His & Hers
There is a month left of the His & Hers exhibit at the Museum of FIT, a costume show that compares examples men’s and women’s clothes from 1760-2010. It is a small, quiet show that presents the way gender differences were expressed in clothing through several centuries. 18th and 19th century fashions display stark differences, though as the exhibit moves closer to the present, designers begin to subvert conventions. Although there are earlier examples of women appropriating traditional male styling, the designs of Yves Saint Laurent in the 1970s and 80s emerge as a major leap towards the type of androgynous dressing that is accepted in contemporary fashion. His Le Smoking ensemble, first introduced in the mid-1970s, remains an icon of transgressive sexual ambiguity.
Above: 1920s
1950s
Left: Bonnie Cashin Hostess Apron and Necktie
1949-1959
Far Right: Sportsmaker (Tom Brigance) playsuit
1955
Yves Saint Laurent
Center: Le smoking ensemble: jacket, blouse, cummerbund, trousers
Black wool, black silk satin, ivory silk satin
Circa 1982, France
Right: Suit
Black and white checkered wool, silk charmeuse.
Fall 1983
1990s
Contemporary, including:
John Bartlett Mens and Womens Fall 2010
Right picture, pair on left
Burberry Prorsum Mens and Womens Fall 2010
Right picture, pair on right
Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology
Seventh Avenue at 27 Street
New York City 10001-5992
Sonia Delaunay at the Cooper-Hewitt
Today we visited the Sonia Delaunay exhibit at The Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum. The galleries are overflowing with her gorgeous graphic patterns. The geometric and floral prints are still fresh some 80 and 90 years later. Her very identifiable graphic style and color combinations have clearly influenced so much of what we are seeing in current collections.
The great aspect of this exhibit is that it shows her paintings on an equal footing with her design and textile work. She stated that she saw her commercial work as just an extension of her art, and not a lesser form. The exhibit includes glimpses into her notebooks so you can see how a beautiful fabric went from a sketch to a textile.
-JB
Tara Donovan at Pace Gallery
Taking advantage of the lovely weather in New York– and trying not to think about how long it would or wouldn’t last– our office ventured outside and took a field trip to the gallery-thick neighborhood of Chelsea. We lingered for a long while at Tara Donovan, who is showing in two of the Pace Gallery spaces. The first stop brought us into a large installation, Untitled (Mylar), 2011 , a shimmering coal colored assemblage of spheres that are reminiscent at once of disco balls, molecular structures, and a billowing smoke cloud. The spheres were made of curving tubes of thin metallic sheets of Mylar. The effect of light bouncing off of the reflective surfaces of the folds created variations of color and shadow, shiny and matte. The whole composition seemed to have built itself in every direction like coral, multiplying from the inside out.
Curious about what the accompanying show Drawings (Pins), 2010, would have waiting for us, we headed a few blocks north, where the white walls were hung with what seemed to be canvases of monochromatic compositions. Considering the name of the show, the works might have been large-scale re-imagining of day-dreamy pencil drawings, experiments in gradation and interlocking circles made with a compass. Upon closer viewing, however, the works revealed themselves as more sculpture than flat canvases: thousands of steel pins had been pressed into a backing board. The designs were created by varying the density of the pins to allow more or less of the white background to show through. The result were patterns and gradations of color with incredible depth and dimension. Like the larger installation, the play of light and shadow on simple forms was fascinating.
-EM
