LAYLA D'ANGELO: B FOREVER, MUSEO FRANCISCO SOBRINO, GUADALAJARA SPAIN

I am very pleased to let you know that I have written the text for the catalogue accompanying Layla D’Angelo’s retrospective of a decade of her kinetic sculpture at the Museo Francisco Sobrino in Guadalajara, Spain, on view from June 19th to September 6th 2026. An excerpt of the catalogue is shown in the images above and the full text is reproduced below. Please contact me if you would like to receive a PDF of the entire catalogue, in which the text is published in English and Spanish. The Museo Francisco Sobrino is dedicated to the work of Spain’s foremost artist who worked in the realm of optical and kinetic art, and the work of contemporary artists carrying on those movements.

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Layla D’Angelo was born in the USA but has lived in Spain for 38 years. Before settling in Spain (but hardly settling down) D’Angelo had lived in New York, London, Rome, Bogota,and Mexico

In these past decades the artist’s life in Spain has shaped her artistic vision into two completely different long-running projects. One of these is a weekly Polaroid portrait project, composed of thousands of images of the artist’s self-described “colorful life,” an auto-anthropological project in which she views her own life through the Polaroid camera she directs at herself.

Her second project presented here, in the Museo Francisco Sobrino, is a review of 10 years of kinetic art that began in 2015 with little knowledge of the theories of this unusual art form, but instead started with a technical discovery unique in the ongoing history of kinetic art: the use of magnets, that both hold the work together and that enable the artwork to move. Her multidimensional color constructions,composed of painted iron pieces, held together by magnets, can change form, appearance and composition. D’Angelo has explained the artistic evolution and the technical explosion that has resulted in the art works you see in this exceptionally suitable venue:

After many years of painting a series of oil paintings based on Polaroids taken for my conceptual piece ‘Once Upon a Life’, a weekly photographic diary of my life, I changed things up and started to paint with nail polish on iron panels and also making mobiles, painting on iron discs hung with things used for fishing. After exhibiting those early mobiles in Paris at Galerie Pierre Passebon, I then began a series of small figurative paintings with Nail polish on iron. When the time came to exhibit those pieces , the gallerist suggested that we hang them with magnets. “Magnets,” that one word inspired this whole body of work.

FROM BEAUTIFUL STRANGE STRANGER TO ANYWAY BERNARDINO TO B FOREVER

Layla D’Angelo’s art offers an invitation to the infinite. Hints of Russian constructivism, op art and kinetic sculpture are combined in black, white, yellow, red and blue wall mounted iron constructions, held together with magnets, that can be subjected to unlimited reconstruction by the viewer. Fragmentary flat iron pieces suggest diamonds, lozenges, fishscales or jigsaw puzzle pieces, the composite form of which is never final, never reaching conclusion. The black -and-white image of the chess or checkers board is present in works that are an invitation to play: move the game pieces and plot your next move.

A closer look at the surface of the artist’s earlier iron pieces, exhibited in 2016 in Barcelona at Galerie H2O in an exhibition poetically titled “Beautiful Strange Stranger,” reveals painstakingly applied minute dots of color which upon close inspection are discovered to be nail polish. The sculptures have the appearance of pure abstractions but the artist’s use of nail polish as paint give them a literal coating of post-feminist critique. Their resemblance to exploded patchwork quilts and use of a raw material of feminine allure suggest a subtle and simultaneous critique and celebration of women’s work and beauty culture. D’Angelo’s play on femininitude is seen in works that appear as concentric circles, evoking the mystique of the female physical void and the feminine psychic vortex. The constructions’ fragmentation and mutability stand in opposition to the classical monolith, associated art historically with the male presence.

In D’Angelo’s recent work she has altered her technique and her palette, reflecting her personal desire to explore new, but still unconventional ways to apply color, and in response to ecological concerns. The artist explains that “the dots, which are bigger, are applied with a syringe. The new pieces are less toxic as I use an ecological water based acrylic paint; totally different from the super-toxic nail polish.” The black and white of the earlier work, hinting at signs of hazard, has been gradually supplanted by the primary colors of red, yellow and blue, a simple experience of aesthetic pleasure and the added bonus of being non-toxic, for artist and audience.

D’Angelo’s corner mounted works echo the Russian constructivists’ engagement of this previously overlooked placement: Vladimir Tatlin’s 1914 “Corner Counter-Relief” and the 1915 Petrograd exhibition of Suprematist paintings by Kazimir Malevich, in which his black and white geometric canvases took on three-dimensional form through oblique mounting at the meeting of walls and ceiling. Echoes of mid-20th century Latin-American neo-constructivism are present as well: the astute observer will notice a nod to Lygia Clark’s relational objects and flexible sculptures of the 1950s and 60s. The artist credits an admiration for Mondrian in the emphasis on the red, yellow and blue in her recent work. Even the most uninformed art viewer will recognize D’Angelo’s quotation of ultimate Op artist Bridget Riley’s stripes and spirals. Historical antecedents are apparent, but D’Angelo is not a theorist or an academic. A life devoted to creativity, beauty and pleasure has brought her art to the place it occupies today. When asked the meaning of the seemingly cryptic title of the present exhibition “B Forever” she remarks that “B is for my darling late friend Bernardino. He loved this work.” Bernardino’s affirming presence was recognized in the second exhibition of the artists kinetic art, presented at Barcelona’s Espronceda Institute of Art & Culture, jauntily titled “Anyway Bernardino” and, indeed, the art moved in any way the viewers chose to recompose it, via D’Angelo’s unique use of magnets to make art that is mutable.

Despite the protestations by the artist that there is no “deep” meaning to her work, other than creating art that brings pleasure, her kinetic art is literally a visual puzzle, and it is part of a lineage in art history (a lineage magnificently represented by the Museo Francisco Sobrino itself).

Rosalind Krauss observed that in constructivist theory art was seen as "an investigatory tool in the service of knowledge." What knowledge is D’Angelo seeking to convey? Is there even any objective truth to convey? The title of one piece, “Chequered Life,” and its changeable form suggest that there is no objective truth but instead there is only subjective experience: life is open ended and art is what you make of it, literally. In this sense D’Angelo’s constructions are Dionysean rather than Appolonian. They are on the side of subjective play, chance and the irrational rather than objective truth and enlightenment. They are subjects not objects: they are constantly subject to the absolute control of the viewer.

©Alan Rosenberg

2OTH CENTURY SILVERSMITH E. DANE PURDO, SILVER MAGAZINE, APRIL/MAY 2026

I am delighted to let you know that my article on mid-20th-century silversmith E. Dane Purdo (1926-2014) is the cover story in the just published issue of Silver Magazine. Silver Magazine is mining its archive and chose this article I wrote for them in 2009 for the cover of the April/May 2026 issue, which is graced by Purdo’s elegant attenuated candelabrum from 1960. This is my second Silver magazine cover story: in 2008 my article on Earl Krentzin was chosen for the cover of the magazine’s 40th anniversary issue. The article on Purdo has been republished as originally printed so it does not reflect the perspective of his passing but I have updated this summary to memorialize his very long and very creative and productive life both in the studio and out in the vibrant postwar crafts world, as an exhibitor and as a judge at the most prestigious museum-sponsored craft fairs and distinguished exhibition venues.

E. Dane Purdo’s work in sterling silver displayed the highest level of skill in both handcraftsmanship and design.  His long career as a silversmith and teacher was highlighted by a distinguished list of exhibitions and a legacy of outstanding hollowware.

At the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor he majored in art history, graduating with a Master of Arts degree in l952.  Purdo explained recently that “while at Ann Arbor I attended an evening class in jewelry making,” adding that “it was because of my keen interest in jewelry making that I entered Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, and expanded my love of silver to silversmithing.” Purdo earned his Master of Fine Arts degree at Cranbrook in 1955.

In 1958, following two years of study at the Royal College of Art in London as a Fullbright Scholar, the results of that experience were exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Crafts alongside the works of other “Fulbrighters,” including Arline Fisch and Earl Krentzin.  Purdo’s pieces had already been exhibited in a one-man show at Milwaukee-Downer College in 1955, and would be shown in one-man exhibitions at Ohio State University, Columbus, in 1962, and at the Bergstrom-Mahler Museum in Neenah, Wisconsin, in 1974.

The sterling hollowware that Purdo created was characterized by carefully controlled contours, perfect balance between convex forms and concave outlines, and mirror-smooth surfaces. 

