Vogue, Vogue, Gender, Repetition, Erasure

I wrote this piece recently on Madonna’s music video “Vogue.” It was fun to write, so I thought I’d edit it and include it here.

Feathers part like curtains to announce the beginning of a performance. Figures impeccably dressed strike poses and are interspersed at intervals between objects of art. In participating in the same space as paintings and sculpture, they acquire the attributes of being visually constructed and topically determined. But, beneath surfaces, there are only more surfaces denying interiority. The figures are thus postured to be apprehended through their presentations. Their personae and their appearances inscribe themselves in each other as they are being simultaneously determined.

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A Moment in Fashion: Aria Art Gallery, Florence

I found The Aria Art Gallery by accident on a walk to get somewhere else. I was attracted to it without first knowing it was an art gallery; its nameplate was very demure and almost diminished entirely by the lushly arbored garden behind a gate in an otherwise narrow stone-and-cobble street.

The show they had up, called “Glamour Icons and Fashion, Photography and Vintage Dresses 50-60” was not only gorgeous, but pushed the border of what a gallery could recognize as high art. One part of the display featured photographs of film stars on and off set, while another featured three period dresses on mannequins. The photos explained a union we take for granted (of fashion with celebrity culture) and one we have yet to fully accept (of fashion as high art of intellectual merit). The dresses stood in the center of the rooms, rather than behind glass panes as in museums, and in that way they commanded and occupied their own space. One other display featured hats, cases, some accessories arranged not in the museological way, but like an arrangement in a shop window. I loved this because it suggested that fashion displays did not need to be scientifically dissected in order to retain their intellectual potency.

Sitting next to the press releases, a stack of packets on the brief history of fashion were a thoughtful footnote. More than simply contextualizing, these demonstrated fashion’s sensitivity to both artistic and cultural values over time. The texts also reveal that the gallery is highly conscious of the relevance of this show in the gallery’s space: Italy’s legacies in cinema, models, fashion, and art not only cross and condense here, but play coyly off of the gallery’s physical location. Being only blocks away from the Uffizi, the show proves that an Italian icon can manifest in many ways.

Aria Art Gallery
Borgo S.S. Apostoli, 40
Florence, Italy

Through August 20, 2010

Viktor & Rolf’s Meta-Fashion for 2010

Viktor & Rolf have made it to the top of my list of watched designers since my late introduction to the aesthetics of identity through fashion. Many designers since the 1990′s, V&R among them, should rightfully be called theorists practicing in visual media.

This season, V&R blew my mind. Their show became simultaneously the literal creation of and an allegory of fashion. It was constructed around the idea of one central model wearing the entire collection on her body, which Viktor and Rolf would unwrap a layer at a time, and use to dress a new model on the runway. We could see the process of creating and outfitting that is often kept beneath the glossed surface, so that we can see the labor of it. We also understand that this can be read as an allegory of the work of a fashion designer as one who creates a clothed subject. We witness the unravelling of an identity (if you think of clothes as constructing the self), then the the re-construction of these layers, given a new identity when applied to a new figure. The layering, the interchangeability, the exchange of what is interior/exterior, the dismantling of a heirarchy and order to clothes (underthings on bottom, outerwear on top)–these make me think of linkages, multiplicity, and Deleuze.

It helped that Kristen McMenamy, a 90′s supermodel, was the central icon bearing the entire collection. There was a sense of regenerative continuity that is so central to the flows of fashion.

And the clothes in themselves are technical genius. Drawstrings might be the new iteration of draping and of sculpting negative space.

Viktor&Rolf RTW FW10

Viktor&Rolf