September 12, 2019 – February 23, 2020
2 Columbus Circle, W. 58th St at 8th Ave
New York City, madmuseum.org

“The World of Anna Sui” is exactly what is delivered through the excellent curating and exhibition design that clearly articulates both the process of Sui’s collections, the inspiration behind her oeuvre and the collaborative methods behind the designer’s practice, runway shows and design studio. This exhibition is an adaptation of the 2017 version at the Fashion and Textile Museum, London.

Sui emerged in the late 1980s as an ambitious, driven, and indefatigable figure that deftly navigated the intricacies of the fashion landscape from her early days working for Seventh Avenue sportswear companies. Sui quickly learned the importance of satisfying the retail market by appealing to department store buyers in designing wearable and thus saleable garments. From her early days as a fashion stylist associated with Steven Meisel and Franca Sozzani, she honed her talent of putting together forceful fashion statements by combining clothing and accessories paired with the work of top hair stylists, make-up artists, and models. No less important was her presence on the NYC Club scene, in the 1980s and early 1990s. Likewise, as Sui absorbed trends in cinema culture, avant-garde fashion, as well as Karl Lagerfeld’s robust reshaping of the House of Chanel, those resources fueled her creative process. Against this backdrop, Sui has forged an immersive, highly imaginative style that transfers her aesthetic obsessions culled from contemporary culture into wearable designs for a youth focused market.

The fifth floor gallery at the Museum of Art and Design is dedicated to Sui’s influences highlighting examples of fashion luminaries such as Zandra Rhodes, Norma Kamali, Betsy Johnson, Diana Vreeland, and Biba (as worn by Anita Pallenberg) that are equally notable as highly influential female role models; against this formidable backdrop Sui’s fashion narrative emerges. The trademark Tiffany-style pendant lamps and glossy black Victorian furnishings that serve as fixtures in her boutiques amplify the mood of the Sui universe within the exhibition design. A wall of rock ‘n roll band posters sets the tone for both Sui’s internal soundtrack and that of her fashion shows.

If the spirit of the times stretching from the 1990s to the present could be encapsulated by a fashion exhibition, this presentation hits it out of the park. The show cogently identifies a uniquely American brand of fashion designer that, unlike her European counterparts, is indebted to the functionality of wearable sportswear that channels contemporary culture to a youth market. Sui’s influences – such as the vintage revival, rock ‘n roll, punk, grunge and surf culture – are displayed in imaginative tableaux reflecting a set design befitting each theme. Thus, a lush tropical backdrop completes the presentation of surfer motifs from Spring 2004, 2016 and 2019. Additionally, there are panoramic projections of video footage from associated collections throughout that bring each runway show and fashion moment to life.

Notable are the exhibition portions illustrating the creative process such as mood boards. For example, one board references the recent Warhol exhibition at the Whitney Museum, including his early commercial shoe illustrations and iconic celebrity paintings, fashion illustrations, various fabric swatches, and passementerie. Video footage of key Sui collaborators such as Pat McGrath (make-up), Garren (hair), and Thomas Miller (studio head), indicate both Sui’s long-term creative relationships and reveals the highly imaginative and collaborative work methods associated with her output.

European designers of this generation such as Jean-Paul Gaultier, Alexander McQueen, Romeo Gigli and John Galliano created fantasy statement-based collections whereby wearablity came as a second thought. Conversely, Sui’s output is grounded in stylistic functionality. Sui notes, in a 1999 profile in the New York Times, in reference to vintage designs, that, “You have to bring it back so that a person can walk down the street and not look like she walked out of a costume epic or a time machine. It’s got to fit how people dress today.”

Sui, as an aficionado of pop music and the associated fashion looks of the punk movement, such as the shock fashion designs of Vivienne Westwood and the anarchistic impresario motives of Malcolm McLaren, nonetheless puts a positive spin on their punk negation and revolt tactics by transforming the rejection of the status quo into bold and fanciful fashions – perhaps as a reflection of American positivism. In a similar vein, the disheveled thrift-store look exemplified by Kurt Cobain and the grunge movement is channeled, not as an affirmation of heroin chic, but rather, by Sui as readymade ensembles for those connected to the grunge aesthetic rather than the actual decadent and ultimately destructive image of the rock star lifestyle.

