EXCELLENT EXOTICA

Is India becoming fashionable once again? Fashionistas are drinking turmeric milk and wearing mango-print dresses. And there are two new prominent photo essays on Indian street fashion. One, in the Times, by Brooklyn photographer Mark Hartman, called Capturing the Colorful Style of Punjab , India, focuses on residents of that northern state. Another, in National Geographic, by Danish photographer Ken Hermann, called Flower Men, focuses on Kolkata flower vendors.

Hartman’s photos are exactly what the title promises: shots of women in colorfully mismatched salwars, duppattas, bangles, and bindis, and men in candy-hued turbans, cartoon mustaches, and aviator glasses. The shots are too loosely composed for my taste. Subjects are most often captured unknowingly, staring benignly into the middle distance, sweetened in honey-colored sunlight. The shots betray a naive cultural fascination, as if taken during a middle American couple’s first holiday on the subcontinent. These photographs have less to do with fashion than anthropology. One could find more bracing Indian style on a street corner in Jackson Heights.

Hermann’s photos are precisely the inverse: strident, classically-composed portraits of men at work. He poses the flower vendors formally, on a walkway along the Hugli River, in strong midday sunlight that bleaches the background and quiets the lush, riotous tones of their skin, fabric and flowers. Each man stands straight, at the center of the frame, and looks directly into the camera, handsome, alert, and quietly proud. A caption below notes his name and the varieties of flowers he sells.

Most remarkably, Hermann’s photos go beyond portraiture to capture something of the lunatic grace and excess of India, which only someone who’s spent significant time there understands. The basket of long, crimpled ashoka leaves Angad Ray balances on his head makes an Ascot-worthy hat, and his lungi is folded around his knees with the studied asymmetries of a Comme des Garcons skirt. Kulwinder carries thick garlands of marigolds over each shoulder that fan out around him like a medieval priest’s cloak. These photographs trade in exoticism, for sure, but it’s an artful one.

Photograph courtesy of Ken Hermann and National Geographic.

May 20, 2017 by Nalina Moses

BLOCK PARTI

On a recent visit to New Orleans I drove through parts of neighborhoods that were devastated by Hurricane Katrina, including the Lower Ninth Ward. Twelve years after the flooding, its residential suburban blocks have a surreal character. About one third of the lots hold old houses, mostly wood “shotguns,” that have been restored, raised above grade on stilt-ilke footings, with water lines and stains on their facades. About one third of the lots hold new houses, bright mini-mansions in newfangled styles and finishes. And about one third of the lots are empty, grown over with a lush, flat lawn.

The texture of these blocks is remarkable. Together they make for a more open, irregular, picturesque kind of suburb. The houses are seen from all angles, like individual objects, chess pieces, rather than chunks of a monotonous suburban fabric. While residents are still struggling for amenities – including jobs and affordable housing – recent growth hints at a new kind of development. Could what has already happened be a viable model, allowing random lots to be developed organically, accommodating natural population shifts, until the Lower Ninth achieves its old density? Or, should planners intervene strategically, focusing new construction in fixed areas that can be strengthened with new amenities, giving rise to denser micro-communities? Or, should planners freeze development as it is, and turn the lawns into pocket gardens and parks, carving an immense, irregular green space through the whole neighborhood? Each possibility offers great hope.

Photo courtesy of PBS.

May 15, 2017 by Nalina Moses

BODYWORKS

The Met’s Rei Kawakubo/Comme des Garcons retrospective is subtitiled Art of the In-Between, which is incorrect. This designer’s work is full-on, more uncompromised than that of any other contemporary fashion designer. There are other brands that subvert (Hood by Air, Namilia), but none with the clarity, assuredness, and innocence (toward media and market) of Kawakubo. More than navigating between polarities of gender, technique and identity, she operates outside these classifications. And her aim is not to to shock, but to make clothes that remain close to her vision.

These clothes are often costume-like, exaggerated versions of everyday pieces: a biker jacket with plum-sized grommets and thick leather laces, a ballet tutu fashioned from s sloping pile of crushed black tulle, a nun’s habit that covers the face completely, a kilt that crushes together four different tartans. And they are playful syntactially, accepting conventions of tailoring and taking them to exponential extremes. There is an A-line dress with the profile of another dress appliqued on top of it, a grey checked suit with an additional set of arms growing from its armpits, and a pleated white gown whose front panel has pleats printed on it.

However inventive these garments are in construction and image, it’s their relationship to the body that’s their boldest achievement. They have a crustacean quality, making an exoskeleton – another body – around the body to give it new form. They are less sewn than constructed, incorporating boning, wire, padding, and industrial materials like vinyl and plastic, to give them an powerful independent structure. They obscure the body and all its powerful identities: race, gender, age, stature, health, beauty, mobility, power.

It’s a tall order wearing the clothes, which require surrendering one’s figure along with one’s social status. At the Met Gala celebrating the show only a handful of celebrities, including Rihanna, Lady Gaga and Caroline Kennedy, wore Comme Des Garcons on the red carpet. They didn’t look merely pretty; they looked like warrior princesses from some other, altogether more sophisticated, planet.

Photograph by Nalina Moses.

May 14, 2017 by Nalina Moses

YOU DO YOU

After wrestling with a recalcitrant employee at a meeting last week, my boss told him, with a shrug of the shoulders, “You do you.” This could be the motto of the newest generation of product designers, whose work is represented handsomely at this year’s Collective Design Fair.

The overall mood is sophisticated and twee. I’ve thought before that our current moment in design is a throwback to the 80′s but, after walking through CDF I realize there’s something essentially different. Today’s design work isn’t principled formally; it’s casual and idiosyncratic. Each object is about realizing one small idea – about narrative, material, proportion – in hallucinogenic detail, but without an overarching set of beliefs. This is form-making without rules, personal design. Which isn’t to say it isn’t substantial or complex. All the objects and artwork here are immaculately crafted, curated and installed.

The mood is, almost always, playful, and the objects are like toys – whose only function is to amuse and delight. Even the most practical pieces (chairs, tables, drinking glasses) are overwhelmed by their idiosyncratic form, so that their everyday functions seem secondary. The most spectacular installation is the R + Company booth, which contains a balloon-shaped couch welded together from nickels, a six-foot-tall bead-encrusted mushroom, a hanging chair shaped like a wasp’s next, and spiked ceramic vases that look like exotic fruit envisioned by Dr. Seuss. Each object feels immediate, as it has been fabricated directly, without refinement or engineering, from a child’s crayon drawing.

Modernists defied formal conventions to challenge staid bourgeois notions about what a table was, what a window was, and what a house was. Now, perhaps because there is no authoritative dogma to rub up against, designers are defying convention simply because they have the freedom to, and because they’re bored doing ordinary stuff. The results are lovely to look at, and emotionally slight.

R + Company installation, Collective Design Fair, 2017. Photograph by Nalina Moses.

May 13, 2017 by Nalina Moses