums (the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; The Meadows Museum in Dallas; the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles) discussions about the relevance and appropriateness of fashion within the museum come up once again. Virginia Postrel has written an interesting article on the topic in this month’s Atlantic Monthly. Titled “Dress Sense,” the article debates why fashion stirs up such strong reactions both positive and negative, once it’s placed in the museum. Postrel argues that the uneasiness surrounding fashion and museums is ultimately an uneasiness about markets. She also points out how recurrent discussions of fashion’s appropriateness in museums (particularly art museums) end up preventing more interesting and critical discussions on the validity of the exhibits themselves. A similar point was also made by Christopher Breward in an article on the British staging of the controversial Armani exhibit (Guardian 2003), in which the British scholar also notes how criticism often arose primarily from the strong associations between fashion and commerce. This association remains perhaps most problematic within the art museum, where the relation between art, commerce and the museum however strong and well-established tends to be, if not hidden, at least de-emphasized. Thus, the embattled relation between fashion and the museums (particularly of the art variety) could be partially attributed to the fact that by entering the art museum, fashion ("tainted" by the commercial) functions as a mirror of sorts, and “unveils” the preexisting ties between museums, markets and commerce.

Francesca Granata