Guy Trebay

Though she has not, perhaps, radically altered the face of American fashion, she has become one of the industry’s durable presences, a designer overdue for the fresh appraisal provided by “The World of Anna Sui,” a retrospective that curators at the Museum of Arts and Design in New York adapted from a 2017 exhibition at the Fashion and Textile Museum in London.

On a recent morning, Sui walked a reporter through an exhibition of 75 looks and hundreds of related objects — dresses, shoes, jewels, mood boards, wardrobe items from famous friends, videos and backdrops from her storied fashion shows — drawn from an archive that Sui, 67, has maintained since arriving in New York from her hometown in Detroit nearly a half century ago.

These are edited excerpts from the conversation.

Q: The retrospective opens with a photograph from the 1960s of you as a child visiting New York for a family wedding. While everyone else in the picture is focused on the bride, you’re staring straight out of the frame.

A: I always said it was that visit that gave me the idea to be a fashion designer. I didn’t even know what kind of job that was. But I just looked around at the city and decided that, when I grow up, I’m going to be a fashion designer and move to New York.

Q: Your parents were first-generation immigrants from China who met at school in Paris and immigrated to Michigan for your father to pursue a master’s degree. How did they react to your plan?

A: My parents said, “Why would you want to be a dressmaker when you can be a doctor or lawyer?”

Q: But you were determined.

A: I had a baby sitter who read Seventeen. In the back of the magazine I discovered these ads for Parsons School of Design, and from that point on I geared my whole curriculum toward getting into Parsons. New York seemed so far away then. I would go once every summer and would get my one glimpse of what I thought was fashion. I’d visit the Biba boutique at Bergdorf Goodman, and it was the first time I’d ever seen all those incredible colors: dusty rose, charcoal, plum, teal — murky colors that I’d never seen before.

Q: You have said that newsweeklies provided a cultural lifeline for you and used Life magazine pages to demonstrate your response to its reports on the “counterculture.”

A: I remember seeing an article on Mia Fonssagrives and Vicky Tiel doing the costumes for “What’s New Pussycat?” and I was obsessed with the sketches they ran. Many years later I went back and read it again and realized that Mia was Irving Penn’s stepdaughter.

Q: How did those early influences ultimately inform your work?

A: In the opening section, there’s a coat belonging to Baby Jane Holzer, who was a Warhol superstar and one of my idols who later became a close friend. I knew who Baby Jane was from Life. They ran a story about underground fashion and there she was in some incredible dress and the most incredible hair. Diana Vreeland loved her and gave her this column in Vogue where she would cover the new boutiques. That was Jane’s assignment — to shop. For the show, we borrowed this purple fur coat of hers that I’d seen in an exhibition at the Norton Museum of Art in Florida called “To Jane, Love Andy: Warhol’s First Superstar.” It’s the coat she wore to the Frazier-Ali fight. She wore it with a pair of Chelsea Cobbler boots and hot pants underneath. Jane was never the type to wear a plain mink coat.

Q: But how did you meet?

A: Steven photographed her and told me she was at the studio and for some reason invited me over.

Q: You mean fashion photographer Steven Meisel?

A: I’ve known Steven since we were both at Parsons School of Design. In those days, design students were not allowed to go to the school lunchroom because we weren’t supposed to mingle with the art school riffraff. But I would sneak down, and Steven would be holding court. A friend was talking to him and mentioned that they were all going out dancing and that I should come, too. I went with my boyfriend to Tamburlaine and saw Steven with his entourage and he said, “Ditch the boyfriend. Come sit with us.”

Q: Did you?

A: Of course. I kept the friendship with Steven. In those days, I had an apartment in the city, and Steven grew up in Queens and was still in school, so my place became club central.

Q: When he took up fashion photography, did he become an important conduit and connector for you?

A: Steven was so important in introducing me to a lot of my idols. That’s how I met Twiggy. That’s how I met Jane. That’s how I met Veruschka.

Q: And Keith Richards’ girlfriend, Anita Pallenberg, whose striped Lurex Biba pantsuit is in the show?

A: I met Anita because my roommate at the time was Walter Lure. He was in that band [The Heartbreakers] with Jonny Thunders, and they spent a lot of time in London. He knew Anita from London and when she was in New York she would hang out. I remember her telling me that if she didn’t have the life she did, she would have become a fashion designer. Eventually she went to Central Saint Martins and we reconnected when she came to do an internship with Marc [Jacobs].

Q: It seems that your friendship with Meisel had another dividend: access seemingly to every top model and new face.

