Critics Page
Guest Critic
Art as Fashion, Fashion as Art
By Alexandra SchwartzIn these grave times, art and fashion may seem, more than ever, like luxuries. But they are inextricably intertwined with everyday life, including political life. Think of the pink pussy hats that thousands of women knitted themselves to wear to the Women’s Marches on January 21.
Is Fashion Art?
By Valerie SteeleIs fashion art? The perennial question. Andrew Bolton, Curator in Charge of the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, has said, “I find it extraordinary […] that in this day and age people are still debating it.”
The Museum of Modern Art’s
Items: Is Fashion Modern?
By Paola Antonelli and Michelle Millar Fisher
It is a polite exaggeration to say that MoMA has an idiosyncratic history of exhibiting fashion—but when we have done so, we have made it count.
A Dream of Identity
By Rhonda GarelickLast weekend, I went to see Damien Chazelle’s delightful La La Land. At the cinema, I had to pass two large vitrines displaying slightly retro garments.
Renaissance Fashion, Renaissance Bodies
By Timothy McCallLong dismissed due to a pervasive, often moralizing distrust of fashion’s ostensible frivolity, studies of clothing and fashion have lately emerged as vibrant intellectual forces within the humanities’ material turn and art history’s embrace of material culture.
Fashionable Distractions
By Marika Takanishi KnowlesIn French art of the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries, the representation of fashionable garments provided artists with a pretext for visual elaboration: for playing with mediums of oil paint, chalk, pencil, and ink, for getting lost in the pleasure of gestural mark-making.
Art into Life—and Back Again
By Juliet BellowIn late fall of 1924, Sonia Delaunay contributed an unusual work to the annual Salon d’Automne. Her submission comprised eight rectangular pieces of printed silk fabric, each bearing a different brightly-colored geometric pattern.
The African Roots of Modern Fashion
By Camara Dia HollowayThe Costume Designer (1950), a documentary created by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, showcased the legendary costume designer Edith Head and provides a compelling demonstration of the power of costume.
Texts That Are Knit To Be Worn On Me
By Lisa Anne AuerbachWearing a stretched canvas can be difficult when driving or on the subway, but if the form of the work is something that customarily fits a human being, it makes things more straightforward.
Sympathetic Magic
By Mark NewportFeeling sick: put on that favorite pair of fuzzy pajamas. Date tonight: put on my best black jeans and favorite denim button-up shirt cause they look great.
Fantastical New Bodies
By Saya WoolfalkI began to make garments when I was undergraduate in college. I was studying with feminist artists at Brown, and my work at the time attempted to complicate ideas of femininity and sexuality. I was deeply inspired by Judith Butler’s ideas around the performativity of gender, and wanted to make artworks in which a performer could become a part of an alternative symbolic language and inhabit a new body.