Sui’s persona and design outlook are best mirrored in the dichotomy of the pirate and the fairy princess as both figures appear in several collections. The pirate ensemble worn by Naomi Campbell (Fall 1992) replicates a swashbuckling outlaw in full seafaring regalia. Sui often transmits the fantasy of the romantic Bloomsbury era with diaphanous florals exuding a nymph-like aura. Likewise, both the Fairytale and Nomadic collections contain several pixie-like designs, such as Icelandic princesses and fairies. Sui’s muse, Keith Richards. is often associated with the pirate archetype with an androgynous bent – that is equally a Sui touchstone. The hyper-feminine girlish tendencies are shot through many of Sui’s collections as in reference to the schoolgirl and surfer girl looks. Her longtime friend and associate Steven Meisel remarks, in a catalog essay, “Anna is extremely feminine and her femininity translates into her fashions… She’s all about dresses – slip dresses, tunic dresses, smock dresses, baby doll dresses.”

The trademark 19th Century Aubrey Beardsley-style Art Nouveau graphics paired with dark gothic Victorian-style and lavender backgrounds appear in Sui’s interior store designs as well as in the packaging of her cosmetics and fragrances. Sui, throughout her career, embraces rigorous branding associated with these visual elements, which evolved over the years through her serious interest in graphic design, interiors, flea markets, and thrift shops.

Also notable within the presentation of “The World of Anna Sui” is the robust public programming that accompanies the exhibition. Panel discussions with fashion world luminaries such as hair stylist Garren and make-up artist Pat McGrath bring the creative influencers to the stage. Likewise, screenings of films such as Marie Antoinette (2006), including a conversation with director Sofia Coppola, showcase the visual media that had lasting impact on Sui’s designs while highlighting key contemporary cultural figures within a dynamic public forum.

Lastly, Sui’s runway productions – which began in 1991, jump-started by model friends Naomi Campbell, Linda Evangelista, and Christy Turlington – added a supercharged endorsement to her debut show situated in an offbeat Chelsea warehouse. Later runway incarnations, such as a performance by rock band Elastica “in concert” with models strutting the stage perimeter, demonstrate her dedication to indie rock and the performative gesture within a fashion context.

One need not be a bohemian, a rock star, a surfer girl or a hippy to dress the part and touch the magic all the while going about one’s everyday life. Sui designs enable an idealized fantasy version of oneself all the while navigating a contemporary urban landscape, a suburban environment, or a rural outpost. One can dress in a Sui design, and thereby transform into version of a Sui fashion trope, be it a rock star, boho, punk, or a surfer chick. Once engulfed in the magical world of Anna Sui, one finds all that is cool and edgy yet safe to wear both at home and at work. Creative and alternative lifestyles embody fashion looks, and Sui translates such visual statements magically into classic wearable designs.

The post Fashion and Comfort After Punk: Anna Sui at MAD appeared first on artcritical.

In an artist statement from a few years ago, MacPhee wrote that “My work has always been about survival both personal and as part of a species.” Not surprisingly, those collapsing cityscapes were made five years after the attacks of September 11, 2001, a length of time it seems that a lot of artists have taken to absorb that day into their psyche and their work. Since then her paintings have become more and more abstract, but held fast to her interest in both architecture and the body, in a really ingenious and personal way, I might add, by using pieces of fabric to create compositional form.

LESLIE WAYNE: Medrie, we’ve known each other for a very long time. I’m always fascinated by how the trajectory of one’s development keeps circling back on the same fundamental themes, in spite of how different the work may appear over the course of time. I recall so clearly falling in love with your paintings in the mid 80s, of large and surreal architectural landscapes. Since then, I’ve seen those water towers, industrial silos and stovepipes morph into highly chromed body parts floating in space, and later back into architecture in scenes of urban landscape subject to the forces of nature – and culture – at their most apocalyptic.

The story goes that you have a secret other life as a fantasy clothing designer. Is this right?

