My first job in New York was at an office across the street from the old Barneys on Seventh Avenue.  On lunch breaks, when particularly inspired, I’d head over to the the third floor and try on pieces from the Vivienne Westwood racks, a diversion which always left me feeling as if I were more adventurous, eccentric, and avant-garde than I actually was.  Seeing the small exhibit at The Museum at FIT “Vivienne Westwood, 1980-1989,” reminded me of all the things that made me fall in love with her clothes: the sense of history, the rich embellishments, and the endlessly inventive cutting and draping.

The exhibit also brought home how closely linked her clothing (from this period particularly) was to contemporary music, video and graphic design.  Vivienne was never a lonely artist channeling a pristine vision.  She drew energy from the streets of London and from her punkish cohorts, and in the videos of her runway collections on display at the show there’s a real sense of performance and play.  Her clothing, years later, still has the same happy, crafted, bohemian energy.  It’s clothing as theater.

The New York Times posted the sad news about Elizabeth Taylor’s passing on their front page, along with a photo of her from 1957 when she was an impossibly beautiful starlet.  But the Elizabeth Taylor I will remember is the one from the late 1970s, during her second marriage to Richard Burton, when she was overwrought, overweight, and overdressed.  In photos from this time the strength of her personality –her impulsiveness, wildness and honesty– as well as her physical beauty, shine through.

A witness at the second Taylor-Burton wedding, which took place outside under a banyan tree at a game reserve in Botswana, noted: “The bride wore green, with lace frills and guinea fowl feathers."  She spent these years wearing a lot of ridiculous things: caftans, turbans, ankle-length furs, mini-dresses, fringed pocketbooks, and a ring with a diamond the size of golf ball.  And yet she never looks like a fashion victim.  She doesn’t seem to be participating in fashion, but just going on with her life.

John Chamberlain’s work has always struck me as gimmicky.  He became famous in the 1960’s for making sculptures out of old car bodies, sculptures which seemed, at the time, perfectly in sync with movements in found art, process art and pop art.  As years passed his work has come to feel decidedly minor.

But at a survey exhibit at the Paula Cooper Gallery in Chelsea his pieces seem, in their assured composition and assertive figural presence, almost classical.  There aren’t any of the iconic crumpled-balls-of-fenders here.  Instead there are large, freestanding sculptures, which have a bearish spirit.  There are smaller objects resting on pedestals, like heads.  And there are assemblies hung off the walls, which look like flayed skins.  In the immense, bright gallery, the sculptures feel more substantial, and more vital, than they ever have.