Posted inArt

The Impossible Curation of Schiaparelli and Prada

It’s inevitable not to compare the new show at the Metropolitan Museum’s Costume Institute to last year’s blockbuster, Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty, however unfair that might be. But it doesn’t matter, because Schiaparelli and Prada: Impossible Conversations, a pairing of two disparate designers that gives far too much precedence to the latter, falls flat, regardless of what preceded it.

Posted inArt

She Gives Good Window Display

January usually sees the dismantling of lavish holiday windows on Fifth Avenue, a dissipation of arresting tableaux that engaged pedestrians. But the eminent Paris department store Le Printemps refused to wait until next year to showcase another extravagant display, hosting fashion icon’s Daphne Guinness’s second foray into performance art housed in their windows.

Posted inArt

Is Fashion Art, Style Icons & Other Topics with the Director of the Museum at FIT

Among the cringe-worthy capitalizing on alternative lifestyles and incessant branding that permeates the fashion industry, it’s difficult to carve out a public forum to discuss the cultural, political and intellectual importance of what we wear. But the director and chief curator of the Museum at FIT, Valerie Steele is doing a good job as one of the few public personas who speak openly about the importance of clothing and adornment and her latest show on style icon Daphne Guinness.

Posted inArt

The Top 10 Objects with Unnecessary Designer Labels

Have some designers gone a little too far slapping their high profile names and logos on things? Do we really live in a world where designer bicycles are the must-have of the season? Let’s take a look at some innocent objects that were perfectly good without a designer name that now we have the uncontrollable urge to purchase thanks to aggressive marketing and brand awareness.

Posted inArt

Alexander McQueen’s Sartorial Savagery

What becomes a legend most? How are those cultural superstars chosen, the ones whose very names invoke awe, wonder, or at least a gasp? Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty, the comprehensive retrospective of the late designer’s ravishing raiment now on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art certainly provides a clue. With an hour and a half wait to enter (on a good day), a de facto gala in his honor and almost unanimous praise from critics, the McQueen legend continues to thrive in the eerie, operatic halls of the exhibition space. He may have a spectacular artistic output, and he may have defined an era of rising fashion stars, but the question remains how his deification came to be, how he came to define 21st century fashion with a short, tragically romantic career.