Medrie MacPhee: Yes indeed! Back in 2011 at a Christmas party instead of doing the usual re-gift at a Secret Santa event, I made a hat sculpture. That is, a collaged hat made out of a number of hats and notions. The impulse to collage has always been there no matter what body of work I was engaged in. For me collage is deeply rooted. Not within the classic intentions of collage. But collage/collaging as representing an idea of how one’s life is cobbled together. Barely holding often, but a tenuous balance where the parts and the whole are critical. The bringing together of disparate parts, the things that shouldn’t go together but must, the fragments etc. was more of an existential process rather than purely visual. That was the genesis. Or maybe it was my English mother who grew up in London at a time when one apprenticed and she wanted to be a hat maker! In any case my concoctions became a big hit with artist friends and hats lead to tops, vests, one-piece outfits and the idea of a clothing line called “Relax” with comfort being primary. “Comfort clothing for a fraught time.”

Well it’s fascinating, don’t you think, that here you’ve brought together the two things that have dominated your work for years – body parts and architecture, by ripping apart clothing and using the pieces – the sleeve, or the pant leg, to piece together architectural form. It’s brilliant. But I know you and I would venture to guess that you never set out to formally or conceptually plan this approach in advance. So tell me, how did you get here? And were you aware of this psychological process at work?

As you say, in the beginning there was no idea that the clothing/sculpture would be anything other than what it was.

Artists have often wondered why I didn’t make sculpture because my focus so engaged with architecture and forms in space. But I was resolutely a painter and – like many of my generation – interested in the edge between abstraction and representation. It was the measuring of a painting space between a full-on Renaissance perspective – painting as window – and everything in between that obsessed me.

Also, the older I’ve gotten, the more – as a woman of my time – identity politics and feminism have shaped me. Every woman struggles with how to expand the language of painting and yet must inevitably deal with the burden of a mostly male history.

My intention – in working with clothing – wasn’t overtly feminist, yet that said, it definitely felt transgressive. Fashion, style, sewing, clothing as identity have always been oppressive to me. My preferred style is “building management!”

Yes I know! This is one of the funnier aspects of our friendship – my obsession with fashion and your complete disregard for it. But we could segue very easily into a discussion about fashion and feminism as a socio-political construct, and then we’d be getting a little off the point. But tell me how the pieces of dismembered clothing made their way – from a “fashion line” – into your painting. Was it purely formal, was it process driven, or were you always thinking about the idea of clothing from the get-go as a metaphor for something else?

It was not consciously any of those things. That said, I was on the move between 2009-14. At that time I was making intensely colorful and active paintings that had all of the architectural references upended and floating/exploding in space. Could have been the outcome of a disaster or a reordering of everything. I was on the lookout – but for what I didn’t know. Then I made a conscious decision to take the color out and basically mimic the minimal color in the works on paper focusing instead on structure and then surface. Somewhere in the middle of that process I had a sudden and powerful urge to put in a real object of clothing. It went in but like many times before when I have been ahead of myself it didn’t go anywhere for another year or so. At a certain moment I was convinced that the addition of the clothing provided that thing I was looking for. Even though (especially now) the paintings appear abstract, I still think of them as representations. For me, the clothing brings the paintings back into a context that tangibly refers to the world and to people. Additionally, as a way forward and a way of thinking about process differently, I settled on an idea of

the architecture of language. Using all of the inherent metaphors of language to visually suggest things like what is real and what is imaginary. What is the subplot? Is there transparency or opaqueness? Do these colors suggest something urgent/edgy or is the attitude more of stillness?

So as I understand it, the materials and the process presented themselves as metaphors for the architecture of language and that as you started seeing how the pieces of fabric could work, your mind opened up to the formal possibilities and the full measure of painting’s conceptual potential – beyond the normal confines of what we think of as paintings. Would that be accurate?

Well perhaps. I don’t think of decisions in painting as being so clearly linear. One thing is certain though, adding clothing and other collaged items (like the large acrylic transfers) took me out of my normal game into something entirely different. Even my idea about when a painting is finished became something new.

In a show we saw together years ago – it was the Brazilian artist Beatriz Milhazes – you explained the process of acrylic transfer – painting on plastic and peeling the painted skin off when dry. This was just “shop talk” between us at the time. Much later it occurred to me to bring this transfer process into my works on paper. The transfers initially presented themselves to me as enigmatic gaps/voids that within the context of architecture as language are inchoate.

In recent work they have taken on a dimensional aspect – more like characters but disruptive like the clothing. The heavy flat acrylic next to the transparency of the oil is a subtle discontinuity in the surface of the painting.