In 1960, Purdo’s hollowware was exhibited in a three-person exhibition called Dimensions 1960, held at the New Mexico Highlands University Arrott Art Gallery in Las Vegas, New Mexico.  The other two exhibitors were weaver Lenore Tawney and ceramist Peter Voulkos, both renowned today for their pivotal positions in twentieth-century crafts.

In conjunction with the 1958 Fulbright exhibition, Edgar Kaufmann, Jr. wrote that “in design, as in other fields, we are learning that America’s advantages, while great, are not guaranteed; we can maintain them best by a friendly participation in world activity and in the accompanying criticism and progress.”

E. Dane Purdo’s career was marked by participation in the crafts community on the regional, national, and international levels—as a student, teacher, exhibitor, colleague, and craftsman.  The words he applied to the rim of a 1961 punch bowl, although written by Ben Johnson 400 years ago, would seem to be the message that Purdo sent out to those who have had the pleasure to use and view his works in silver: “Let those who are learned, sophisticated, cheerful and honest gather around.”

ALAN ROSENBERG APPOINTED CO-EDITOR OF LA CRÉOLE, JOURNAL OF THE LOUISIANA CREOLE RESEARCH ASSOCIATION

Dear Friends: I am very excited to let you know that I have been appointed Co-Editor, with Melissa Daggett, of La Créole, the annual journal of the Louisiana Creole Research Association. Our 2025 issue has just been published and is available in both print and on the internet.

In addition to my academic credentials my mother was a Creole native New Orleanian whose ancestors were amongst the earliest French noblemen who colonized Louisiana and the first enslaved Africans abducted and traded from Senegambia. My mother always instilled in me that I was Creole and she spoke French and practiced Creole cultural and culinary traditions. My article on my grandmother’s family appeared in the 2024 issue of La Créole.

Amongst our first initiatives was to get our archive of 17 volumes of La Créole up online, available to all. We have achieved this first goal in collaboration with Xavier University of Louisiana. You can find this issue and those previously published on Xavier University’s website, available to the public, free of charge. PDFs of of La Créole can be found in the University’s Institutional Repository: https://digitalcommons.xula.edu/lacreole/

(easily found by searching “Xavier University of Louisiana Institutional Repository” on any search engine).

The Louisiana Creole Research Association was founded in 2004, just one year before Hurricane Katrina. Following the catastrophic event some of the founding members dispersed and have been unable to return to their beloved city. Like New Orleans itself, the organization regrouped, survived, and has been a crucial part of the thriving Creole renaissance that has taken place throughout Southern Louisiana since the tragedy 20 years ago.

In 2008 the Association, often referred to as “LA Creole,” committed to publishing an annual journal. La Créole will continue to be available in hard copy and can be purchased directly from the Louisiana Creole Research Association via its website, where all who are interested can join as members (a subscription to La Créole is a benefit of membership): www.lacreole.org.

Even in Louisiana there is much misunderstanding of the meaning of who and what is Creole. There is evidence that both French and Spanish colonial Louisiana identified all its people (White, Black, and mixed), both free and enslaved, who were born in the new world of old world stock, as Creole. That included the offspring of Europeans (predominantly French and Spanish), Africans, and a mixture of both that could also include Native American. Therefore, the descendants of all these people can claim Creole heritage. The mission of the Louisiana Creole Research Association and its journal is to assist Creoles of Color in researching their ancestry, to educate the general public about Creole history and culture, and to celebrate the contributions and legacy of a unique, sometimes forgotten people.

I invite you to visit La Créole online and browse our 2025 issue as well as our past 17 issues. Our 2026 Call for Papers will be issued soon.

SPECIAL COLLECTIONS AND ARCHIVES, FASHION INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY

I am a lifelong saver: from 1978 on I never threw out any Fiorucci poster or shopping bag, the Interview magazines I bought at Fiorucci, any issue of New York Rocker, the SoHo News, i-D magazine, the Face, Details, the East Village Eye (the latter two I worked for) all of which I still have (and much more). A few years ago I decided I couldn’t be the custodian of quite such a large collection of ephemera so I donated most of the fashion related material to Special Collections and Archives in the Library at the Fashion Institute of Technology (from which I have the A.A.S and M. A. degrees). SPARC is one of the world’s greatest repositories of documentation of fashion, including original fashion illustrations and photographs, rare publications, archives of noted designers, etc. During the 1980s and into the ‘90s I kept everything that came my way, every fashion show invitation and program and press kit and every lookbook, catalogue, etc. The images here are some of my favorites from the collection I donated to SPARC:

1: Paolo Roversi for Comme des Garcons, image/campaign book, 1985.

2: Pamela Hanson for Comme des Garcons, postcard, 1985

3: Nick Knight for Yohji Yamamoto, image/campaign book

4, 5, 6: Cindy Sherman for Comme des Garcons, postcards, 1995

7, 8: Katsuo Hanzawa for Comme des Garcons, postcards 1991.

9, 10, 11: Max Vadukul for Yohji Yamamoto, image/campaign book, 1985.

12: Gene Meyer, image from press kit, 1997.

13: Le Roy “King of Art” for Anna Sui fashion show invitation, 2002.

14: Nick Knight for Jil Sander, image/campaign book, 1991

15: Sofia Coppola for X-Girl catalogue, 1996.

16: Marc Berg for X-Girl catalogue, 1996

17: Michael Schmidt fashion show program, 1987.

18: Horst for Geoffrey Beene, press kit, 1984

19: Steven Meisel for Geoffrey Beene, press kit, 1986.

20: Steven Meisel for Geoffrey Beene, press kit, 1984.

21: Andre Walker, fashion show invitation, 1986.

22: Roxanne Lowit, Backstage at Vivienne Westwood, one of six of original prints, 1983.

23: Mario Testino for Bodymap, postcard, 1985.

24: Susanne Bartsch's New London in New York" fashion show invitation, 1983

25: Parachute, booklet, circa 1980

26: Parachute, booklet, circa 19 80

27: Javier Gonzalez Porto for Betsey Johnson, catalogue, 1985.

28, 29, 30: Betsey Johnson, catalogue

31: Michelle Byrnes for Betsey Johnson, catalogue, 1984

32: Harlen Kayden for Betsey Johnson, catalogue, 1982.

This selection is just the tip of the iceberg. The collection includes the invitation to Marc Jacob’s first fashion show and the after party invitation and the program and line sheet; the very rare 1984 Norma Kamali Spiegel catalogue; all the Comme des Garcons image/campaign books from 1983-1986 and 68 individual Comme des Garcons postcards; image/campaign books from Jil Sander, Yohji Yamamoto, Matsuhiro Matsuda; press kits from Willi Smith (including original prit photographs by Max Vadukul) and Geoffrey Beene and the 1986 press kit for Christian Lacroix’s last collection for Jean Patou; Grand Royal and X-Girl catalogues and a complete set of Betsey Johnson’s mail order catalogues and dozens of other things. You can find it all here in the library’s catalogue:

https://onesearch.fitnyc.edu/permalink/01SUNY_FIT/h4a0tv/alma990001518920204829

When I met with Karen Trivette, the delightful archivist at the time I made the donation, I told her that they could put the Yohji Yamamoto material with whatever other Yohji Yamamoto material they had, Armani with Armani, etc., but Karen explained that it is regular archival practice to keep collections intact: the material is available to researchers but it also tells a story of the person who acquired and saved all of these things. The collection is a sort of a guide to the donor and their times. Karen has recently retired after a truly outstanding decade expanding and strengthening SPARC and now it is in the very capable hands of Tiffany Nixon who I had the pleasure of meeting with recently. All the material I still have will eventually go to SPARC but I have barely delved into so much of what I have here (fortunately it is carefully organized alphabetically and then chronologically, stored in acid free boxes—my home archive). I’ll be sharing about the material i still have so do stay tuned for the next installment.