A: Even before I started doing shows, because I was friends with Steven, I knew Linda Evangelista, Naomi Campbell and Christy Turlington. When the time came to do a show, Steven said Linda and Naomi will help you get all the girls. People by now know my association with Steven and he helps with the castings every season. We’ve gone through many phases — the Belgians, the waifs, the Brazilians, the Russians. But nothing else ever had the electric effect the supermodels had.

Q: I can still recall gasp from the crowd when Naomi hit the runway in your fall 1992 show wearing chaps with nothing underneath but a thong.

A: She also had a rose tattoo on her behind.

Q: It is cliché to say, but does New York feel different now from the city of your youth, when the fashion world was much smaller?

A: It’s the economics. I mean, No. 1, in the ’70s, you could be poor. You could shop in a thrift shop and look like a movie star. People thought I only wore Saint Laurent for a while — when he did the petticoats underneath fitted ’40s jackets. I had a ’40s jacket and I would get these bright petticoats in vintage stores. I got some from a place where you could bring a grocery bag and fill it with as much as you wanted for $5.

Q: Your shows have always drawn on music and you’ve known many of rock’s more louche personnel — the Stones, the New York Dolls, Billy Corgan and James Iha from Smashing Pumpkins. Did you live a rocker sort of life?

A: Mick Jagger was my first menswear customer. I met Keith through Anita. I used to go to the Dolls rehearsals. I was always really into rock ’n’ roll, so I would see all these people and meet them, but I really never was into drugs or rock as a lifestyle. I was too determined. I had to get up in the morning. I couldn’t indulge.

Q: When designers claim rockers as their reference point, I always wonder which rocker — is it Bowie, the Monkees, Iggy Pop? How did your connections to musicians inform your designs?

A: When I was listening to the New York Dolls a lot, I was thinking about how everyone in those days wore black and white stripes and roses. So I used that by making a print with roses on black and white stripes. When I was listening to a lot of punk music, it seemed natural to use androgyny as part of a grunge collection.

Q: Is that the collection where you sent a man and a woman out in matching baby doll dresses?

A: I was so caught up in that. Was it the cover of Spin or maybe the Face that had the famous Davis Sims image of Kurt Cobain in a dress? I was obsessed with that image. There was also another famous video of Billy and James [of Smashing Pumpkins] wearing ’30s dresses on an ice cream truck.

Q: Those pictures don’t look particularly shocking now. Were they at the time?

A: Not really. It’s funny but the show’s curator told me that what shocked her is that visitors to the show think androgyny is a new concept. They’d never seen it before. We know better.

Q: You pay homage to many women — Betsey Johnson, Norma Kamali, Zandra Rhodes, the Disney artist Mary Blair — but do you think of yourself as a feminist?

A: At all my first jobs, everyone was male. But then, little by little, women started getting head designer positions. They started moving out of the workrooms. I was lucky in that I was a product of my time and had these role models like Norma and Betsey to show me the way. The fact that women’s liberation happened in the period when I was growing up made everything much more possible for me, but, no, I never considered myself a feminist.

Q: Still, I would not be the first person to see sexism in how long it took the industry to appreciate your work.

Q: How emotional was it to take this long retrospective view?

A: For so many years, I never looked back. You don’t have time when you’re designing all these collections. And I found the sad thing about putting together the exhibition was that when I looked at all those clothes, what I thought about is how all these companies that made them are gone. The garment district has disappeared. There used to be so much within a couple of blocks of my office on 39th Street: the trimmings people, the buttons people, the zippers guy plus all the patternmakers and contractors. It was heartbreaking to see that all the fabrics we were using were made in America. We had the most incredible textile industry, and so much of it is gone.

Q: Didn’t the garment industry also function as a creative resource?

A: I used to walk around and ask the fabric stores to let me go into the basement to look for old stock. There was a company, Plitt Segal, that had been around since the 1940s. They made velvet, but it was very stiff. So I once asked the owner, Jules Segal, why he didn’t sell velvet that was limp and soft like old-fashioned velvet. “We call that coffin velvet,” he said. “What we have to do is wash it.” So I took some home and washed it in the washing machine. They still make it, though he’s long gone.

Q: Did the internet replace all that?

A: Yes and no. You can never replace the garment district. But for our last show, I wanted these animé wigs that I saw kids wearing online. We Googled them, and another whole world opened up.

‘The World of Anna Sui’

Through Feb. 23 at the Museum of Arts and Design, 2 Columbus Circle, Manhattan; 212-299-7701, madmuseum.org.

This article originally appeared in

Anna Sui, Fashion's Favorite Daughter, Gets Her Day in the Sun

Like some kind of industrious magpie, designer Anna Sui has spent decades assiduously gathering up shiny oddments from the pop culture landscape and shaping them into a singular career in fashion design. Her deeply researched collections — 84 of them to date — exploit a welter of tweaked archetypes (surfer meets Kawai schoolgirl) and the giddy mash-ups of incongruous archetypes (pirate encounters pre-Raphaelite) that are her specialty.

