DRESS WHITES

An installation at The Met recreates a closet from the Greenwich Village studio apartment of Sara Berman. Berman was born in 1920 in Belarus, emigrated to Palestine in 1940, and then to New York in 1953. From 1982 until her death in 2004, she stored her her all-white wardrobe, as well as other loose possessions, in a single walk-in closet, on two hangbars and six rows of narrow wood shelves. Her wardrobe consisted of: ten or so pairs of trousers, twenty or so shirts, ten or so sweaters, stacks of folded socks and underclothes, two wool scarves, two wool caps, one pair of gloves, a cotton bathrobe, three plastic wristwatches and, on the floor, seven pairs of flats with their toes pointed outwards. The housewares stored inside include: linens, towels, an iron, a globe, a white wood serving tray, a steel casserole, a set of painted ceramic mugs, a small stack of letters, and about a dozen books.

All these things are fine and lovingly cared for, but they are not luxurious, and they are not sentimental. They are remarkable instead because Berman selected and displayed them with such care. Stacks of tshirts and underpants are folded precisely, as if for sale, each pile sitting an inch away from the next. Shirts are ironed and buttoned, facing front, with an inch left between each hanger. The things contained in this closet, shockingly few in number for a contemporary American, are all of what Sara Berman needs.

Berman’s closet isn’t monastic; it offers its own kind of opulence. With the pieces inside it’s possible to craft a great number of ensembles, spanning seasons and occasions. Her closet might be as rich in fashion possibilities as Nan Kempner’s famously overstuffed ones. A small photograph of her on the gallery wall shows her in white coat, shirt and trousers, with a mens striped necktie, looking naturally, elegantly and eccentrically chic. This closet, filled with her personal effects, could have been understood as a memorial. Instead it speaks, strongly, to her love for herself and her love for her life.

Photograph © The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

November 26, 2017 by Nalina Moses

WHEN LESS IS MORE IS NO LONGER ENOUGH

I wonder how English architect John Pawson feels about the transformation of his most iconic project, the Calvin Klein flagship on Madison Avenue, at the hands of brand creative director Raf Simons and artist Sterling Ruby. The city’s most admired minimalist interior has become a riotous retail playhouse. Grids of construction scaffolding and stage lights have been inserted into the wide-open sales floors, beige wall-to-wall carpeting has been laid over the polished concrete floors, and brightly-colored formica blocks and cylinders have replaced the low, altar-like stone and wood plinths. Most dramatically, the interiors throughout have been painted a screaming canary yellow. When seen from across Madison Avenue at dusk, the stately limestone building’s windows gleam demonically.

It’s an audacious rebranding, an attempt to lure a younger, hipper customer and to bring the store’s architecture in step with Simons’ fevered pop culture imagination. This season’s clothes, separates with clean silhouettes executed in vernacular fabrics (denim, houndstooth, plastic, lace) with bold graphic details (racing stripes, appliques, feathers), and paired with structured accessories (cowboy boots, boxy clutches, doctors bags), have a fresh, funky feeling, like costumes for space age hippies. The new stores gives them a suitable stageset.

But I can’t help but remember the old store. It takes a lot of skill, in both design and construction, to execute a convincing minimalist interior, and Pawson’s was thrillingly austere. The floors seemed endless and seamless, light fittings and hardware were brilliantly concealed, the store’s narrow staircase was tucked between two full-height piers, and daylight washed over everything, highlighting the soft finishes. This was a Madison Avenue flagship store that didn’t try to entertain an off-the-sidewalk customer; it was a temple to restraint.

The cultural pendulum is swinging now from principle to feeling, from monochrome to color, from luxury to vulgarity. But I wonder if defacing every surface of the old store was the best strategy. The connecting stair, whose treads have been covered in black enamel, still surprises with its narrow proportions and mysteriously slow reveal of the second floor. Its slender square steel handrail, painted yellow, remains singularly elegant. The bright colors and street savvy of the new design catch the eye but don’t hold the imagination for long. When viewed from the mezzanine, the web of scaffolding, strings of lights, and toy-like props on the ground floor feel like party decorations. The architecture of the old store – its high walls, open floors and slowly unfolding views – quietly reasserts itself.