A CREOLE FAMILY REVEALED IN PORTRAITS BY ARTHUR P. BEDOU

I am very excited to let you know that an article I wrote about my grandmother's family, “A Creole Family Revealed in Portraits by Arthur P Bedou" is the cover story of the recently published 2024 annual Journal of the Louisiana Creole Research Association (LA Creole). The genealogical research and the story of a large group of family portraits by the highly regarded New Orleans photographer was also the subject of a presentation I made at the Association’s conference in November 2024. My brother Charles was a collaborator on the very extensive genealogical research which leads back to the earliest French noblemen who colonized Louisiana, enslaved Africans from Senegambia, and Free People of Color who played a significant role in the Creole community in 19th century New Orleans. The photo of our grandmother, Yvonne Marie Revoile, that appears on the cover of the journal is one of nine of the four Revoile sisters by Arthur P Bedou that illustrate the article. Bedou, described as “the leading black photographer of New Orleans in the first half of the twentieth century” is known for his close association With Booker T. Washington. By the time the Revoile sisters sat for his camera he had photographed such notable personages as Marcus Garvey, George Washington Carver, Andrew Carnegie, and presidents Theodore Roosevelt, William McKinley, and William Howard Taft. I discuss this remarkable family collection of photographs in the context of fashionable portraiture and as expressions of each sister’s unique style and personal history. If you would like to receive a PDF of the article please contact me.   -Alan 

COSTUME SOCIETY OF AMERICA MILLIA DAVENPORT AWARD 2024

Ann Lowe: American Couturier

For the third year I once again have written reviews of the books nominated for the Costume Society' of America’s Millia Davenport Publication Award. The award “recognizes and promotes excellence in the publication of costume, dress, appearance, and fashion related scholarship. The award is given annually to a newly published book or exhibition catalogue that makes a significant contribution to the above studies, reflects original thought and exceptional creativity, and draws on appropriate research methods and techniques. . . . The award, is named in honor of Millia Davenport (1895-1992), noted costume scholar, theatre designer, and founding member of the Costume Society of America. Her theatre work brought her international acclaim. She established and catalogued the library at the American Folk Art Museum. Her major published work, The Book of Costume (1948), was a pioneering visual history of Western fashion from ancient civilizations through the late nineteenth century.”

The following are my reviews, beginning with the outstanding book on Ann Lowe which is this year’s winner.

Ann Lowe: American Couturier

by Elizabeth Way and Margaret Powell

My excitement for Ann Lowe: American Couturier is generated by the compelling biography, a remarkable story, regardless of race and resulting neglect, but those are part of the story too. With contributions from multiple authors this outstanding monograph combines biography, fashion history, costume conservation and most appealingly social history, specifically the social history of a certain segment of the American upper class who were the designer’s clients. The ample documentary illustrations give a view into that world as well as Lowe's personal and professional world. Margaret Powell’s first chapter, primarily biography is riveting. Sadly Powell did not live to see this publication of her master’s thesis. Elizabeth Way’s second chapter, the fashion history, focuses on what Lowe’s dresses looked like and unnecessarily repeats much of the biography in chapter one. Way’s chapter on the legacy of Ann Lowe, drawing purported correspondences between Lowe’s work and that of various contemporary African-American fashion designers is least relevant to the story so beautifully told and illustrated in the first two chapters. Nevertheless it fell upon Way to convert Powell’s thesis into the beautiful book that lovingly restores Ann Lowe’s name to the history of fashion and she has done so in an exemplary way, curating the exhibition at Winterthur for which this book served as catalogue. Sections on the conservation of Lowe’s work and the re-creation of Jacqueline Kennedy's wedding gown give a detailed look at the work of a master seamstress and include historical perspective on dressmaking history and other documented details (“Lowe met Dior in Paris in 1947 and we know that he admired her work”). You can read more about Ann Lowe at the Winterthur website: https://www.winterthur.org/ann-lowe-american-couturier/

The other nominees included:

Fashion Killa: How Hip-Hop Revolutionized High Fashion

by Sowmya Krishnamurthy

I read Fashion Killa with great interest as I was present and an active participant in the early years of hip-hop, when it was called rap. In the early 1980s I was a regular on Friday nights at the Roxy, where it has been said, rap first began to “cross over” into mainstream culture. The Roxy crowd was far from mainstream, being young and fashion and music conscious in the extreme, but approximately 40% of the crowd there was white and the milieu was one of extraordinary cultural ferment. In the mid 1980s I wrote about fashion and culture for the East Village Eye, the alternative newsmagazine in which the word “hip-hop” was first published, in a 1982 article by Michael Holman. I was very surprised that Krishnamurthy does not mention the Roxy or cite Holman's article. Nevertheless her book is good and reveals a lot of otherwise obscure history. The most interesting aspect is the author's analyses of the interactions of hip-hop culture with fashion branding and luxury brands in particular and explores, in great detail, how hip-hop stars and fans went from the streets of the Bronx to the salons of the haute couture. The Street Fashion and Luxury Fashion categories have overlapped in a most fascinating way, that Ms Krishnamurthy describes. Illustrations are disappointingly minimal. Since the focus of the book is the end of the last century and the beginning of the current one the majority of the citations are from the internet, a trait that at one time I would have held against an author but do not do so in this case. The author makes a strong case for the powerful role that African-American pop culture has on and across contemporary fashion.

Designing Hollywood: Studio Wardrobe in the Golden Age

by Christian Esquevin

The author is a librarian and, like a library, his book is packed full of information but short on interpretation. The information in Designing Hollywood is coherently organized, with an excellent introductory chapter and subsequent chapters each examining a different film studio, beginning with the earliest, Universal Studios. In the introductory chapter the author explains that “the foundational purpose of costume was to help the actor portray a character and to advance the plot,” and he helpfully explains the steps in the design and production of film costumes. Much (but not all) of the text of the studio chapters is made up of facts and dates and anecdotes that are strung together with insufficient narrative, however. The author mentions occasions when a fashion depicted on film led to a trend in the real world but he neglects to expand on the topic of film fashion’s influence on popular fashion and culture, other than a meditation on glamour in the introductory chapter. Nevertheless the book is very appealing and beautifully designed and illustrated, entirely with period black-and-white photographs of the stars and color reproductions of original costume design renderings. No surviving costumes are illustrated. The endnotes show a wide variety of sources including, commendably, many unpublished oral histories.

A Dark, A Light, A Bright: The Designs of Dorothy Liebes

Edited by Susan Brown and Alexa Griffith Winton, Contributions by John Stuart Gordon, Emily M Orr, Monica Penick, Erica Warren and Leigh Wishner.

A Dark, A Light, A Bright: The Designs of Dorothy Liebes is a much needed and welcome publication but not for the reasons laid out by Winton in the introduction, in which Liebes is described as “little known” and “absent from history books.” While it is true that the subject is not universally known she is revered in design circles and her work has been included in a number of the seminal publications on 20th century design. Design Since 1945 published in 1983 by the Philadelphia Museum of Art and Design 1935 - 1965: What Modern Was, published in 1991 by the Musée Des Arts Decoratifs de Montreal AND Landmarks of Twentieth Century Design, published in 1993, are just three books on my own shelves that include Liebes in the pantheon of the 20th century’s great designers. It is true to say, though, that a few pages in a few books do not equal the beautiful and exhaustive monograph we now have. It is difficult to evaluate a multi-author book and this one has many, each addressing different aspects of Liebes' work: in hand weaving; in machine weaving; in interior design; in fashion; in her studio; and as a world traveler. The job of editing is well done here, as the tone of the writing throughout is directed towards the well-educated lay person. Liebes was well-known and respected in her lifetime so there is a vast amount of photographic evidence documenting every aspect of her work that beautifully illustrate this monograph. The cliche “lavishly Illustrated” accurately describes this book. Outstanding bibliography.

Real Clothes, Real Lives: 200 Years of What Women Wore

by Kiki Smith

Real Clothes, Real Lives is an outstanding undertaking as a publication, and documents the remarkable Smith College Historic Clothing Collection, gathered over the last 40 years by the author, a professor of costume design at Smith College. Kiki Smith describes the clothes that she has collected as those “worn by women who were not photographed for the society pages or featured in fashion magazines,” Nevertheless those women saw themselves, aspirationally, within the pages of those very magazines and the mediation between fantasy and reality is one of the primary revelations of this book. The text is coherently organized into general categories: clothing for the home; for public life; for rites-of-passage; for work, etc.. Within those categories the examples are arranged chronologically, giving coherence to the visual narrative of the book. Smith describes the collection as “a liberal arts archive that advances the academic inquiry of women of diverse economic and social backgrounds through the study of their dress from the 19th century to today .” This resource is made particularly effective by illustrating multiple examples of a particular archetype: “one 1895 wrapper tells you about its shape and fabric, but three or more let you determine what is characteristic of the style as well as what is distinct about each example.” Lack of citations excluded this otherwise worthy book from consideration for the award.

