The product at ICFF that gave me the most pleasure was a silly one: a fussball table by R S Barcelona with teams of female players. Very early in the morning, after a tortuous trip from home that included three subway transfers and a descent into the basement of the Javitz Center, it made me smile. The table comes in different candy-colored metal enamel finishes, all far too pretty for a bar. Their bright sheen drew me in and then, a full minute later, I realized what was really going on.

There’s nothing feminist about the table and nothing revolutionary about it either. It’s all in the service of the same rather dumb parlor game and time-waste. But it’s refreshing to see female figure primed for action rather than dress-up, and it’s reassuring that the table is from Spain. In America the likeness of a female fussball team would most likely have been implemented (and then interpreted) in the spirit of Title IX. My image of Spanish womanhood had always been the eye-popping, overdressed Madrilenas in Pedro Almodovar films. This toy throws a new figure into the mix.

May 25, 2012 by Nalina Moses

I saw a young man at this year’s International Contemporary Furniture Fair (ICFF) ride a bike through it, and it struck me that he had exactly the right idea. This year’s show is significantly smaller than it’s been in previous years, but it still fills the entire lower level of the Javitz Center. The show is usually fun to walk through, and each new booth has the potential to surprise and delight. But this year I spent just an hour on the floor and then took a seat while my friend finished her viewing. The show felt like an endless array of the same handful of products: artisinal wood tables, artisinal hand-blown glass lamps, and artisinal wallcoverings.

I’m all for a return to craft, sustainable materials, and small-scale fabrication. But most of the artisinal-minded products at ICFF are too obsessively designed and machined to be authentically artisinal, or even artsy. Their one-off hand-finished look is just an aesthetic. It’s obvious that behind the reclaimed materials and artfully irregular finishes, highly ambitious trained designers (frustrated architects, perhaps?) are at work. The rage for handmade stuff has already been parodied, lovingly, by the iconic Put a Bird On it! skit on Portlandia. What’s the limit to the number of artisinal products the market can bear? Isn’t it just a matter of time before the sensibility, like all other trends, falls out of fashion?

May 24, 2012 by Nalina Moses

Pairing Miuccia Prada and Elsa Schiaparelli, as the Met has for this year’s Costume Institute blockbuster, doesn’t serve either designer well. Prada’s work, especially, would have benefited from a different context, perhaps that of the fabled brand’s history, which is also her family history. Miuccia’s grandfather Mario started the company in in Milano in 1913, with a shop in the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II that sold handbags, suitcases and other small leather goods. That store is still there, with its lovely Victorian trappings: a checkerboard stone floor, utilitarian steel racks, and P-R-A-D-A spelled out in gold foil on the glass.

It was Miuccia Prada who oversaw the brand’s (brilliant) expansion from accessories to shoes and then ready-to-wear in the 1980’s. Prada never, however, entirely shook off its identity as an accessories brand. The shoes and bags have become iconic, deeply desired by both those who know fashion and those who don’t. On a deeper level, there’s a raw physicality to the brand’s products, even the clothing, that hearkens back to its workmanlike origins. Most of the garments on display at the Met possess a heavy, hearty sense of fabrication. There are simple A-line skirts (Is Miuccia Prada the Stradivarius of the A-line skirt?) layered with shards of mirrors, fake jewels, plastic baubles, leather cut-outs, rivets, rings, and paillettes. These embellishments are all slightly oversized –they’re more than just ornaments – and fastened with visible stitching and hardware. There’s in the pieces great inventiveness and freedom; they really do, as Miuccia says she intended, stretch the boundaries of good clothing. But there’s also in them, embedded, the image of her grandfather leaning over his work bench, making things with his hands.

May 23, 2012 by Nalina Moses

One thinks of Elsa Schiaparelli as a wit more than an artist. What pops to mind first are the shoe hat, the lobster gown, and the seed packet dress, creations that are more like one-liners than clothes. What becomes apparent when seeing her work up close, as it’s possible to at the Met’s new exhibit Impossible Conversations, is that she was, also, an impeccable seamstress. The dinner jackets are fitted and fastened with armor-like severity, and the floor-length gowns are draped asymmetrically, on the bias, with a sumptuous, casual mastery. Without wit – without any ideas at all – the finesse of Schiaparelli’s cutting and draping would assure her reputation.

The Met exhibit pairs Schiaparelli with another great Italian fashion designer, Miuccia Prada, and is framed as a series of dialogues between the two. Throughout the galleries there are video monitors showing the two great ladies chatting with one another in a special film by Baz Luhrmann. Prada portrays herself, admirably, and actress Judy Davis portrays Schiaparelli with campy excess. The fineness of the garments on display show up Davis’ portrayal. (They also, unhappily, show up most of the Prada garments.) On a mannequin encased in a full-height vitrine, Schiaparelli’s silk lipstick-printed gown looks less like a piece of clothing than a delicate, palpitating, creature. It’s as if it were born rather than made. All the cerebral references – to surrealism, to popular culture, to women’s roles – are rendered irrelevant. When it comes right down to it, Schiaparelli knew how to make a dress.

May 21, 2012 by Nalina Moses