What's on the Fashion Calendar for December 2012?

It's been a while since I've dared to post a calendar as it seemed to be one of the most popular posts to be copied onto other sites.....

Here are my picks for December 2012 fashion events:

Valentino: Master of Couture
Photo courtesy of Somerset House, 

Valentino: Master of Couture at Somerset House, London

Opened on 29 November 2012  and runs until 3 March 2013
Somerset House,  Embankment Galleries, South Wing

This exhibition celebrates the life and work of Valentino and features over 130 exquisite haute couture designs worn by icons such as Jackie Kennedy Onassis, Grace Kelly, Sophia Loren and Gwyneth Paltrow in an exciting installation created specially for Somerset House in London, UK.  I adore Valentino, but am wondering whether this exhibition can match the incredible installation at the Ara Pacis in Rome (July 6 - October 28, 2007).



Appearances Can Be Deceiving at Frida Kahlo Museum, Mexico City
Opened on November 22, 2012 and runs until November 2013

Judith Clark curated this exhibition of 300 items of clothing worn by the artist Frida Kahlo. Apparently after her death in 1954 and Diego's death in 1957, art collector Dolores Olmedo who acted as the manager the estate, refused to give access to Kahlo's archives of letters, clothes, jewelry and photographs. They were not unlocked until 2004 after Olmedo died. One of the highlights of the show is a corset designed by Jean Paul Gaultier who considered Kahlo a fashion icon and a source of inspiration.

If you cannot make it to Mexico City, the Art Gallery of Ontario has one of Frida Kahlo's painted corsets on display in their exhibition Frida & Diego: Passion, Politics and Painting. Read my post about the exhibition here.


Impressionism and Fashion at the Musee d'Orsay, Paris
Opened on 25 September 2012  and runs until 20 January 2013

In an essay called "The Painter of Modern Life", Charles Baudelaire encouraged artists to paint contemporary fashion as a way to convey modernity in their work. He wrote: "the gesture and the bearing of the woman of today give to her dress a life and a special character which are not those of the woman of the past.” Baudelaire was friends with many of the Impressionists including Degas, Manet, and Renoir, and their paintings captured women at a time when the rapid changes in fashion revealed subtle clues about class, status and identity. (By the way, this is a topic that I've researched at length and does not necessarily reflect what might be in the exhibition).

In Impressionism and Fashion, the exhibition presents paintings by such artists as Renoir and Manet as well as actual garments and considers how Impressionists such as Renoir and Manet depicted fashions of the day. A team of curators worked on this exhibition including Gloria Groom, curator at the Art Institute, Chicago, Philippe Thiébaut, general curator at the Musée d'Orsay, Paris. and Susan Stein, curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. The exhibition will move to the Metropolitan Museum of Art from February 19 to May 27 and at the Art Institute of Chicago from June 26 to September 22.

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Creative Process Journal: Curation and Obsessions

From a curatorial perspective, finding a narrative from among the hundreds of dresses in the Ryerson Fashion Research Collection that come from different donors and span over a century of fashion history is a challenge. 

Garments represent important artifacts of material culture, giving evidence of the fashions and social history of a period. Museologist Susan Pearce describes the way objects can reflect our identity: "Objects hang before the eyes of the imagination, continuously representing ourselves to ourselves and telling the stories of our lives in ways which would be impossible otherwise" (qtd. in de la Haye 12). 

Creative Process Journal: Curation and Judith Clark continued

Judith Clark's curatorial work is so rich and so vibrant that I want to read anything I can find about her process. Although the article One Object: Multiple Interpretations (co-written with Amy de la Haye) is about a mass produced women's coat/uniform worn by the British Women's Land Army during WWII, there are fragments of her general curatorial philosophy when she writes:  It is fitting singular objects into historical continuums and possible future stories that endlessly capture my imagination. Quite simply what stands next to what and where does it stand within an infinitely renewable curatorial grammer? (159).

Clark also points out that late Diana Vreeland "very astutely identified" that the exhibition viewer had to identify with the object in some way and make a connection between "finding something desirable and finding something interesting" (159). She goes on to ask: "is curating about the clarity of connections, and if so, how are these made visual or literal? How can objects be presented as a way into different stories?" (160).