India in Fashion

by Hamish Bowles, with contributions by Dr. Vandana Bhandari, Suzy Menkes, Dr. Sarah Fee, Priyanka R. Khanna

India in Fashion is an exquisite book, utterly overflowing with beautiful imagery and solid scholarship. It is, however, very loosely organized, and feels like a series of highly intelligent magazine articles, some of the chapters with texts only two pages long, but complemented by multiple pages of illustrations. The subject is so broad as to be impossible to contain in a single volume. Many instances of the impact of Indian dress and textiles on the fashionable imagination are absent from this collection: examples by Balenciaga, Ann Lowe, Tiger Morse and other designers didn’t make the cut. I was particularly surprised that Tiger Morse was not discussed since she traveled to India to buy fabric and her trip was documented in an article in Life Magazine, photographed by Mark Shaw (the subject of an exhibition I curated). Jacqueline Kennedy's trip to India is discussed by Caroline Reynolds Millbank in her chapter on the sari in Western high-fashion. It was Tiger Morse who directed Jacqueline Kennedy to her resources in India and suggested that Kennedy be photographed on an elephant as Morse had been. Milbank discusses Mainbocher and his use of sari fabrics but neglects to illustrate any examples of his adaptations. Another designer that I was surprised not to see in this book was Faie J. Joyce who designed the Taj of India line of shoes and accessories in the 1960s. Several of the chapters examine the reverse flow of influence, from the West to the East, and in that regard I was very surprised that the saris of Princess Niloufer, now in the Museum at FIT, were not illustrated or discussed, although the chapter by Amin Jaffer illustrates and discusses other excellent examples of cross-cultural fashion. The chapters on Yves Saint Laurent, Dries van Noten, John Galliano, and Jean Paul Gaultier are good contributions and are complimented by chapters on contemporary Indian designers, all lavishly illustrated. Two of the latter chapters are written by Suzy Menkes, a grande dame of fashion reportage. Disappointingly there is no bibliography but a glossary is present and helpful.

Threads of Power

Edited by Emma Cormack and Michele Majer with contributions by Barbara Karl, et al.

I admit I am biased towards Threads of Power because I saw the spectacular lace exhibition it accompanied at the Bard Graduate Center. The book is as extraordinary as the exhibition however the photographs do not do justice to the exhibited examples from the collection of the Textilmuseum St Gallen, Switzerland. There are almost no true close-up photographs, of the type that are so effective in A Dark, A Light, A Bright, the Textiles of Dorothy Liebes. The illustrations are otherwise spectacular and include a wide variety of artistic and documentary sources. The book is both a history of lace and a series of chapters by multiple authors (22 in total!) on topics of current interest in the lace field, specifically lace in the New World, and subjects that are relevant to the collection itself, specifically machine production of lace in Switzerland today. a glossary is provided and it is most welcome. This is likely to be the definitive book on lace for a generation.

Fashioned by Sargent

by Erica E. Hirshler with Caroline Corbeau-Parsons, James Finch, and Pamela A. Parmal

Cross disciplinary studies such as Fashioned by Sargent are truly worthy of consideration for the Davenport award–they reach across categories and connect with a broader audience than a book directed at a fashion audience only might. Fashioned by Sargent is a work of art history, social history and fashion history. It potentially could reach those broader audiences, but it is not by any means addressed to a popular readership. It is a highly sophisticated book directed at an intellectually sophisticated audience. Fashioned by Sargent has 14 contributors. Erica Hirshler is presented as lead author and presumably she acted as chief editor, a prodigious responsibility given so many collaborators, which she appears to have managed successfully, as the book is streamlined and coherently organized. The chapters are, thankfully, relatively short. Densely researched, the footnotes contain much commentary as well as a lively mix of citations. Lack of a bibliography is a significant drawback. The Sargent machine keeps up its productions capabilities.

Dressing Up

by Verity Wilson

Dressing Up has a very limited audience in the US. This is not a reason to disqualify it, but it does prevent it from having that “star quality” that one expects in a Davenport award winner. In 2022 an an honorable mention was given to Sweet and Clean: Bodies and Clothes in Early Modern England, a book that, similarly, had a limited audience but was an outstanding work of scholarship. I had some difficulty reading Dressing Up: the very narrow topic has little appeal to me and the dense and tedious writing did not increase its appeal. Wilson frequently uses terms, and refers to practices, that are uniquely British and does not clarify them for a broader audience. The use of such terms, and reference to practices, is wholly appropriate for the subject, and the author’s audience is most definitely people with native familiarity. The book is beautifully designed and wonderfully Illustrated with period photographs. The single photograph of a surviving costume left me wanting to see more. Citations and bibliography are extensive and reveal an extraordinary depth of research.

The Dress Diary

by Kate Strasdin

The Dress Diary is a delightful book but it lacks the subjective characteristics that I hope to see in a Davenport award winner. There are simply too few illustrations in this book that aims to be an exposition of a rare surviving scrapbook documenting a mid-nineteenth century woman’s wardrobe. Kate Strasdin’s creative transcription of Anne Syke’s dress diary is a worthy and prodigious undertaking but, as we all know, a picture is worth a thousand words, and so a few more facsimiles of the 2,134 swatches contained in the actual diary would certainly complement Strasdin’s beautifully crafted text. Admittedly, as Strasdin writes “individually the swatches give little away, but by piecing together clues, we can weave together the strands of Anne's life into a colorful patchwork of family and friends.” Strasdin’s unraveling and reconstitution of those strands is a wonderful achievement but an opportunity to actually see the material evidence was lost in this publication (Strasdin cites a very similar album reproduced in its entirety and published in facsimile in 1987, A Lady of Fashion, Barbara Johnson's Album of Styles and Fabrics).

Black Hair in a White World

by Tameka N. Ellington

Tameka N. Ellington introduces Black Hair in a White World by declaring that “as a Black woman, I have taken it as my mission for the last 15 years to research Black beauty to understand why it is hated.” She presents some good evidence for this sweeping statement, but there is as much evidence that she leaves out, of fashion’s love affair with Black beauty over the last 50 years. This book is not, by any means, a history of black hair but is, as Ellington writes “a true picture of the black community's distress.” As such, it is really a work of sociology, just slightly outside of the parameters of the Davenport Award. Nevertheless any serious book on (or critiquing) beauty standards should be of interest to the Davenport award judges. Black Hair in a White World is of great interest to me as it is my first exposure to Critical Race Theory (part 2 is titled “Critical Race Theory and a Sociocognitive Approach to Perceptions of Black Hair.”). I found the direction of the inquiry to be legitimate and at times persuasive but often moralistic in a way that is not relevant to studies of fashion. African Americans, like all Americans (Black, White and Other) are subject to the capricious decrees of fashion. Ellington and the other authors whose work is included show us evidence of fashion’s power over the African American populace but they do so with a mission of liberation which, although worthy, seems inappropriate to fashion scholarship: no degree or decree of morality has ever changed the power of fashion over humanity. Humanity always bends to fashion’s whims, no matter the race, creed or culture. Illustrations are sparse and a bibliography would have been helpful.

Dressing a la Turque

by Kendra Van Cleave

The publication of Dressing a la Turque may require the rethinking of much French fashion history however I am not entirely convinced of the degree of Ottoman influence on French fashion. Van Cleave does present a vast amount of evidence, in text, illustrations and a very lengthy bibliography. In the chapter on Western and Eastern approaches to dress the author explains the divergent paths that dress took after the 16th century, which was preceded by a long period in which the dress of the entire Eurasian land mass was based on the loose tunic or caftan styles, which treat fabric two-dimensionally. After the medieval period Western dress was increasingly three-dimensional, based on tailoring techniques that took advantage of newly introduced fabrics of greater width, allowing curved and bias cuts. The author attributes a plethora of 17th and 18th century fashion trends to Ottoman influence after explaining that East and West share a common sartorial heritage. Her conclusions have many paradoxical elements that need unraveling. Many of the styles cited as evidence of Eastern influence came into fashion with the (Western) Enlightenment and consciously try to suggest the dress of the ancient classical (aka Western) world and prehistoric period: Laugier’s primitive hut was to architecture as the primitive chemise was to fashion. The evidence presented does not support the conclusion. The audience for this publication, part of the Costume Society of America book series, is the professional dress historian but the subject would be well adapted to a publication for a broader audience.

Jane Austen's Wardrobe

by Hilary Davidson

Jane Austen's Wardrobe is a perfect time capsule of dress, from the late 18th century to the early 19th century. It is beautifully illustrated and lovingly designed, perfectly and logically organized and will appeal to multiple audiences. My only complaint is that Davidson did not include the full text of any of Jane Austen's letters, which are at the heart of all of her research. At least a few of her surviving letters transcribed in full would have truly rounded out this otherwise marvelous book. Each chapter examines the contents of a different part of an actual wardrobe: clothes press; band box; dressing table; jewelry box; drawers; etc. The writing exhibits a fine balance between scholarly and accessible: the audience, commendably, is the educated lay person. A wide variety of illustrations are included: surviving gowns, close-ups of fabric and details and period illustrations and artworks. Jane Austen's Wardrobe should be found in many museum and historic site bookstores.