As I stood in a tent on hot July afternoon in this high desert city, I was nagged by Syson’s question. Planted in sand on three folding tables were the creations of Leandro Gómez Quintero, one of 178 individuals from 52 countries gathered for the 16th annual edition of the influential and popular International Folk Art Market.

Gómez’s artworks had made the trip to the United States without him since visa restrictions prevented the one-time history teacher based in Baracoa, a small city on the eastern tip of Cuba, from attending. And yet the artist’s presence could be felt in the works he’d sent — eccentric and vaguely obsessional scale models of the vintage vehicles that have come to stand as visual shorthand for Cuba’s anachronistic position on the global stage.

Politics, history, and the irresistible urge to create from the most meager of resources were all coded into the miniature versions of vehicles such as the once-ubiquitous Jeep CJ, or the customized flatbeds responsible for transporting cattle, lumber and humans along the rutted roads that remain the lifeline of the island nation. Each had been created from refuse and materials Gómez scavenged: foam core, paper clips, scrap plastic, Duct tape, Styrofoam packing materials, Popsicle sticks and twine.

“For me, this is the essence of folk art,” said Stuart Ashman, my guide that afternoon. A former cultural affairs secretary of New Mexico, Ashman now serves as chief executive officer of a market whose goal is to bring exposure both to practitioners of traditional crafts as well as visionary eccentrics like Gómez. “It comes out of nowhere, out of nothing,” he added. “There’s not a tradition for it. It’s just some guy saying, ‘I want to make this thing.’”

Often enough, as it happens, the person with that driving desire to make something new and untested is a woman. Consider, for instance, the celebrated pineapples of Carapan. So closely are these powerful objects identified with Mexican folk art at its highest levels that when in 2001 the cultural arm of Banamex bank organized a show titled “Great Masters of Mexican Folk Art” and published a hefty 551-page book to accompany it, one of craftsman Hilario Alejos Madrigal’s pineapples was chosen for the cover.

Madrigal, 53, is an acknowledged master of the form and yet it was his mother who originally devised it. “His mom made the first ones,” Tomas Aguirre, Madrigal’s agent, said. (The artist had been unable to make the trip from his home in Michoacan.) “The whole village where they live made pottery for cooking,” Aguirre added. “His mom, Elisa Madrigal Martínez, used to make those things, but had a lot of competition so she was looking to stand out and started the pineapples.”

Boldly sculptural, of no utilitarian purpose, the pineapples are imposing even when not built on the massive scale favored by Madrigal’s son, who expanded the craft learned from his mother when he married and moved to San José de Gracias in the 1970s. There, he forms and glazes the pineapples in hand-built open air kilns.

“They feel they are artists instead of crafts makers,” Aguirre said of works now made by Madrigal and his wife, Audelia Cerano, and their five children. “Some people don’t appreciate it as art,” he added. “They’re surprised by the prices. They say, ‘My trip to Europe costs less than that.’”

Even the largest of Madrigal’s vessels, at $1,300, may set a buyer back by less than the cost of a drawing by an artist showing in a gallery on New York’s Lower East Side. And, for a starkly abstract room-sized rug by the Oaxacan weaver Juan Isaac Vásquez García — a textile whose every element, from the shearing, carding and spinning of the wool to the vat-dyeing of the yarn and the weaving itself, which is all done by hand — the price is just a few dollars more.

“I’ve been weaving since I was 7,” Vásquez, 84, and widely known by the honorific Don Isaac, said in a moment of quiet before the hordes of visitors rushed in (more than 20,000 people attended this year). For generations, Vásquez’s family had practiced a craft that dominates Teotitlan del Valle, a village in the foothills of the Sierra Juarez mountains just outside Oaxaca.

By Vásquez’s estimate, there were more than 800 weavers from which to choose when, in the late 1960s, painter Rufino Tamayo came in search of someone to collaborate in making tapestries. “All of a sudden, maestro Tamayo showed up, and I didn’t know who he was,” Vásquez said. What first drew Tamayo to Vásquez was his unconventional use of natural rather than synthetic dyestuffs.

“He asked me what red I was using, where did I get this in the wild?” Vásquez added. “At the time I was going to stop working with the natural dyes because nobody was buying,” Vásquez said. Encouraged by Tamayo, Vásquez entered into a decadeslong partnership with the famed muralist. “I still didn’t know if I was doing a good thing or a bad thing,” Vásquez said. “I really never thought of it as art.”