Creative Process Journal: Curation and Judith Clark

Pretentious from The Concise Dictionary of Dress
Photo by Julian Abrams 2010

Judith Clark is a curator of fashion exhibitions that are often unconventional and thought provoking, including The Concise Dictionary of Dress in 2010. In this exhibition, fashionable objects or works of art relating to the clothed body were juxtaposed alongside singular words addressing the psychology of the fashioned body, such as "armoured, conformist, fashionable, plain, pretentious, provocative, tight". The setting of this exhibition was within the confines of the storage facility of the Victoria and Albert Museum, which added a degree of theatrically and exclusivity. This was a show that required advance booking. If your name was not on the security list, you were left standing at the locked gate. All belongings had to be left behind before entry and small groups of visitors were accompanied through the exhibition by a guide. Talking was not permitted and signage was virtually non-existent. In absence of a history the object or explanation of what was being presented, the dialogue was internal, challenging the viewer to create connections and links between the words and the objects. This was a show that haunts me still.

Book Review: The Concise Dictionary of Dress

As I wrote in my exhibition review earlier this week,  The Concise Dictionary of Dress at the Blythe House is a rare and extraordinary experience. The viewer must interpret the word clues to create their own meaning for the eleven site-specific installations which combine history, costume, language and artifacts. The accompanying book is an illustrated dictionary unmasking the subtext of the creators vision.
 
Title: The Concise Dictionary of Dress
Author: Judith Clark and Adam Phillips
Photography by: Norbert Schorener

Publisher: Violette Editions in association with Artangel 2010
Number of Pages: approximately 140 (pages not numbered)
Category: Non-fiction
Price: US $26.37 (Amazon)


What the book is about:
This exhibition catalogue consists of three parts:
1. an essay called Look it Up by Adam Phillips about the nature of dictionaries and the language of clothing
2. an alphabetical presentation of the words that are defined in the exhibition The Concise Dictionary of Dress along with a photographic presentation of the installations (included in this part are five words which were not installed at Blythe House)
3. a series of questions about the curation of the exhibition posed anonymously to Judith Clark

Favourite Passage:
Clothes, another of our languages, another of our codes, another of the forms our histories take, keep changing, like words, but faster; and, like words, everybody uses them, and, whether they are conscious of it or not, everyone has their own style, just as everyone has their own vocabulary. The reason that people are disdainful of fashion is that they fear that many of the things they value most in their lives may be more like fashion than anything else. In this sense, dictionaries are always fighting a rearguard action; not against fashion, but against its inevitable excesses (it has to keep changing; ithas to be something no one can keep track of). We have to imagine what a language would be like if it was like this. So there are no fashionable dictionaries (or indeed, fashionable definitions). And there can be no obvious dictionary for clothes, fashionable or otherwise, no straitforward reference book. The Concise Dictionary of Dress is, then, an unobvious dictionary; not a book, not made only out of words, but not without reference.  (Adam Phillips page 18)

Summary:
Although I had access to a press kit, this book was essential to help me attain a deeper level of understanding to what I saw at the Blythe House. Written in a scholarly and dense manner, the book gives a voice to the creators vision, unlocking their insights and intentions which I craved to hear while on the tour.

Exhibition Review: The Concise Dictionary of Dress

dic-tion-ar-y
1. a book containing a selection of the words of a language, usually arranged alphabetically, giving information about their meanings, pronunciations, etymologies, inflected forms, etcetra expressed in either the same or another language; lexicon; glossary;
2. a book giving information on particular subjects or on a particular class of words, names or facts usually arranged alphatetically
 Source: Webster's Encyclopeadic Unabridged Dictionary of the English Language 1994 

Conformist, Photo by Julian Abrams 2010

The Concise Dictionary of Dress is a site-specific art installation that explores the art and language of dress within the confines of the Blythe House, a storage facility of the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. Commissioned by Artangel, the creators Judith Clark and Adam Phillips insert clothing, accessories, cast objects, photographs in surreal and evocative tableaus within the V&A Museum's reserve collections. Clues to the interpretation for the eleven installations are provided through cards with definitions of dress terms written by psychoanalyst Adam Phillips. These words were chosen because of their association with fashion and appearance and included: armoured, comfortable, conformist, creased, essential, fashionable, loose, measured, plain, pretentious, tight.