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For more information about the Millia Davenport Award of the Costume Society, including past award -winners visit the Society.

HYPERREAL: GRAY FOY AT THE MENIL COLLECTION

I had the great pleasure of visiting the Menil Collection in Houston to see the outstanding exhibition “Hyperreal: Gray Foy.” I was introduced to the artist by Jonathan Marder more than 20 years ago and started the first iteration of his website, which I encourage you to visit: https://grayfoy.com/ Gray passed away in 2012 at the age of 90 and thanks to the efforts of his friend Joel Kaye, art dealer Francis Naumann and Don Quaintance, the Menil is now the permanent home of an extraordinary collection of the artist’s work. The first painting shown above is an early work still in my own collection (not in the exhibition); the second image is a silverpoint drawing formerly in my collection now in the Menil and included in the exhibition; other images show highlights from the exhibition and an exterior view of the spectacularly subtle Menil Drawing Pavilion designed by Sharon Johnston and Mark Lee, which well complements the Menil Collection’s main building by Renzo Piano.

Gray Foy was one of the most extraordinary, but least-known, American artists of the 20th century. Born in Dallas, Texas, he studied at Los Angeles City College Southern Methodist University, and Columbia University. He was active as an artist from the 1940s to the 1960s but stopped making art in order to devote himself to the art de vivre in the home and relationship he shared with author and editor Leo Lerman.

Foy’s first exhibition, in 1948 at the Durlacher gallery, warranted a brief mention in the New York Times but his work in a group show at Durlacher caused Stuart Preston, in the Times, to suggest that the content of the artist’s “minutely handled drawings can best be sifted by the surrealist or the psychoanalyst.” In 1951 Preston, viewing Foy’s one-person show at Durlacher, noted that, despite the rise of abstraction, the visual world was still worth looking at:

In Gray Foy’s case worth observing with fanatical intensity. Foy’s pencil and brush spin out a tissue of delicacy and transparency, light enough to seem to have settled on the paper like frost, strong enough to have netted in its gossamer texture enough visual data about plant forms to astound a botanist. But the pursuit of accuracy is not his only concern nor does it dispel the poetry in his work. It has a hothouse flavor and, springing from the airy artificiality of design, a rococo quality. It is perhaps no coincidence that in one pulsating oil he has been inspired by Ariosto, whose poetry was equally irresistible to Fragonard.

Stuart Preston, writing in the New York Times, reviewed Foy’s 1957 exhibition at Durlacher, describing the artist as “second to none in sheer manual wizardry. The part played by technique in a work of art varies in importance and were Foy’s extraordinary delicacy unaccompanied by a poetic sensitivity to flowers and growing things, these drawings ight be no more than astonishing tours de force. Such is not the case. They both amaze and please.”

That same year Foy was chosen for Art in America’s “New Talent” issue in which he was quoted at length on his work:

It has been my aim to present any chosen subject or mood as lucidly and evocatively as possible. My working materials are quite limited--generally a hard pencil and untoned white paper. I lay no claim to any philosophy to explain, heighten or ramify my work. Nor do I work in a fervid emotional state but rather clinically, as a surgeon might, with sharp instruments. Very seldom do I use a model or actual object as I draw or paint, relying instead on memory to evoke or re-create. I never sketch but begin drawing from the outset, generally from a focus which develops outwards.

Renewed interest was generated in Foy's art as a result of a 2004 article in the New York Times by Steve Martin about the artist and his 1942 masterpiece Dimensions, which Martin acquired and donated to the Museum of Modern Art.

Hyperreal: Gray Foy was curated by Kirsten Marples, Curatorial Associate, Menil Drawing Institute who wrote:

Between the 1940s and 1970s, American artist Gray Foy (1922–2012) created a body of extraordinarily meticulous drawings, most often rendered in graphite on paper. This exhibition celebrates two recent gifts that have made the Menil Collection the foremost repository of Foy’s work. Intrigued by Surrealism and Magic Realism as a young artist, Foy characterized his artistic method as “hyper-realism.” His exacting technique—which required intense concentration and even months to complete a single drawing—rewards sustained looking. The exhibition spans the entirety of Foy’s career, from his early Surrealist compositions to his later inventive botanical and geological renderings. Also included are a selection of the artist’s commercial illustrations, which will be displayed publicly for the first time. Gray Foy was born in Dallas, Texas, and raised in Los Angeles, California. During World War II, he began drawing during the evenings as an escape from the tedium of his day job at a military aircraft plant. After the war, Foy studied at Southern Methodist University in Dallas before moving to New York in 1947, where he continued his fine art studies at Columbia University. He soon was represented by Durlacher Brothers, and in 1961, he was awarded a prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship to advance his drawing practice. From the late 1940s to the ’60s, Foy also produced an impressive body of commercial work: magazine illustrations, book jackets, and record album covers.

ALAN ROSENBERG LECTURE OCTOBER 16th: "VICTORIANA 1930"

Hi Friends: I am delighted to let you know that I will be presenting an illustrated lecture, “Victoriana 1930,” to the Victorian Society in America, Northern New Jersey Chapter, in Montclair on Monday October 16th 2023. The event will be held at 7:00pm at the historic Montclair Women’s Club, 82 Union Street, and the lecture will be followed by a reception. The lecture explores the Victorian revival in 1930s interior design: “In 1930, a Victorian revival was stirring among avant-garde tastemakers who just a few years earlier were devotees of the geometric deco aesthetic or the clinical chrome, glass and plain white walls of modernism. For these cutting-edge trend-setters, Victoriana was so far out that it was suddenly in. A pronounced neo-Victorian aesthetic was soon also championed by interior decorators and homemakers. The Victorian revival in the 1930's was not simply an attempt to recreate historically accurate period décor. For fashionable style-setters, mid-19th Century style was an explicit challenge to the modernist machine aesthetic, placing fantastic Victorian design elements within a modernist setting, achieving a juxtaposition that revealed a Surrealist undercurrent in interior design.” Amongst the leaders of this trend were Helena Rubinstein, Charles de Besteigui, Juliana Force, Millicent Rogers, Bernard Boutet de Monvel, Salvador Dali and Pavel Tchelitchew. The lectures explores these figures, their fashions in interiors and art and the ideas behind them. From Manhattan’s Pennsylvania Station it is a 1 hour train ride on New Jersey transit directly to Montclair (the excellent Montclair Art Museum is also worth a visit but is only open Friday, Saturday and Sunday). I hope you will join us.

COSTUME SOCIETY OF AMERICA MILLIA DAVENPORT AWARD 2023

I once again had the pleasure of reviewing the books nominated for the Costume Society of America’s Millia Davenport Publication Award. The award “recognizes and promotes excellence in the publication of costume, dress, appearance, and fashion related scholarship. The award is given annually to a newly published book or exhibition catalogue that makes a significant contribution to the above studies, reflects original thought and exceptional creativity, and draws on appropriate research methods and techniques. . . . The award, is named in honor of Millia Davenport (1895-1992), noted costume scholar, theatre designer, and founding member of the Costume Society of America. Her theatre work brought her international acclaim. She established and catalogued the library at the American Folk Art Museum. Her major published work, The Book of Costume (1948), was a pioneering visual history of Western fashion from ancient civilizations through the late nineteenth century.”

The reviewing was particularly exciting, and challenging, this year because there was an unusually large number of nominations. Whereas last year there were five books to review this year there were ten nominees. The nominated books were:

Frankie Welch's Americana: Fashion, Scarves, and Politics by Ashley Callahan

Patrick Kelly: Runway of Love by Dilys Blum.

Red, White, and Blue on the Runway: The 1968 White House Fashion Show and the Politics of American Style by Kimberly Chrisman-Campbell

Prêt-à-Porter, Paris and Women: A Cultural Study of French Readymade Fashion, 1945-68 by Alexis Romano

Dressing Up: The Women Who Influenced French Fashion by Elizabeth L. Block

Dressing and Undressing Duchamp by Ingrid E. Mida

Guo Pei: Couture Fantasy by Jill D’Alessandro, Anna Grasskamp, Sally Yu Leung, and Juanjuan Wu

Lee Alexander McQueen: Mind, Mythos, Muse by Clarissa M. Esguerra and Michaela Hansen

Conservation Concerns in Fashion Collections: Caring for Problematic Twentieth-Century Textiles, Apparel, and Accessories by Kelly L. Reddy-Best and Margaret T. Ordoñez

Dressed for Freedom: The Fashionable Politics of American Feminism by Einav Rabinovitch-Fox

The winner of the 2023 award is Frankie Welch's Americana by Ashley Callaghan!