For me meaning and matter are inextricably bound up together. I don’t know what comes first. That said, now that my “palette” has stretched to include everything a seamstress/designer would use, it has radically changed my process.

So the pieces of clothing are functioning in a similar way as a collage material, to the peeled up pieces of acrylic paint you were making earlier. Except that clothing is a very different kettle of fish. The references are far more complex and far-reaching than paint. How do you see those references playing out in your work, particularly given that you are generally – can I say hostile toward – or perhaps just disinterested in fashion as a signifier? After all, even clothing for comfort makes a statement.

Of course. Once sweatsuits and jeans come into play issues of class do as well. This was not my original intention back in 2016 but inescapable as a theme given everything going on politically.

Comfort clothing is something you wear when the usual fashion signifiers don’t apply – which isn’t to say aesthetics aren’t involved. It is more personal and certainly more rebellious.

For the most part I am disinterested in women’s clothing and uncomfortable with the fraught nature of being on “display.” Signifiers inherent in women’s fashion – sexualizing oneself – are, at best, not interesting to me.

That said, in the past I probably wouldn’t have made the effort to see the Comme des Garcons show at the Met. The imagination, the humor, the startling combinations are truly inspiring. This definitely is not comfort clothing yet blurring boundaries between male/female/other appeals to me.

Blurring gender boundaries and blurring the boundaries that normally dictate how we define painting and sculpture is an interesting conflation. Do you want viewers to see that the fabric pieces are clothing, and is it important to you that the clothing be identified as “comfort” wear?

If the paintings were only seen online you might miss their dimensionality but it would be difficult to look at them in this show and not know clothes are involved. For example, in “Out of Pocket” – the largest painting in the show – there is an unpainted strip of blue jean with two pockets. Once identified, the seams and notions in the other paintings become obvious. Ideas of “comfort wear” started with the clothing but the idea that this extends into the paintings doesn’t concern me.

A couple of years ago I had an opportunity to be in Russia and found myself really engaged by their equivalent of the German Bauhaus, Vkhutemas (“Higher Arts and Technical School”). Like the Bauhaus, the school combined the art faculty teaching graphics, sculpture and architecture while the industrial faculty taught printing, textiles, ceramics, woodworking, and metalworking. Nowadays you have to be careful about admitting to Russian influences but I confess that these artists, including Malevich, Lissitzky, Popova, Rodchenko, Goncharova, Larionov and Stepanova, had a huge impact on meat that moment. I had been looking for something that was outside the strict confines of painting–not in any way a new idea but something that personally made sense to me. Indeed, the confines of a strictly painted language have been breeched in much more dramatic ways than by introducing clothing. That said, something organic and dramatic happened and I am just at the beginning.

The post “Comfort Clothing for Fraught Times”: Medrie MacPhee in conversation with Leslie Wayne appeared first on artcritical.

September 23, 2016 to January 7, 2017
Seventh Avenue at 27 Street
New York, 212 217 4558

On November 14th, 1904, a wedding took place in Paris at the neoclassical church of La Madeleine of peerless elegance, and public brouhaha. With the trappings of a royal wedding, including specially commissioned music and a veritable who’s-who guest list, the marriage was that of Armand de Gramont, duc de Guiche and Elaine Greffulhe. As reported by the press, however, it was not the bride’s outfit but that of her mother, Elisabeth, that drew the oohs and ahs: an embroidered Byzantine gown in beige lamé with incrustations of pearl, silver thread and paillettes, and a fur-trimmed train. The creation of couturier Frédéric Worth, this dress is featured in the Fashion Institute of Technology’s exhibition, “Proust’s Muse, The Countess Greffulhe.” A fashionable aristocrat, the countess was immortalized as Oriane, Duchesse de Guermantes in Marcel Proust’s novel A la recherche du temps perdu, hence the show’s title. The show comes from the Paris fashion museum, the Palais Galliera, where it was titled “La mode retrouvée.”

The sumptuous, sometimes surprisingly modern clothes and accessories dating from the 1890s to the 1930s on display here by designers such as Worth, Vitaldi Babani, Paul Poiret, Mario Fortuny, Jeanne Lanvin and Maggy Rouff certainly make one want to know more about their noble wearer whose intimate circle Proust managed to enter, in part through his friendship with Armand de Gramont. Although the depth of his relationship with the Greffulhes has been questioned, a recent biography of the countess by Laure Hillerin includes correspondence confirming a certain friendliness though perhaps not the intimacy projected by Proust in his novel.