For master embroiderer Asif Shaikh, 51, his identity has seldom been in question, he explained one afternoon at the market. Born and raised in Ahmedabad in northwestern India, the self-taught artist has actively campaigned for a revised understanding of what constitutes art, using his knowledge of Indian embroidery techniques to promote innovation in a craft that, as he put it, “was on its last legs at the end of the 20th century.” For a recent traveling exhibition of his work, inspired by the Sufi saint and poet Farid ud-Din Attari’s allegorical masterpiece “The Conference of the Birds,” Shaikh created embroidered panels using beetle wings, peacock feathers, silk thread no wider than a human hair.

“My dream is to put crafts in the same conversation when we talk about art, because artists always get full mileage” in the cultural conversation, Shaikh added, whereas — in India, at least, “They never made craft into a brand as a branch of art.”

ONE POTENT FACTOR in shifting perceptions is social media, according to Senia Jugi, a traditional master basket maker from the Iban tribe of Borneo.

Although these days Jugi travels the world to conduct workshops on the traditional Iban baskets of split bamboo, arrowroot and rattan and the topi tunjang hats — known as “sky pointers” for the crenelated crowns said to draw cosmic energy down like rabbit-ear antennas, she had grown increasingly pessimistic about the survival of a craft she first learned in childhood. “In our community, the younger people — when they weave — they don’t want to be anonymous,” she said. That all changed, she added, when young weavers started posting online to Instagram and accumulating followers and likes.

Social media in all manifestations has proved central to the practice of a Peruvian folk art collective called Amapolay, a profit-sharing cooperative founded by Carol Fernández Tinoco and Fernando Ernesto Castro Chávez, who met as anthropology students in Lima. Not relying on crafts fairs to hawk their graphic and political T-shirts, posters and caps, they deploy a range of platforms to promote their activist work, which confronts head-on the displacement, poverty and racism blighting the lives of Peru’s indigenous peoples.

“Our kind of work got branded as chicha, but it’s much bigger than that,” Castro, 34, said, referring to a pop culture fusion of urban and indigenous folkways that found expression in music, theater, dining and art. “Chicha is too easy because it’s based on this romantic picture of indigenous people — all chullos and mantas and polleras,” he added of the elements of traditional Andean dress. “But culture is not static, populations are not static and we found that we wanted to take on these issues and make that our art.”

Perhaps inevitably politics intrude on a market that generated an estimated $3.1 million this year and one that, for many participants, represents the bulk of their annual earnings. Navigating a maze of travel bans and visa restrictions. the organizers assembled artists from Kazakhstan to Haiti. And they welcomed back prized practitioners like Porfirio Gutierrez, 40, a weaver from Oaxaca, whose journey to Santa Fe was starkly different from the border crossing he made into the U.S. at 18. Speaking no English at first, Gutierrez spent the next decade working at fast food restaurants, scaling the social ladder until, by the time he was drawn back to Mexico in 2008, he had his green card and was managing a cement plant north of Los Angeles.

“You know, growing up, no one really told us we were artists,” said Gutierrez, who was accompanied to the market by his sister and collaborator, Juana. For a family of what Gutierrez’s father called “artisans and farmers,” the pursuit of art for its own sake was inconceivable.

The tapestries and rugs he now produces, while rooted in the traditions of his Zapotec culture, are liberated rather than bound by them, abstracting elements of life in Mexico’s high central valleys such as the mesh of a straw petate — that woven straw mat so much a constant of rural life.

“It was going north that gave me a perspective on what it means to embed how you see the world, anything that concerns you, into the narrative you create and make that your canvas,” Gutierrez said. “When that happens, at that moment craft gets shifted into art.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/20/arts/design/folk-art-market-santa-fe.html" id="ee8f915c-9042-3c7b-ac1b-1918b828c941">The New York Times</a>.

SANTA FE, N.M. — Who gets to make art? The question was posed recently on Instagram by Luke Syson, director of the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, England. In asking it, Syson was adding his voice to a growing chorus of museum professionals who are challenging traditional hierarchies of art production. He was talking, in this instance, about the obscure craft of scrimshaw, subject of a fine study show at the Fitzwilliam, but more broadly about the importance of recognizing and celebrating th...

You Call it Craft, I Call it Art

Mindless and irresistible as chain letters or online surveys, most internet challenges are like Michael Corleone’s mob in “The Godfather: Part III.’’ You imagine you’ve given them the slip and they suck you back in. As a rule, I avoid these seductive time traps. Yet there I was recently, scrolling through Instagram for the 10th time that day, when I stumbled on the Seven Day Book Cover Challenge and was instantly hooked.

Actually, that’s a misstatement. This innocuous game, which asks users to post a photo of a book cover on a social media platform every day for a week, requires an invitation; it is a challenge, after all. Since no one had actually tagged me, I figured I’d ask.

