Tag
Fashion
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Mend Your Ways
An exhibition of Japanese textiles celebrates repaired clothing: flipping salvage into sustainability, and damage into beauty.
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Virtual Roundtable on “Empire”
After it debuted last January on Fox, Empire quickly became one of the most talked-about shows on television. Its Shakespearean portrayal of family life, its stylized window onto the hip-hop industry, and its Timbaland-produced soundtrack helped it earn millions of passionate fans (and more than a few critics). To celebrate the premiere of season 2—which…
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The Met Goes to China
In July, while in New York, I toured the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s much buzzed about “China: Through the Looking Glass,” a visually stunning multimedia exhibit that showcases the varied ways that Western fashion designers have been inspired by Chinese art and culture. The show has set attendance records, and is the Met’s most visited…
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Is There Really No Smart Writing on Women’s Fashion?
Reading Women in Clothes is like spending Saturday afternoon at Nordstrom Rack. Massive, chaotic, and noisy, both are messy in a way that could be inadvertent but could be purposeful: is this disarray a sign of how much they have to offer, or a commercial tactic to make their goods seem limitless? For reader and…
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Do We Need Wonder Woman?
My two-year-old daughter plays on the beach in a tiny red, white, and blue swimsuit, her chest emblazoned with winged yellow Ws that need no explanation. At a glance, the suit appears of a piece with the branded Dora the Explorer and Mermaid Ariel gear sported by fellow toddlers frolicking on the shoreline. Unlike her…
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After a Queer Fashion
The exhibit currently on view at the Museum at FIT, “A Queer History of Fashion: From the Closet to the Catwalk,” ends on a note of progressive triumphalism: the final installation is a triptych of gay wedding attire from the past several years. We see, to the right, a pair of entirely conventional white wedding…
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All About the Clothes
Though Grace Coddington is well-known in her native Britain by lovers of London’s Swinging Sixties, most Americans only learned who she was from the 2009 documentary about the making of Vogue’s annual landmark, The September Issue. This despite the fact that she has worked at American Vogue since 1988, and arrived there on the same…
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Books Full of Women
Biography never tells the story of a single life. Even a biography ostensibly focused on an individual also tells the story of its subject’s family, friends, or associates; it invites us to download bits of the lives of others and make them our own: biography as file sharing. Collective biography compounds the melding of author,…
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The Epistolary Terrorist
Alex Gilvarry’s debut novel, From the Memoirs of a Non-Enemy Combatant, opens with an announcement that what follows is not a novel at all: Editor’s Note: With the exception of footnote annotations, the author’s acknowledgments, the editor’s afterward, and a supplemental article included with permission, all material herein has been reprinted verbatim from the confession…