Opening on the heels of “Manus x Machina, Fashion in an Age of Technology” at the Metropolitan Museum, an extravaganza of female high fashion for the most part since World War II, the FIT show features clothes that rival in fabric, handwork, and imagination those recently on view at the Met, done without today’s technological advantages. Worth’s Byzantine gown described above, but also his Lily Dress (1896), an evening dress in black velvet with applications of ivory silk in the form of lilies, embroidered pearls and sequins, and his tea-gown of dark blue velvet cut outs on green satin ground (circa 1897) are cases in point.

Born and raised in a Belgian aristocratic family that was relatively poor but highly cultured and connected to nobility in several countries, Elisabeth de Caraman-Chimay married the fabulously rich real estate magnate, Henry Greffulhe, and soon was siphoning the attention of some of the most powerful men of her time with her famous musical laughter, her tiny waist, her ineffable personality and, of course, her wardrobe. The glittering evening cape by Worth on view at FIT, with a patterns of large abstracted gold flower motifs, worn at a charity event she chaired in support of wounded Russian soldiers in 1904, was based on a gift from Tsar Nicolas II during his visit to Paris in 1896.

Thanks to her high-placed connections, the countess served as a go-between in foreign affairs and national politics, subsidized scientists including Marie Curie and Edouard Branly, and patronized contemporary music, art, and of course haute couture. The organist at her daughter’s wedding was no less than Gabriel Fauré from whom she commissioned an original piece for the occasion. She raised funds for Serge Diaghilev and supported the Ballets Russes. But it is with the show of French decorative arts organized in London by Elisabeth with the sculptor August Rodin in July 1914, that her secret political ambition came to the fore. Hoping for peace to continue, she invited royalty and diplomats from all over Europe who were soon to be on enemy sides.

Her stunning white dress (unfortunately not in the exhibition) symbolized her preference for international coexistence. Proust, who had his own agenda in selecting the colors and styles of his muse’s attire, depicts Oriane in her box at the Opera in the same white dress (according to Hillerin) with a white headpiece “part flower,” “part feather… alive and amorous… running down her forehead and cheeks.” The color white is often said to be the color of women looking for love, and Oriane, like Elisabeth, suffered an unfaithful husband. Both women seem to have handled their situation with irony and wit.

As the muse outlived the novelist by almost three decades, the exhibition includes couture that Proust could not have seen. Even so, it is replete with dresses, but also accessories that readers of Proust may recognize. The captions that accompany the presentations of the objects brilliantly document such connections as does the presentation itself by Valerie Steele, Director of the Museum at FIT. Bathed in the metaphorical darkness of oblivion, some of the clothes on mannequins shine in a blaze of light coming from above, while others manifest a ghostly presence by reproducing on mirrors their horizontal positioning. The countess liked to be photographed in front of mirrors.

One accessory on view at FIT will be particularly meaningful to Proustians: a pair of red shoes by Lagel-Meier dated 1905. The shoes appear in the last moments of The Guermantes Way when Charles Swann has just told Oriane and her husband that he has only a few months left to live. While Oriane refuses to engage in conversation with Swann over his devastating news because she and her husband Henry are already late for a dinner party, they nonetheless delay their departure when Henry discovers, as Oriane is climbing into their carriage, that she is wearing black shoes with her red dress. Throwing a fit, he sends for red shoes for his wife, explaining to Swann and to the narrator, how unbecoming black shoes would be with a red dress. Proust’s critique of the selfishness, self indulgence and superficiality of the Guermantes, and of aristocracy in general peaks in this passage.

Dark green hues and black were the favorite colors of the real countess in her mature days, while pastels like those seen in 18^th century French paintings by Fragonard and Boucher in particular had been her choice for evening dress early in her marriage. Around the time of the Ballets Russes, her clothes, though lacking the bold colors worn by the dancers, adopted an Orientalist look. A loose fitting kimono evening coat (1912) by Babani, and a quasi- geometric short vest (1912) by Mario Fortuny strike a more relaxed “modernist” note in her wardrobe.No more tight corset to accentuate her tiny waist. A black Jeanne Lanvin coat with the motif of a brick wall imprinted on it from 1936 hints at René Magritte paintings in which brick walls are featured and oddly pierced.