Frankie Welch's Americana is a truly outstanding publication. The author’s two previous books, on Ilonka and Mariszka Karasz, respectively, sit on my own bookshelves, so I knew of her excellence in choice of subject and explication. Frankie Welch was quite prolific but is not widely known. The textile and fashion designer and retailer worked outside of the fashion capitals and is best known in the nation's capital for her Alexandria, Virginia, boutique and her patriotic and politically themed scarves. The author has made significant contributions to fashion history with her previous books on Ilonka and Mariska Karasz and continues her examination of underrecognized designer/entrepreneurs with Frankie Welch's Americana. Every aspect of the book exhibits excellence from the writing to the illustrations, the graphic design and the exhaustive thoroughness with which the subject is treated. An example of the latter is the appendix listing the many scarves that Welch designed for hundreds and hundreds of entities and institutions. Welch’s entrepreneurial spirit and business skills are examined, making this an excellent contribution to the history of the fashion business. Welch’s interactions with politicians and their wives, including first ladies is well documented making the book of interest to students of politics and national history. Frankie Welch was part Native-American and her Cherokee alphabet scarf made a contribution to increased consciousness of Native culture. The book contributes to Native American studies in this regard. All together this was a superb nominee and most qualified for the Millia Davenport award.

I paid close attention to contemporary fashion in the years that Patrick Kelly was active. I observed his work at that time and felt that he was a minor talent–Dilys Blum’s monograph on the designer, Patrick Kelly - Runway of Love changed my mind and was recognized with a Davenport Award Honorable Mention. Kelly's delightful designs achieved much with a minimum of means and effort and his oeuvre has a pleasing coherence of image and message. This publication has an outstanding balance of text and illustrations. The beautiful original photographs of dressed mannequins are well complemented by documentary photographs of the designer’s world and topped off by the exuberant photographs by Oliviero Toscani for Kelly’s advertising campaigns. The design of the book perfectly suits Kelly’s bright, bold and basic aesthetic. The essays, by a number of scholars, are erudite and informative. Dilys Blum’s essay crucially contextualizes Kelly’s designs within the Paris fashion scene, where he worked. Sequoia Barnes article is an in-depth look into one sensational fashion performance that occurred in the finale of Kelly's fall winter 1986-87 fashion show, when the designer dressed Pat Cleveland as Josephine Baker. African-Americana is a recurring theme in the designer’s work and was treated by him in a way that might be controversial today. The essay by Madison Moore admirably addresses this aspect of Kelly’s work. Personal reminiscences by a number of friends of the designer, including the late great Andre Leon Talley, round out the picture. Altogether a first-rate production.

Dressing & Undressing Duchamp by Ingrid Meda may help Duchamp students understand fashion and it may help fashion students understand Duchamp, although the latter is less likely, not because fashion folk are less intelligent but because the author does not make Duchamp too much more intelligible than he currently is to a broader segment of the cultural community. It is remarkable that Duchamp scholars (which the author notes are numerous) have not examined the artist’s connection with clothes and fashion given that his leading contribution to art is the “readymade” a corollary to fashion’s pret-a-porter or ready-to-wear, which began as less expensive analogues to haute-couture. Duchamp's development of the "readymade" in 1913 placed him far outside the conventions of even avantgarde practice at that time. Dissatisfied with the rationality of his own cubist painting and its geometric analyses of conventional stilllife and figural subjects, Duchamp began to paint imaginary mechanical inventions. He then created a proto-readymade by mounting a bicycle wheel on a stool, producing a work of art with minimal formal intervention. Going a step further he applied his signature to an iron rack for drying bottles (1914) and then to a common snow shovel (1915) and declared them sculptures. Duchamp's unconventional act of creation suggested that an intellectual gesture, rather than a physical gesture, could be the basis of a work of art. The progression of Duchamp's strategies reveal a link between the industrial artifact and the dissolution of authorship as an authenticating mark for a work of art or design. These strategies would have a profound influence on 20th century art, especially on Surrealism and the development of pop art. The first chapter, on Duchamp’s early figurative drawings some akin to fashion illustrations, reveals a little known aspect of the artist's oeuvre. Chapter 3 examines Duchamp’s intersections with fashion, dress and identity including advertising, perfume, cross-dressing, the garconne, and gives credit to Duchamp's several female influences and collaborators, Florine Stettheimer, Berenice Abbot, Clara Tice. Chapter 5, In which the author attempts to apply Duchamp's concept of the readymade in the context of fashion museum exhibitions is least persuasive and least necessary. An excellent book, nicely designed and documented. A significant contribution to Duchamp studies, a much less significant contribution to fashion studies.

Like Paul Poiret, Guo Pei can be credibly accused of being merely a costumier. Unlike Poiret she has not made any contribution to modern fashion other than being a designer of lavish and often outlandish clothes for celebrities to wear on the red carpet (exemplified by the yellow gown with absurd pancake train resembling a giant omelet that Rihanna wore to the “Met Gala” in 2015). I am here to judge the book not the designer and Guo Pei: Couture Fantasy by Jill D’Alessandro, et al., is beautifully produced and illustrated with outstanding photographs, including many close-ups of the intricate embroidery adorning the clothes. The original photographs are the primary content although there are interesting essays by a variety of distinguished contributors. The essay by Juanjuan Wu, on the recent history of fashion in China, is highly informative and is well complimented by Sally Yu Leung’s on traditional Chinese motifs in Guo Pei’s work. The lead essay by Jill D’Allesandro is equal parts biography and hagiography.

Red White and Blue on the Runway: the 1968 White House Fashion Show and the Politics of American Style, by Kimberly Chrisman-Campbell, is a delightful and significant book that will be of interest to fellow scholars and students as well as lay people; the former will enjoy the meticulous recounting of an important but ephemeral event that quickly vanished from memory; the latter will appreciate its accessibility and two ever-popular subjects: fashion and politics. The fleeting nature of the 1968 White House fashion show that the book documents is what makes the subject so significant. The author had the distinct advantage of access to a trove of documentation in the Lyndon Baines Johnson Presidential Library as well as the archives of several of the fashion designers and editors who participated. These resources are woven together into a lively text that is complimented by a beautifully balanced selection of images of the event itself, associated ephemera, portraits of personalities involved and the clothes themselves, by designers including Chester Weinberg, Geoffrey Beene, Pauline Trigere, Adolfo, Bill Blass, Rudi Gernreich and George Stavropoulos (Lady Bird Johnson’s favorite designer, and the subject of my essay in the St. James Encyclopedia of Fashion) and many other names not as well known today. One wishes there were more illustrations of the clothes themselves, but there is enough to give a picture of what was going on in American fashion in 1968. The bibliography itself is fascinating and the index is an exemplary feature that is sadly disappearing in the publication world.

Elizabeth L. Block’s Dressing Up: The Women Who Influenced French Fashion is beautifully designed and illustrated. It has the best characteristics of a scholarly work and a coffee table book, respectively: a well-researched and informed text that is accessible to a range of readers and beautiful color illustrations in a very attractively designed book. Although French late 19th century fashion has been well studied Dressing Up can be seen as a significant contribution to the study of the American Gilded Age. The author is occasionally bogged down in intellectualisms. The bibliography is organized alphabetically with no distinction between primary and secondary sources–a chronological organization would have been more suitable. Altogether a handsome production that will certainly be found in many museum bookstores.

Prêt-à-Porter, Paris and Women: A Cultural Study of French Readymade Fashion, 1945-68 by Alexis Romano is truly an outstanding work of scholarship amongst the nominees. This “first critical history of French readymade fashion” is a close examination of an aspect of fashion history that has been clouded by the dominance of the haute couture. The author’s begins her study in the post-war period, well before previous accounts that gave credit to Emanuelle Kahn, Michele Rosier, Daniel Hechter and Chloe with the innovation of ready-to-wear. The author gives full acknowledgement to those designers as well: her identification of stylisme as a new conception of design in the 1960s is significant. The excellent writing is dense but highly intelligent and intelligible. The many color and black-and-white photographs are of enormous value to the intellectual arguments and contribute to a handsomely produced book. The beautifully organized bibliography is a joy to peruse.