The person I approached was fashion illustrator and stylist Bill Mullen, whose droll feed — equal parts memoir, style commentary and grim account of a renovation from hell conducted by an upstairs neighbor he refers to as Minnie Castavet — has become digital catnip for those of us hooked on a growing trend for using Instagram to write long.

Some Literary Show-and-Tell

Mullen himself had been challenged by @thebookmarc, the bookselling branch of designer Marc Jacobs’ empire, and his daily book posts skewed irresistibly toward oddball obscurities.

Day 1 found him posting a crumbling, yellowed paperback copy of “The Velvet Underground,’’ a 1963 investigation into “aberrant behavior’’ among consenting adults, an image he accessorized with an assortment of sex toys that looked like they would hurt. Day 2 featured an unknown (to me) fan-bio-cum-takedown of Blondie by the great and lamented rock critic Lester Bangs, with a cover featuring a youthful Debbie Harry.

There followed on Day 3 a vintage Charles Addams book of cartoons and, next, a copy of the 1965 “Hollywood Babylon,’’ Kenneth Anger’s lascivious (and factually dubious) account of the inhabitants of Tinseltown and their sordid antics.

And so it went, through titles devoted to the occult (a core interest of Mullen’s; he frequently cites Laurie Cabot, Official Witch of Salem, Massachusetts, when recommending a color of the day) and, separately, Robert Mapplethorpe. It ended — with neither comment nor review, as the challenge mandates — on Day 7 with an original slipcased copy of Jacqueline Susann’s deathless 1966 “Valley of the Dolls.’’

As with so much else on Instagram, Mullen’s choices were offbeat and campy and also autobiographical, as literary show-and-tell tends to be. His apparent fascination with stuff once culturally marginal and now squarely in the mainstream seemed deliciously synchronous with my own. Because the terms of the challenge (which has been around for some time in various iterations) stipulated that each post stand alone, there was minimal pressure to flaunt one’s erudition.

It Made Sense at the Time

This, too, had its appeal. Once, in a long ago interview, filmmaker Joel Schumacher remarked that — while he would not want them all simultaneously to walk into one room — he did not regret anyone he’s ever slept with. This, essentially, is how I feel about my books. Each, in its own way, made sense at the time. Most are still around, though I don’t think about them all that much.

The titles I chose were not so much intended to frame my intellectual landscape as to provide a frisson or engender a laugh. I posted what I liked and what came readily to hand. With each volume laid out on a rug in my apartment I did my best with an iPhone to prevent my shadow from falling across, say, a rare copy of “My Face for the World to See,’’ the autobiography of Warhol superstar Candy Darling and a book whose cover — the pink vinyl of a schoolgirl’s diary, replete with gilded lock — obviates any need to bother with the text.

Next I posted “Ceylon,’’ a 1950 book of gauzy homoerotic black-and-white photographs by Lionel Wendt, a pianist and polymath Pablo Neruda deemed the pivotal figure in the evolution of national identity in postcolonial Ceylon, now Sri Lanka. I was delighted to discover that book, having forgotten I owned it, and bemused afterward to learn that it now sells online for $1,800. After that came Dennis Cooper’s too little appreciated 1984 novella “Safe,’’ a book whose black-and-white cover photograph of an orgasmic man seemed prophetic in its resemblance to that on Hanya Yanagihara’s 2015 best-selling novel, “A Little Life.’’

These were followed by a Pocket Series chapbook of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s 1986 “Roman Poems,” and an austere catalog from a 2010 exhibition mounted by the Institute for Contemporary Arts at the University of Pennsylvania and devoted to the visionary fashion designer (and gay liberation hero) Rudi Gernreich.

‘A Very Welcome Rabbit Hole’

“I never even knew that book existed,’’ Jennifer Baker, executive vice president of Bookmarc, said of the Gernreich volume, with its dark title, “Fashion Will Go Out of Fashion.’’

In a sense it was Baker’s “fall down a very welcome rabbit hole’’ that set in motion my involvement in the challenge, since it was she who challenged Bill Mullen after having been challenged by hairstylist Jimmy Paul, who had in turn been challenged by makeup artist Dick Page.

“I got out all the books I had in closets,’’ Baker said by telephone from her Los Angeles office. “I got the boxes out and found myself surrounded by books and thinking about all the feelings I have around books, that visceral connection to them, and not listening to Rachel Maddow for a change.’’

Like her, I took a deep and almost physical pleasure in the discoveries the book-a-day challenge produced. I knew in advance from his recondite Instagram account that a friend I challenged, filmmaker Amos Poe, would produce surprises. He did not disappoint.

Starting the week somberly with Polish writer Tadeusz Borowski’s “This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen.’’ Poe leavened his offerings on Day 2 with a pulp fiction comic of the 1940s.

