The press conference and exhibition tour for Rick Owens: Subhuman Inhuman Superhuman, a retrospective of the designer’s oeuvre in Milan’s Triennale museum, was held in Italian: a language that I, sadly, understand only vaguely.
London, United Kingdom – There are now three Dover Street Markets in the world (plus I.T Beijing Market, run by the same company), and none of them located in Dover Street. Following a 200% rent hike in its eponymous location, London’s most forward-thinking mini-department store has moved to Haymarket. The new outlet officially opened last week and is 3 times bigger than the original.
We would like to present to you an in-depth review of the Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty exhibit at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London. Tomorrow, we will publish a comprehensive photo essay of the exhibit shot for StyleZeitgeist magazine.
“I wanted to drape a piece of fabric into a pair of trousers, because molding on a human body was something we weren’t taught in fashion school” – says Leon Emanuel Blanck, the young German designer whose concise and conceptual collections, after only 4 seasons, are stocked by meccas of all things black and deconstructed such as Antonioli in Milan, Ink in Hong Kong, and SV Moscow. “I couldn’t find anyone to do it on, so I ended up doing it on myself. I had to move and turn a lot while I was at it, so I got a very distorted pair of trousers”.
‘Tis a Schiele season. In New York one can head to Neue Gallery for a glimpse of what the Austrian modernist painter Egon Schiele made out of clothed bodies. Meanwhile, in Zurich’s Kunsthaus, there is another show where Schiele’s work is displayed alongside that of YBA Jenny Saville’s, exploring their common approach to the naked body. The nudes continue in London’s Courtauld Gallery.
If, dear reader, when in London and walking down Oxford Street, you spot what looks like a giant Rick Owens towering over the double-decker buses and waving what looks like a giant Olympic torch, fear not: you are not hallucinating. A polysterene torso of the designer, made by the British sculptor Doug Jennings (creator of the (in)famous statue of Owens pissing) and weighing a humble 1.5 tons, was erected yesterday on Selfridges façade to celebrate twenty years since the inception of the label and the opening of “The World of Rick Owens” project in store.
In only a couple of years of its existence, LN-CC, the London multiple-brand boutique has gone from an open secret of the fashion cognoscenti to a major player whose business model is quickly being imitated by other shops. John Skelton, the store’s co-founder and creative director, has played a major role in its meteoric rise. I recently caught up with him in London to talk shop…
“It’s all about embodiment in the digital age,” – I overheard at the opening of the Iris Van Herpen’s exhibition at SHOWcabinet, Belgravia’s new installation space curated by Nick Knight’s SHOWstudio project. The man who said it was Tobias Klein, one of the artists whose work accompanies Van Herpen’s in SHOWcabinet. His sculptures shown here include an extract from The Invisible Human, a 3D-printed Magnetic Resonance Image of a human abdomen with aluminium sulphate crystals grown over it in a process that echoes those occurring in the body when it is dying. If this sounds a bit complex, it is because Klein’s work, just like that of most participants’, oscillates between art and science.
A 1970s cabinet from the German Democratic Republic with a frameless mirror on top, a low and narrow single bed, an Uzbek patterned carpet: the furnishings that fill the newly-assembled living-room in the basement of Dover Street Market are unmistakably Soviet. As someone born and raised in the USSR I immediately recognize the utilitarian shapes, yet the textures are unfamiliar: every piece is coated in a heavy mix of plaster, latex, liquid rubber and hessian that makes the objects look like ghosts of themselves. The mirror does not reflect anything, the carpet’s pattern is barely intelligible, the once-glossy wooden surface of the chest is rendered white and matt; the overall dreamlike feeling is that of stepping into the living-room of my childhood decades later, and finding everything in its old place but buried under the weight of time passed. This is the newly opened installation by Cherevichkiotvichki, the London-based shoe label that takes inspiration in abandoned spaces, time and memory.