Conservation Concerns in Fashion Collections: Caring for Problematic Twentieth-Century Textiles, Apparel, and Accessories by Kelly L. Reddy-Best and Margaret T. Ordoñez: although this publication is directed towards those responsible for the technology of conserving fashion and textile collections it will be of equal interest to those doing historical, industrial and business research, as the authors include historical background of each problematic material examined. This remarkable historical research was conducted using early textile science textbooks, trade journals, conservation references, and bulletins from trade associations. The historical material is arranged as narrative, as chronologies and in an appendix. Period photographs also support the historical background and are complimented by many technical illustrations. Well known fibers are included such as rayon and acrylic but the appendix gives exhaustive chronological lists of the trade names with which they were marketed by different manufacturers: Avisco, Celanese, Skenandoa, Zantrel and many more. If you ever wondered what Dacron, Dynel and Qiana were made of and all about this book will tell you. An outstanding contribution the conservation literature.

Einav Rabinovitch-Fox explains that “Dressed for Freedom examines the multiple ways that women engaged with fashion during the long 20th century, in order to challenge the enduring myth that a commitment to women's freedom and rights was incompatible with adornment practices and adherence to fashion.” The apparent dichotomy - fashion vs feminism - is indeed shown to be a myth, but one that gained credence in the women's liberation movement of the 1960s. The chapter on the 1960s and 70s is thus especially welcome and most fascinating. The 1980s and 90s are notably absent from the chronological examination, a significant absence given that, as I wrote in my essay on Dorothee Bis in Contemporary Fashion “in the 1980s with the rise of conservatism in culture and politics there was a return to conventionally body revealing fashions; many women began to feel that in their adherence to orthodox feminism they had abdicated the power inherent in their sexuality and sought to regain that sense of power through their dress.” The writing throughout is clear, flows nicely and is free from jargon and excesses of critical theory, making it accessible to both the serious and casual student of fashion and feminism. An excellent mix of sources is referenced in the footnotes. Dressed for Freedom: The Fashionable Politics of American Feminism is a wonderful book but the sparseness of its black and white illustrations prevent it from rising to the level of an award winner. Nevertheless it is a valuable addition to the literature of feminist studies.

Lee Alexander McQueen: Mind, Mythos, Muse by Clarissa M. Esguerra and Michaela Hansen is a beautiful book to look at, but upon first glance something seems missing. Two things that are definitely missing are a bibliography and an index, both of which are required to win the Davenport award. Coherence is also missing in this achronological treatment. The catalogue documents the collection of McQueen clothes generously given to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art by Regina J. Drucker. I’m sure the donor has a flair for fashion but the selection of garments is subjective and spotty, with as many insignificant examples as masterpieces. Each garment illustrated is paired with a work of art from LACMA’s collection, highlighting inspiration and correspondence from the history of art and design: “exploring imagination, artistic process and innovation in fashion and art, Lee Alexander McQueen Mind Mythos Muse reconsiders the designer's well-documented oeuvre by contextualizing select McQueen designs within art history. . . . Curators have interpreted and contextualized McQueen's work to highlight the cycles of inspiration and Imagination that are at the heart of all art.” The works of art shown beside the garments are described in entries written by curators from throughout the museum, a most welcome incidence of cross-disciplinary scholarship. This book joins at least 8 previously published books on the designer. While this publication makes its own slight contribution to the now voluminous literature on the designer, the existence of so much prior scholarship and biography renders this new addition insignificant in the overall picture.

The deadline for the 2024 Millia Davenport Publication Award approaches: October 15, 2023. Find out more about the nomination process: https://www.costumesocietyamerica.com/millia-davenport-publications-award

JUDITH AUCHINCLOSS 1940-2022

The world lost a true person of substance with the recent death of Judith Auchincloss. Judy was beautiful, deeply intelligent, warm, curious, gracious and so chic. With Julia McFarlane she was cofounder in 1976 of Manhattan Ad-Hoc Housewares, the Lexington Avenue store that brought high-tech, the industrial style for the home, to the Upper East Side. I met her socially in the early 1990s and came to know her professionally when I wrote the thesis, for my M.A degree in history of design, on high-tech. The following is a short excerpt from my thesis in which I discuss the founding of Manhattan Ad-Hoc Housewares, (complete with footnotes). I will be publishing more excerpts from my thesis in the coming year. Please check back; it was quite an opus.

New York in 1976:

Judith Auchincloss, Julia Mc Farlane

Manhattan Ad-Hoc Housewares,

Ad-Hocism and High-Tech

Although high-tech, the use of industrial objects and materials in the home, was an important design phenomenon in the 1970's, relatively little was written on it at the time, nor has much been written since. Joan Kron and Suzanne Slesin’s 1978 book High-Tech was the hugely influential publication that gave a name to the style, which had been expanding, like an erector set over the preceding decade. Emilio Ambasz’s foreword to High-Tech was the most accurate and thoughtful contemporary analysis of the style. Ambasz delineated a theory of high-tech in describing the work of the Castiglione brothers of Italy who, as early as the 1950's "set aside many of design's accepted academic scaffoldings and claimed that ‘finding’ and ‘choosing’ were also the object makers rightful tools ... their designs were arrived at by utilizing found objects usually recovered from the surrounding industrial landscape"1 . Thus, according to this theory, high-tech, while associated with a clearly defined "industrial" look, is not simply or exclusively an aesthetic style but also functions as a design process or conceptual gesture.

In the introduction to High-Tech, co-authors Joan Kron and Suzanne Slesin further emphasized this gestural rather than aesthetic theory of high-tech, describing the processes of recontextualization and appropriation in their explanation of "the use of utilitarian industrial equipment and materials, out of context, as home furnishings. . . . [the] appropriation of products originally created for use in warehouses, factories, battleships, hospitals, and offices."2 Kron and Slesin explained that "the myriad items of commercial and industrial equipment turning up in homes today were produced originally for utilitarian purposes, often with no thought given to style." They noted the

virtue in the fact that many of these products are well designed, although unintentionally, . . . and that they are readily available. In addition, many of these objects and materials are cheaper than comparable merchandise available through decorator sources or custom made. And when they are not cheaper they are usually more durable."3

Although Kron and Slesin's book is definitive in its presentation of a high-tech design theory it was not the first publication to offer such a concept. Adhocism: The Case For Improvisation, by Charles Jencks and Nathan Silver, was published in 1972 and was a manifesto for "a method of creation relying particularly on resources which are already at hand."4 Like High-Tech, Jencks and Silver's title was the name they gave to the alternative strategy they perceived and which they advocated. Unlike High-Tech, which focused specifically on the industrial style in the home as a manifestation of an appropriationist design strategy, Adhocism was a broad ranging study that explored adhocist alternatives in urbanism, technology, transportation, consumerism, art and economics, amongst an array of categories, while presenting design as a relevant practice in each of these areas. While high-tech is adhocist, adhocism is not synonymous with high-tech. They are closely related, however, and are both part of, and exemplify, the same postmodernist practices of appropriation and recontextualization. Advocating the use of any preexisting objects or processes that solved a given problem, adhocism was a challenge to the modernist/capitalist ideology of progress that had dominated the previous one hundred years:

Today we are immersed in forces and ideas that hinder the fulfillment of human purposes; large corporations standardize and limit our choice; . . . 'modern architecture' becomes the convention for 'good taste' and an excuse to deny the plurality of actual needs. But a new mode of direct action is emerging, the rebirth of a democratic mode and style, where everyone can create his personal environment out of impersonal subsystems. . . . by combining ad hoc parts, the individual creates, sustains and transcends himself.5

Typical examples of conventional "good taste" that they cited included "Braun appliances," "French tinned copper pots," and "Scandinavian birch furniture," which they directly contrasted with "a new system of taste values permitting more devaluation of physical objects qua objects."6 In opposition to the illusory department store model of shopping "choice," Jencks and Silver proposed the compilation of a definitive index of "all products," which would be available for anyone to access. Presumably the products indexed would be necessarily functional, rather than fashionable, given the basis of the system in the demands of industry:

Why should anyone now suppose a databank would be that much better than the present hit or miss method of finding out about products through advertising, and locating dealers in the phone book or by word of mouth? The reason it seems to me such a liberating prospect is that the basic method is already being used to great advantage in the building, defense and aerospace industries, where information on products is a crucial requirement.7

Jencks and Silver proposed an extension of their exhaustive index in the form of a "supermarket for design" or a "hardware supermarket" in which there would be "no class distinctions between 'trade' and 'retail' customers nor between 'builders and architects' and 'ordinary people.'“8

Jencks and Silver's vision of a product index was partly manifested in High-Tech, which Kron and Slesin subtitled a "Source Book" and concluded with "The High-Tech Directory," an extensive listing of manufacturers and dealers of the equipment and furnishings illustrated in the earlier chapters, encouraging readers to buy direct.