Lillian Ross’ breezy “Portrait of Hemingway” and a paperback Signet copy of Thomas Wolfe’s “Only the Dead Know Brooklyn” came next. Poe was lavish in sharing the challenge, and although his invitation to play was taken up with relish by some he tapped, a number demurred. Apparently not everyone thrills to the harmless voyeurism of peering into other people’s back pages, as Baker of Bookmarc pointed out.

“The hardest part, quite frankly, was challenging seven different people and finding that only a few lived up to it,’’ she said. “Fashion people followed the rules more than the book people,’’ she added, which makes sense given that fashion is a largely conformist undertaking while literature depends for its existence on unruly types.

The Thrill of Possession

Still, the book cover challenge was both “lighthearted and inspiring,’’ Baker said, in part because it evoked the thrill of possession she experienced upon unwrapping a special-ordered copy of Jean Stein’s 1994 “Edie: An American Girl’’ one long-ago Nantucket summer and also because — as with so much else on social media — the stakes of playing along were negligible.

“We’re all adults here,’’ said Baker, who made wonderful, quirky choices in her postings of Joseph Szabo’s 2003 photo essay “Teenage” (published by the magical and now dormant Greybull Press); David Bailey’s 1964 “Rock and Roll Heroes;” and also a first-edition copy of Joan Didion’s “Play It as It Lays,” with its cover illustration of a tequila sunrise Los Angeles skyline and a rattler coiled in silhouette.

“I didn’t originally read that particular cover. The cover I read was a stinky, smelly, yellowing 1970s paperback with a tacky illustration of Mariah smoking a cigarette,’’ Baker said, referring to the novel’s protagonist, Mariah Wyeth, that emblem of mid-20th-century acedia. “I discovered the original edition way later, and just giving it a revisit for the challenge completely brought back that excitement that wells up in your chest when you hold a favorite book.’’

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/05/books/instagram-seven-day-book-challenge.html" id="9dd8f3f4-68c0-32a7-a6fd-558f6f0277ca">The New York Times</a>.

(Social LIT)

Inside the Insta-Cover Games

Using haute couture, ready-to-wear and streetwear as its vehicle, the exhibition, organized by Michelle Tolini Finamore at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, builds on a 2013 show by the curator that examined stubbornly entrenched gender associations we make with the color pink. This time around, Finamore ambitiously set out to track the steady, if occasionally zigzag, evolution of the ways in which most everything we think about fashion has been governed by that hoary and tyrannical old boogeyman — the binary.

That her show opens as binaries themselves are being dismantled ought to energize a curatorial exploration of the countless ways fashion has been used across history to torque, comment upon or altogether flout the rigid rules of sexuality and gender. (Cue: Joan of Arc.) Yet, disappointingly, it underscores instead the risks to this and other traditional institutions of being outpaced by cultural fault lines opening up outside its walls.

Paging through a newspaper last week, for instance, en route to see “Gender Bending Fashion,” I stumbled across a Louis Vuitton advertisement featuring redheaded model Natalie Westling — a pouty designer darling who first appeared on a Marc Jacobs runway in 2013 (and who starred thereafter in campaigns for Prada, Versace, Chanel and Dior).

I stared for a while trying to figure out what about it bugged me and then remembered that, in March, Westling had gone public with his gender transition. Although he continues to model, it is now as Nathan Westling. I flipped open my phone then to Instagram and up popped a viral image of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez shaking hands at the Capitol with Jonathan Van Ness, the bearded grooming expert from the Netflix reality show “Queer Eye.” She was wearing a snappy magenta pantsuit for the photo op; he was dressed in a pink sweater and a pleated midi skirt.

That cat suit previously mentioned was designed in 1970 by Gernreich; and if ever there was an unjustly neglected American designer and gender rebel, he’s the one. Just under two decades ago, the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia staged a curatorial rescue operation, attempting to retrieve Gernreich from obscurity and restore him to his rightful place in fashion history. This visionary Austrian-born immigrant arrived in the United States in 1938 with his parents, penniless Jewish refugees from Hitler’s Anschluss, and went on to become one of the most decorated designers of his era; a four-time winner of the Coty American Fashion Critics’ Award (the forerunner of the CFDA Awards); an inductee in the Fashion Hall of Fame and, according to Time, one of the “all-time fashion icons.”

The Philadelphia show, “Fashion Will Go Out of Fashion” — using an often-quoted Gernreich aphorism — was adapted from one mounted a year earlier at the Neue Galerie Graz in Vienna and might well have succeeded in its mission had fate not intervened in the form of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, which occurred just days before it opened. Revolutionary frocks were the last thing people had on their minds at the time.