Image courtesy of Calvin Klein.

November 11, 2017 by Nalina Moses

EARTHBOUND

A professor of mine once described modern architecture as flight, a lifting from the ground. I’ve always thought of dance this way, as the body’s movement against gravity, to remain aloft. So the Hubbard Street Dance Chicago’s performance of Echo Sense by Crystal Tile, at Fall for Dance, was slightly shocking. In this piece, performed before a blank black backdrop, eight young dancers in tailored trousers and vests skirmish, shifting back and forth across the stage. They don’t stand erect, stride, or strut. They are instead, continually, holding themselves just barely above the ground, crouching, hovering, crawling.

The narrative is evocative and, perhaps purposefully, vague. The pinstriped costumes and the stuttering strobe lighting call to mind Depression Era silent movies. The dancers’ physical aggression – they way they approach each other, lay hands on each other, tug each other, surround each other – reminded me of a rugby match or a street fight. At moments all eight coalesce into a single figure, rising up from the ground or cascading towards it, like a series of stop-motion photographs. They are earthbound, in a slow, perpetual fall. But the act isn’t passive. The dancers move quietly, with leopard-like ferocity. They remain sure-footed in a dark, difficult landscape.

November 03, 2017 by Nalina Moses

DISEMBODIED

MoMA’s new exhibit Items: Is Fashion Modern? might be the most elegant presentation I’ve seen there. The 111 items featured, “clothing and accessories that have had a strong impact on the world in the 20th and 21st centuries,” are mounted with minimal fuss, on headless mannequins on low platforms, and pinned like dead butterflies on the blank walls of the sixth floor galleries, leaving oceanic expanses in between for wandering and reflection. There are simple printed text cards and some small video monitors at the displays, but the installation remains blissfully free of gimmickry. It’s also, sadly, free of drama, glamor and sex appeal. Is Fashion Modern? takes the fizz out of fashion.

Unlike the small, rich, thoughtfully-curated fashion shows at The Museum at FIT, this show feels thematically vague. It’s less about the items themselves, and how and why they’re worn, than about their intellectual associations. Most of the items are types of garments (LEOTARD, BRIEFS, MOTORCYCLE JACKET), but some aren’t “items” at all. They are materials (KENTE, GORE-TEX), brands (Y-3, WONDERBRA, SPANKS, FITBIT), and even ideas (SPACE AGE).

As they prepared the show – only the second fashion show in MoMA’s history – curators must have imagined the throngs visiting The Met's annual blocksbuster fashion show. But instead of presenting iconic garments, like Elizabeth Hurley’s Versace safety pin gown or Audrey Hepburn’s Givenchy cocktail dress (LITTLE BLACK DRESS), there are generic versions from the same designers. And instead of offering Michael Jordan’s hightops (AIR FORCE 1), there’s a sagging, scuffed pair that look like they were lifted from the sidewalk on garbage day. So many of the items are commonplace, overly familiar (SUIT, WHITE T SHIRT, TIGHTS), that they have little charge formally, and don’t hold the eye when set in vitrines or hung on the wall. These 111 items might have been better collected in a time capsule, marked How Everyone Dresses in 2017, and set aside for fifty years.

Most strangely, the show misses timely political connections. We see a replica of Colin Kaepernick’s 49ers shirt (SPORTS JERSEY) but we don’t see a replica of Mickey Mantle’s, though both wear, iconically, number 7. We see a Yankees hat but we don’t see a Make America Great Again hat. And a red Champion sweatshirt (HOODIE), displayed against a big black wall with its hood pointed upwards, has an spooky, unsettling presence. Rather than speaking to trends in athleisure and streetwear, it recalls Tayvon Martin, and the anonymous hooded prisoner in the grainy photographs from Abu Ghraib.

This show is so eager to decipher each of the 111 items semiotically that it forgets that that they are also clothing, charged mythologically when worn on a body, by a person, in the world. These items make our identities and our dreams.

Photograph courtesy of MoMA.

October 28, 2017 by Nalina Moses