Armoured, Photo byTas Kyprianon

The Blythe House is the working storage facility of the V&A Museum, and as such attending The Concise Dictionary of Dress requires advance planning and security clearance. Only seven people are admitted at twenty minute intervals for a docent-accompanied tour and tickets cannot be purchased at the venue. Over the course of the exhibition which continues to June 27, 2010, a maximum of about 5000 people will see this unparalleled presentation with the confines of the Blythe House. 

From the moment I buzzed the security officer to allow me access through the fenced-in grounds to the time I returned my security pass to the clerk, I was conscious of being in a place that few people have ever seen. Once the home of the headquarters of the Post Office Savings Bank, the Blythe House now is home to the reserve collections of the Victoria and Albert Museum as well as the Science Museum and the British Museum. Security is tight and this means that visitors must leave all bags and purses behind in a locked storage cabinet and groups of seven are accompanied through the exhibition by a guide. Leading the way through a labyrinth of corridors, these guides yield a huge ring of keys, distribute the definitions at each installation, and issue frequent reminders not to talk inside this working facility.

Having had access to the press materials before setting foot in the Blythe House made my experience somewhat different than the average person. And yet  in spite of my advance preparation, I was utterly astonished by the unexpected juxtapositions of a dress tableau beside a row of Roman wall reliefs, a wall of swords, or a massing of antique furniture.

Fashionable, Photo by Julian Abrams 2010

This exhibition was decidedly different from anything I've ever seen. Clark and Phillips created eleven tableau that required effort to understand. In the end,  this exhibition was anything but a dictionary to define the meaning of dress. In the absence of standard museum labeling, the viewer was forced to make connections between the definition and what was on display. In fact, this conceptually-based presentation stepped into the realm of contemporary art.

For example, for the word Plain, there were a number of dressed mannequins covered in Tyvec material. The definition given for the installation and the word Plain was 1. nothing special where nothing special intended. 2. Hiding to make room. Underneath those Tyvec covered mannequins were in fact Balenciaga gowns. In spite of the iconic shapes, the only way I knew this for sure was by reading the book that accompanies the exhibition.

Plain,  Photo by Julian Abrams 2010

My favourite tableau was a presentation of a muslin/calico gown elaborately embroidered in 354 hours of work by Rosie Taylor-Davies. Designed and commissioned by Judith Clark, the embellishment on this gown was based on a William Morris design which was drawn in hand in pencil, painted and worked in coloured stranded silk thread and a variety of metal threads and spangles. Accompanied by the definition Conformist, this pinned-together gown was a breathtaking display of craftsmanship.

Conformist,  Photo by Julian Abrams

There were other tableau in the exhibition that had me struggling to find the deeper meanings and connections between the definitions and the displays. Observing such installations like part of a dress for Junyu Watanabe for Comme des Garcons in a leaky coal bunker for the definition of Creased left me feeling vaguely uncomfortable and at times confused. Even so, I was undeterred and welcomed the challenge to create my own meaning.

Creased,  Photo by Julian Abrams 2010

The Concise Dictionary of Dress is a unique exhibition that blurs the boundaries between art, psychology and fashion. Challenging the viewer to re-interpret clothing and accessories in terms of anxiety, wish and desire, this site-specific installation also offers a rare opportunity to engage with the background of objects contained within Blythe House.

Pretentious Photo by Julian Abrams 2010

If you are lucky enough to live in London or to be traveling there before the exhibition closes on June 27, 2010, don't miss this extraordinary presentation. Tickets can be purchased at artangel.org.uk

As well, on Wednesday, June 9, 2010 at 630 pm, Judith Clark and Adam Phillips will talk about how their respective interests and ideas are expressed through The Concise Dictionary of Dress. This talk will be moderated by Lisa Appignanesi at the London College of Fashion. Tickets are free but must be booked in advance by emailing rhs@fashion.arts.ac.uk.


The Concise Dictionary of Dress
Judith Clark and Adam Phillips
Blythe House, London W14
April 28 to June 27, 2010
Presented by Artangel