It seems almost too obvious to note how much more potent the Boston show might have been had it treated Gernreich as pivotal to fast-changing contemporary notions of gender in fashion, rather than a way-station on the long road from Deuteronomy (“The woman shall not wear that which pertains to a man, neither shall a man put on a woman’s garment”) to “RuPaul’s Drag Race.”

“I realized you could say something through clothes,” Gernreich once said in an interview with the the Los Angeles Times. To better understand him as a radical explorer of fashion's tropes as stealth instruments of activism, consider his matching 1970s miniskirts for men and women, his unisex cat suit or the military-looking “Kent State Ensemble” that is included in the Boston exhibition while his braless bathing suit and infamous breast-baring “monokini” — for a time the most notorious article of clothing on the planet — mysteriously are not. (Costing $24 and never intended for mass production, the 1964 monokini was denounced by the Soviet Union, condemned by the Vatican and deemed immoral by the Republican Party, which somehow found a way to blame its existence on the Democrats.)

Gernreich, who died in 1985 at just 62, frequently prophesied that the day would come when clothing would no longer be segregated into categories of male or female, and it is no stretch to see in him a progenitor of contemporary adherents to that notion — designers as otherwise unalike as Alessandro Michele, the creative director of Gucci, or Rei Kawakubo of Comme des Garçons, or Alejandro Gomez Palomo of the Madrid-based label Palomo Spain.

A further line of descent can easily be traced from Gernreich — who helped found and fund the Mattachine Society, one of the earliest “homosexual rights” organizations in the country — to the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender pioneers Finamore positions as central to the evolution of fashion away from the binary and its constrictions, and whose video accounts of their struggles to find dimensioned expression of their sexualities and genders are projected in the Krupp Gallery adjacent to the main exhibition.

Everyday tales told by people like Tanekwah Hinds, a health care coordinator who characterizes her own style — one blending “femininity and masculinity together,” as “Dapper femme” — light up “Gender Bending Fashion.” They provide a narrative dimension otherwise lacking in a show that tantalizes viewers with great designs by “boundary pushing” designers and worn by often adventurous individuals while frustratingly leaving us to rely on wall texts (there is no catalog) to piece together evolutionary through lines.

It may be too much to ask that a tuxedo worn on a dummy convey the subtle complexities at work in a performance by Marlene Dietrich in the groundbreaking, pre-Code classic “Morocco,” a 1930 film directed by Josef von Sternberg and still shocking in the adventurousness of its sexuality and gender play. (For those who have not had the pleasure, a précis: Dietrich, as the cabaret singer Amy Jolly, dresses in top hat and tails, performs a salacious song in French, kisses a female audience member on the lips and seduces a young Legionnaire played by Gary Cooper, who looks outlandishly pretty and half as butch as she does.)

Although hardly less intellectually ambitious than the Boston exhibition, the crowd-pleasing blockbusters familiar to us at the Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum of Art are seldom forced to sell a thesis as intricate as Finamore’s in “Gender Bending Fashion.” A jeweled papal tiara tends to speak for itself. It is far more challenging to communicate persuasively how transgressive Yves Saint Laurent’s tuxedo evening suit for women — the famous “Le Smoking” — must have seemed when introduced in 1966 or to frame for viewers the geopolitics underpinning the creation of a skirted man’s suit from his audacious 1985 collection titled “Afghanistan Repudiates Western Ideals” by an unknown named John Galliano. Even the Alessandro Trincone outfit — a skirt covered with scores of poetically drifting scraps of fabric — that opens the exhibition challenges viewers to piece together its lineage both as an article of clothing and a gesture of provocation.

Sure, it helps to know that Atlanta rapper Young Thug caused an internet brouhaha when he wore it on the cover of his 2016 mixtape album, “No, My Name Is Jeffery,” and Finamore makes the obligatory citation. Yet the history of renegade sexuality is often a story of missing begats and — in cases like that of, say, a pioneer like Gernreich, it feels obligatory both to retrieve them and to note for viewers that we have been down this road before.

For an exhibition as scrupulous as “Gender Bending Fashion” is about providing a map of the way-stations along the arc of gender identity and expression — “agender” to “genderqueer” to nonbinary to trans — the effort to establish lineages can seem disappointingly attenuated. Before Young Thug came along, after all, there was Prince in his heels and velvets, and André 3000 in his platinum wigs and pink jumpsuits, and Little Richard in his eyeliner and lacquered beehive, and blues singer Gladys Bentley headlining the Ubangi Club in Harlem in a white top hat and tails — “a large, dark, masculine lady whose feet pounded the floor while her fingers pounded the keyboard,” as Langston Hughes once wrote, adding of this particular and largely forgotten gender-bender that she was a “perfect piece of African sculpture, animated by her own rhythm.”