For those who would like to know what the Countess Greffulhe looked like, the show includes a number of photographs of her, by famous fashion photographers, among them the German-born Otto, and Paul Nadar (son of the famous Nadar). With her frizzy light brown hair piled high, pouting lips, fine nose and sad dreamy eyes, the photos of her as a young bride do not look like the Oriane Proust describes in the church at Combray, tall, blond, with a pointed nose, red cheeks and piercing eyes. But then the countess grew from awkward and unhappy young bride to alluring self-assured beauty thanks to help from her childhood friend and close relative Robert de Montesquiou (a model for Charlus in Proust’s novel). The show also includes short movie clips of her.

The widowed countess lived through the Second World War, always aloof and always elegantly turned out, though close to financial ruin. Forced to allow a German commandant to occupy her country estate, she used her charm to get him to help feed her beloved greyhounds. Like her creation by Proust, Elisabeth seems to have enjoyed being looked at and photographed though only in poses of her own choosing. She could have hardly suspected that she would lose control of her self-image to the upstart Proust, whose novel she claimed to have never read.

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I couldn’t think of a better prologue to the opening of Death Becomes Her: A Century of Mourning Attire at the Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art than the haunting cello compositions performed by Icelandic musician, Hildur Guðnadóttir, in a pop-up concert this past Friday. Setting a transcendental tone befitting of the exhibit, which opens to the public today and centers around the sartorial mourning rituals of the 19^th and early 20^th centuries (a time when the mortality rate was much higher and the average person didn’t live into their fifties) — the cellist, who’s played with bands such as Múm and Animal Collective, wove soul-stirring Icelandic hymns about death with angelic alto lyrics and original songs of layered cello loops.

Three days later, walking down into the basement gallery where the Costume Institute exhibit is on display, I thought about the resounding affect of the cello and the ways in which death echoes throughout our culture, but is often linked with shadowed conversation and dark arts. Though the show’s theme sounds morbid, its tone is lightened by baroque music, and white mannequins whose presence is much less sinister than the masked ones at the Met’s Alexander McQueen show a couple years ago.

The anticipated exhibit, which displays some 30 dresses (including those of Queen Victoria and Queen Alexandra, the former of which wore various shades of mourning attire for the last 40 years of her life), were made primarily of carefully tailored black crape — the folds, pleats, and ruches mimicking the fashionable silhouettes of the time and the guidelines for mourning set forth by magazines advocating “nun-like simplicity” and etiquette guides outlining the mourning practice. Here we learn the deepest state of mourning is reserved for widowed women who show their loyalty by maintaining the dark affect, adding white accents and then gray or mauve to the stiff and dull appearance of black, only after a reasonable amount of time has passed.

These practical observations are juxtaposed by a cheeky sentimentality throughout the exhibit. The burden of this attire on one’s finances and even the ways in which some began to enjoy the all-black aesthetic are common threads throughout. The show is also punctuated by mourning accouterment, memorial embroideries, watercolors, and postmortem photos — which are also the subjects of an exhibit on view now in Brooklyn’s Morbid Anatomy Museum.

But even if wearing grief on one’s sleeve was a form of protection during social engagements, it was also an invitation for women to become targets in the gender-driven attire. Harold Koda, curator of the exhibit explains in the press release, “The veiled widow could elicit sympathy as well as predatory male advances. As a woman of sexual experience without marital constraints, she was often imagined as a potential threat to the social order.”

This exhibit gives insight into often forgotten Victorian ritual and manners and is underpinned by perhaps an even more important statement about our cultural reluctance to talk openly about death, except to licensed professionals: “We don’t have [grieving] rituals anymore. Ritual practice helps us give form to something we can’t articulate,” says Koda during the press preview of the show. “People needed this before therapists.”

If the cellist was the prologue here, I am still left to consider where this exhibit might conclude. It would be interesting to see how mourning garb translates into avant garde fashion, goth culture, and contemporary death ritual. The exhibit is simply an Anglo testament of mourning attire with much less depth than its opening performance might suggest, but it’s a good conversation starter.

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