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Yamamoto & Yohji

Culture, Fashion

Today, Rizzoli is releasing a new monograph on the Japanese fashion designer Yohji Yamamoto (YAMAMOTO & YOHJI, Rizzoli, $115). It is a road well-travelled, as there is already a slew of books on Yamamoto – from the collectable Talking to Myself to the forgettable “best hits” pamphlets by the publishers Taschen and Assouline.

The new volume contains 600 photographs and contributions by long-time Yamamoto’s famous friends, including the French actress Charlotte Rampling and the German filmmaker Wim Wenders. It is a hefty, cloth-bound tome, its 448 pages printed on thick matte paper, as it should be, since once cannot imagine anything glossy (read, vulgar) in the Yamamoto world. The cover is red and black, the two signature Yamamoto colors.

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Ann Demeulemeester Book Signing

Culture, Fashion

Last night the designer Ann Demeulemeester was signing her new monograph at Barneys in New York City. With her was her lifetime friend the singer Patti Smith, who cosigned the book and gave an intimate, heartfelt performance for the crowd of Demeulemeester’s diehard fans.

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Egon Schiele: Rude Nude

Culture

‘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.

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Ann Demeulemeester Monograph

Culture, Fashion

Today, the publisher Rizzoli released a long-awaited monograph on the Belgian fashion designer Ann Demeulemeester (Rizzoli, $100). The book is an exclamation point in the last sentence of Demeulemeester’s career, which is a long novel in itself. When we met in Antwerp this April, Demeulemeester just sent off the final draft to the publisher, and she spoke of it as if it was the perfect closure to her body of work in fashion.

Taiga

Zola Jesus

Culture

I first met the singer Zola Jesus, whose real name is Nika Roza Danilova, this September in New York. She was wearing a black dress with a high collar that formed a dome at the back of her head. It resembled something from another era and a place that has little in common with our modern society.

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Richard Nonas

Culture

My first brush with the sculptures of Richard Nonas was actually a missed opportunity. James Fuentes mounted a solo exhibition of new and old work in the spring of 2013 but unfortunately by the time I became aware of it all I got to see was images after the fact on the web.

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How Hip-Hop Stole Rock’s Thunder

Culture, Fashion

Some time ago in Paris at a men’s show of the cult Japanese label Julius I found myself sitting next to the singer Usher. As I was chatting with his companion, Grace, I could not help but wonder what Usher was doing in a dark, cavernous space, looking at the goth aesthetic of black leathers and drapey wools that Tatsuro Horikawa, Julius’s designer, sent down the runway. And, I also wondered, where are the rockers?

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Josef Sudek: Labyrinths

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In the age of Instagram, where minutiae of life is incessantly documented, Josef Sudek’s new book, Labyrinths (Torst, $60), seems oddly prescient. Here is the minutiae documented so artfully that the subject matter is seen at a remove. Meaning, you are first mesmerized by the masterful sepia of the photos before you realize that you are essentially looking at little piles of trash, scraps of paper, leftover food, unspooled string, and so on.

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Glen E. Friedman: My Rules

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“Fuck You Heros” – now there is a title for a book. A title for a photo book, to be precise, by Glen E. Friedman, a photographer who first got into a cop’s face to protest his arrest as unconstitutional at the age of 12, had his first photo published in SkateBoarder magazine at the age of 14, immortalized the skating scene around Dogtown in Los Angeles, discovered and produced the punk band Suicidal Tendencies, and photographed the Los Angeles hardcore and punk scene and the New York hip-hop scene, among other subjects, with equal zest. A title of a book that Friedman, in a meta-fuck-you gesture to the world, produced and printed himself because no major publisher would touch it in the 90s.

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Keiichi Tahara

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If in Paris you would be well served to stop by the new outpost of Taka Ishii Gallery Photo where a solo exhibition of vintage prints by Keiichi Tahara recently opened. Tahara, now in his 60s, learned photography from his grandfather in his early teens and has pursued an exploration of light as material – in photographs, installations and light sculptures – tenaciously since.  The show at Taka Ishii Gallery presents works from two photographic series, Fenêtre (1973-1984) and Éclats (1979-1983), both of which Tahara completed early in his career shortly after moving to Paris.