Gender Bending Fashion

Through Aug. 25 at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 465 Huntington Ave., Boston; 617-267-9300, mfa.org.

This article originally appeared in <a id="653a91f5-f2df-3f2b-abd9-7a08a5642da4" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/10/arts/design/museum-of-fine-arts-boston-fashion-review.html">The New York Times</a>.

BOSTON — It is a cat suit, not a thesis statement, and yet somehow the snug Rudi Gernreich garment — with its band collar, dot pattern and Julie Newmar aura — emblematizes both the promise and the shortcomings of “Gender Bending Fashion,” a naggingly ill-defined survey of a century of gender blur.

Fashion for a blurring binary

<h1>Oscars night comes at the end of a five-month marathon of fasting and training and dressing up as Dream Date Barbie (or Ken) again and again, each event bringing the stars a bit closer to summiting the Everest that is awards season. “The end is in sight,” Elizabeth Saltzman, a celebrity stylist best known for her adventurous work with Saoirse Ronan, said in an interview ahead of the show. “You’ve climbed the mountain and you can see the peak.”</h1>

First, though, there is the Death Zone (or, as E! calls it, the Glambot). A treacherous traverse in the days of Joan Rivers spilling out her meanie opinions, the red carpet has been unexpectedly transformed lately — vaguely in tandem with the entertainment industry itself — into a surprisingly diverse and welcoming place.

In the internet era, Saltzman said, everyone may be a critic. Yet an overdue tonal shift has taken hold at the Oscars, one that dials down the negative voices, possibly in recognition of adjustments that took decades to achieve. “Things have changed with the #MeToo moment,” said Karla Welch, another seasoned Hollywood stylist. “There’s a lot more freedom, a lot more politics in the styling. It’s not only about the money or the glamour of the dress.”

It is about “Pose” star Billy Porter flouting gender binaries by wearing a Christian Siriano tuxedo dress. It is about Melissa McCarthy offering a visual rebuke to any body-shamers in a chic black and white pantsuit with a cape. It is about “Roma” star Yalitza Aparicio demonstrating with her presence, in an elegant one-shoulder dress, the shifting perceptions in Mexico about the country’s large indigenous population, difficult to imagine even five years ago as was her appearance was on the cover of Vogue Mexico. (Aparicio, it is worth remembering, once applied for a job at a clothing store in Tlaxiaco, Oaxaca, her hometown, and was turned away because of the color of her skin.) It is about Awkwafina, the Queens-born actor and rapper, in a metallic Dsquared2 pantsuit that was a long way from the B-girl look she affected for a music video about powerful women.

It is about Spike Lee wearing a purple suit from British tailor Oswald Boateng, which he topped off with a custom motorcycle cap inspired by one he spotted in Paris on architect Peter Marino and accessorized with a diamond, gold and fire opal necklace inspired by Prince’s love symbol, made by Neapolitan jeweler Amedeo Scognamiglio.

“A man in a high-jewelry necklace is a first,” said an astonished Scognamiglio. “Plus, he commissioned it and paid for it, which is the distinction and elegance of Spike Lee,” the jeweler added, referring to the complex bargaining game celebrities play with those who supply their clothes.

“Spike Lee just walked in and he looks cold!” actress Amandla Stenberg told a red carpet reporter. “He looks dope.”

An Oscars where people look cold and dope is a revitalized Oscars. Never mind that this change has occurred at a time when the awards show is suffering diminished ratings and a general loss of cultural traction. There remains much to celebrate not only in the ethereal vision of Laura Harrier, the “BlacKkKlansman” actress, in a Louis Vuitton beaded silk dress by Nicolas Ghesquière, but in the fact that a Hollywood star is at pains to note that every element of her outfit had been sustainably sourced.

It’s not likely that the same could be said of the metallic confection Wes Gordon of Carolina Herrera designed for Glenn Close to wear if — after seven nominations — she finally managed to clinch an Oscar. A dress that conjured something Stan Lee might have come up with, if only Marvel had ever devised a septuagenarian woman superhero, it even had a train and a cape.

“It’s got 4 million beads,” Close said of a dress fully in line with traditional maximalist Hollywood dressing. “And it weighs 42 pounds.”

This article originally appeared in <a id="2b9bc0eb-1e92-41ed-b224-1cab0b3d55df" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/24/fashion/oscars-red-carpet-fashion-review.html">The New York Times</a>.

In the internet era, Saltzman said, everyone may be a critic. Yet an overdue tonal shift has taken hold at the Oscars, one that dials down the negative voices, possibly in recognition of adjustments that took decades to achieve.

The Oscars red carpet is living again

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