This week the new fashion exhibition “Manus x Machina: Fashion in an Age of Technology” opens at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. It aims to challenge the notion, usually found in the popular imagination, that handwork and machine work somehow exist in the state of opposition.
The new online jewelry shop Arguros is the brainchild of Karlo Steel, the former co-owner and mastermind behind the iconic New York menswear boutique Atelier, which played a major role in promoting the menswear avant-garde since its inception in 2002.
We would like to announce our collaboration with Vestoj – the Platform for Critical Thinking on Fashion. Through an ongoing exchange of articles about recent fashion developments we will aim to delve deeper into the state of fashion and the fashion media today. In our first exchange we share reactions to a major piece published in T-Magazine of the New York Times. Stay tuned for the response from Vestoj to the article below.
If you happen to be in New York this spring, Enrico Castellani’s new exhibit, Interior Space, at the uptown gallery Dominique Levy is worth a visit. It’s the first solo exhibition of the revered Italian artist in the gallery, and it spans Castellani’s oeuvre from the 60s to the near present. Castellani was part of the Zero movement, which is now having a resurgence of interest with museum and gallery exhibits around the world, and he, along with his acquaintance Lucio Fontana, is one of the best known Italian figures of the mid-20th Century avant-garde.
Boris Bidjan Saberi, whose meticulously and complexly constructed menswear graces the racks of carefully picked boutiques around the world, has quietly opened his own boutique in Barcelona, his adapted hometown, some time ago. It is nestled in the industrial district of Poblenou, Barcelona’s once run-down textile industry hub that is now enjoying a renaissance and that still has large industrial spaces suited to Saberi’s vision. It is his only boutique besides his New York City outpost.
Buying and selling designer clothing by collectors and fashion enthusiasts on the Internet is a longstanding practice. Fashion forums like Supefuture, Styleforum, and StyleZeitgeist, where these enthusiasts tend to congregate are invaluable assets for hunting down that long-coveted piece, called “the holy grail” in the forum parlance. The forums, however, are, first and foremost, places…
Underneath the pressing debate in the publishing industry that’s threatened by e-readers and Amazon, there lies one basic question – what does a book make? Especially, a book of literature? Is a text simply a text? Does the physical book matter? Ask any old bibliophile, and their lament will extend way back to the rise of the cheap trade paperback that replaced the beautiful folios of yore in most home libraries. To them the physicality of the book extends the respect due to the text.
This past Paris fashion week the young label Vetements headed by Demna Gvasalia was the talk of the town, and their instantly recognizable logoed raincoats and sweatshirts were seemingly everywhere. They were mostly worn by the young, self-conscious, well-informed fashion insiders and were instant fodder for the street-style photographers, who themselves tend to be young, self-conscious, and well-informed.
So, I finally went to the Paris women’s fashion week (and liked it). I arrived fashionably late and missed a few shows that I would have loved to see, but I got to see a bunch. Everyone warned me that the women’s fashion week is more hectic than the men’s, but I did not find it so. If anything, it seemed more relaxed because spread over a longer period of time.
A little over two years ago Ann Demeulemeester announced her retirement from her signature label. After the initial shock subsided, the question of succession inevitably came up. That’s when Sebastian Meunier, a Parisian designer who has had a long tenure at Margiela before joining Ann Demeulemeester, stepped out of the shadows. Meunier spent two years at the label before Demeulemeester’s departure and has worked closely with her. But the big question remained; how could anyone fill the shoes of a designer whose style was so clear and who was so inextricably linked to her label? In other words, could there be Ann Demeulemeester without Ann Demeulemeester?