EXPO JAN-JAN VAN ESSCHE – MOMU ANTWERP

Fashion

“Khayal” is an intimate exhibit of the Antwerp designer Jan-Jan Van Essche, currently on display at MoMu, the city’s fashion museum. The installation takes over the ground floor space of the museum. It begins with Van Essche’s calligraphy-based drawings that guide you into just one room, where the designer has created an installation highlighting ten key silhouettes that embody his work. The space unfolds gradually as you walk around a wooden construction resembling traditional Japanese architecture, with custom made mannequins that reflect the designer’s earthy West-meets-East approach. The serenity of the space gradually takes over, reflecting the serenity of Van Essche’s designs as reflected in the handmade natural fabrics, indigo dyes, and loose silhouettes. Van Essche has created his own world, conducive to contemplation and slowing down time, and by the end of your visit the world outside will fall away.

MAN RAY AND FASHION AT MOMU

Fashion

We tend to think that the fashion and art symbiosis is a relatively new thing, birthed by the late ‘90s and early ‘00s collaborations between Marc Jacobs and artists like Stephen Sprouse, Takahashi Murakami, and Yayoi Kusama. In fact, the relationship (as well as the tension) between modern fashion and art is as old as modern fashion itself. Its arguable progenitor, Charles Frederick Worth, deemed himself an artist. He compared himself with the painter Eugene Delacroix and put on artistic airs (down to wearing a type of a beret favored by Parisian painters), setting the model for the generations of fashion designers that came after him. From Paul Poiret to Coco Chanel to Elsa Schiaparelli and beyond, designers either cultivated friendships with or collaborated with artists.

She Walks in Beauty: Olivier Theyskens

Culture, Fashion

If you find yourself in Antwerp in the coming months, or need a reason to go there, a visit to the “Olivier Theyskens: She Walks in Beauty” exhibit at the ModeMuseum (MoMu) will take you back to the time when fashion with capital “F” was still important, when that fickle enterprise still had sweep and grandeur, before the paralyzing effect of irony and false self-deprecation that accounts for much of fashion’s blandness today had set in. It was a time when couture was made thoroughly modern by the likes of Alexander McQueen, John Galliano, and Martin Margiela, those designers who still bothered to learn the fashion playbook before tearing it to shreds, sometimes literally.

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Dries Van Noten at MoMu

Culture, Fashion

Two weeks ago I got to see the Dries Van Noten: Inspirations exhibit at MoMu, Antwerp’s fashion museum. As the title suggests, the exhibit provides a glimpse into Van Noten’s world, and the influences that feed the wellspring of his creativity.

I have already seen the initial version of the exhibit at the Musee des Arts Decoratifs in Paris. It was received with typical fanfare that the fashion press is all too ready to dispense. But while I liked it overall, I was so exhausted by the two floors of continuous explosion of color and ornament that I was happy to get some fresh Parisian air when I finally got out.