The idea of a design supermarket was partly realized in a store whose name was taken from Adhocism. Manhattan Ad Hoc Housewares was founded by Judith Auchincloss and Julia McFarlane in 1976, at Lexington Avenue at 64th Street, with the intention of presenting industrial products recontextualized for the home.

Auchincloss had been an art dealer and McFarlane had worked for Benjamin Thompson's Design Research in the 1960's. The partners had discovered the array of restaurant equipment suppliers on the Bowery, the industrial resources of the Thomas Register and the products available through commercial supply catalogues such as Sweet's Catalogue File, and determined to bring them to individual consumers by opening their "store with an idea."9 In 1979, when they published their own catalogue, just after the publication of High-Tech, they explained their attitude and inspiration:

Over three years ago, we looked about and saw contradictions. Overdesigned, expensive, often pretentious products choked the market. This, at a time of skyrocketing inflation, shrinkage of living space, increasingly frenetic lifestyles. Clearly needed was simplification, clarification; . . . A book called Adhocism . . . defined our intentions. Adhocism means successful coping. . . . The adhocist becomes quick to adapt, finds pleasurable discovery in new uses for old clichés, refuses to accept limitation of choice imposed by standardized production or media imposed taste. . . . The satisfaction of being first is only heightened by being right. No more proof could be needed than the publication of High-Tech . . . Here was a masterful putting together of industrial products that reinforced our way of looking at household problems and their solutions. Need light? Try factory lamps. No place for books? Use commercial steel shelving. Flowers go where? In Kimax Laboratory glass. . . . Many of these products have been around for years. We have simply taken them out of the factory, the laboratory, the institutional building, and made them available to consumers.10

Manhattan Ad Hoc Housewares functioned as a somewhat necessary intermediary in the consumer/object hightech relationship since most of the things they made available were otherwise sold only by wholesale suppliers in large quantities. That the use of these industrial artifacts in the home constituted a radically new "look" was made clear in an article about Ad Hoc Housewares which contrasted the store's industrial offerings with the prevailing fashion for "the latest Swedish Kettle" and "teak bookshelves," remarking that "you'll be particularly happy with Ad Hoc if you are pining away in an area where everything comes in Harvest yellow and Avocado green."11 However, Ad Hoc was not simply about selling a style. Judith Auchincloss, in 1977, explained the store's perspective, which created an intellectually interactive relationship with its clients:

industrial catalogues are the backbone of our point of view. And the next most important thing, without a doubt, is an informed and intelligent customer. A person who is able to see the attractive simplicity of a laboratory beaker, who is able to transcend the limitation of thought that makes for the reaction, 'But that's not what it was meant to be used for.'12

For those able to envision their domestic applications, Ad Hoc offered archetypal, iconic and anonymous objects including napkin dispensers, restaurant china, wire bakery baskets, mover's furniture blankets, and an abundance of objects appropriated from the hospital. . . . (to be continued)

Notes

1. Joan Kron and Suzanne Slesin, High-Tech: The Industrial Style and Source Book for the Home, New York: Clarkson N. Potter, Inc., [1978], x.

2. Kron and Slesin, 1.

3. Ibid.

4. Charles Jencks and Nathan Silver, Adhocism: The Case for Improvisation, Garden City, NY: Doubleday and Company, Inc., 1972, 9.

5. Jencks and Silver, 15.

6. Jencks and Silver, 165.

7. Jencks and Silver, 175.

8. Jencks and Silver, 179.

9. Judith Auchincloss, interview by author, 6 August 1997.

10. Ad Hoc High Tech Catalog 1979-80, New York: Manhattan Ad Hoc Housewares, unpaginated.

11. "HighTechery," The Catalog of Catalogs Newsletter, January 1980, 10.

12. Peter Carlsen, "Manhattan Ad Hoc," Avenue, November 1977, 47.

ALAN ROSENBERG TEACHING AT SOTHEBY'S INSTITUTE OF ART

I am relieved to let you know that I made it through the Spring semester, teaching history of decorative arts in the Master of Arts program in Fine and Decorative Art and Design at Sotheby’s Institute of Art. I had hoped to announce my appointment to the faculty of SIA at the beginning of the semester in January but I have been too busy preparing and teaching!

Sotheby’s Institute of art is an offshoot of Sotheby’s, the world’s largest auction house, and offers both Batchelor’s and Master’s programs in New York and London. The SIA website notes that the graduate level Fine and Decorative Art and Design curriculum “is based on a simple belief: the fundamental currency of the art world is objects. The Master’s program examines the diverse cultural histories of objects, makers, patrons, and related markets, focusing on providing a strong foundation in the history of art and collecting, iconography and provenance, materials and techniques, represented and experienced on a global platform be it in the Americas, Europe, Asia or Africa. Students learn how to engage directly with the marketplace and gain essential skills in connoisseurship, valuation, and curation, which are necessary to study and evaluate objects. Whether in sales, valuation, art history, or cultural institution management at museums, galleries, or auction houses — graduates of the Master’s degree program in Fine and Decorative Art and Design are prepared for a range of careers and leave with an expanded professional network.”

I am grateful to Ann-Marie Richard, Director of SIA New York, for giving me this wonderful opportunity to pass on the knowledge I have accumulated over many years to students who are just starting their journey. Ann-Marie oversees a wonderful facility, as you can see in the photos, as well as an outstanding degree program.

ROXANNE LOWIT - 1942-2022 - A BEAUTIFUL PERSON WITH A BEAUTIFUL EYE

A great lady has died. Photographer Roxanne Lowit was a beautiful person, inside and out, with an exquisite eye for style. I met Roxanne at Danceteria in 1982 when I was 16 - we were introduced by Miriam Bendahan, who impressed upon me how discerning and respected Roxanne was. We became friends and Roxanne photographed me often, over many years, while out and about at the nightclubs, fashion shows and art openings. Roxanne took the photo of me above in 1983, wearing a collage of new wave and new romantic elements; in that year I contributed some articles to my friend Aileen McNally’s ‘zine Ephemeral Youth and I was able to do a story on Vivienne Westwood because Roxanne very generously gave me photos that she had taken backstage at Westwood’s spring (“Punkature”) and fall (“Witches”) shows. It’s remarkable that a relatively established photographer would let her work be published in a little ‘zine put together by a bunch of teenagers, but Roxanne was remarkably kind and mentoring. The text I wrote titled “Avant-Garde Goes Overground,” shows that cultural appropriation was a good thing back in the 1980s, contrary to the current thinking which aligns the practice with colonialism and racism:

Vivienne Westwood, the woman who, with Malcolm McLaren, brought you punk and pirates (and Buffalo Girls), now gives us hobos for summer, and for next fall, witches.  Presented in a show in Paris in October, her spring/summer collection focused on the theme of the hobo, with the maternity shape and tube skirts most in evidence. (The prevalence of maternity style dresses, and a line of rap printed in the program, “Vivienne Westwood, pregnancy in its infancy,” caused many to rumor that the designer was pregnant herself.) Her fall collection was a collaboration with artist Keith Haring who designed many prints for the brightly colored, but generally more conservative clothes than are expected from Westwood. Now that she has borrowed from most of the cultures of the world, one wonders where she will turn next.

In April 1983 my brother Charles and I hosted a party for the London designers that Susanne Bartsch presented in a fashion show at the Roxy nightclub. Roxanne came to our party and took many wonderful photos including the one of Charles and me with Leigh Bowery.

Charles took the delightful photo of Roxanne above, wearing her uniform (Chinese black cotton jackets and pants) and carrying her camera. Following her death Charles reminisced: “she was the first person I knew who practiced macrobiotics and we had conversations about that: a factor that led me to get a master's degree in nutrition years later.” Charles and I spent the summer of 1986 in Paris and dined with Roxanne at a macrobiotic vegetarian restaurant there for the first time. Roxanne was in Paris to photograph backstage at the haute couture fashion shows and she told me that if I wanted to go to any of the shows I should just tell the gatekeepers that I was her assistant. I got to see Christian Lacroix’s last collection for Jean Patou, Chanel by Karl Lagerfeld and Yves Saint Laurent, all thrilling.

Roxanne is among the most distinguished alumnae of the Fashion Institute of Technology, which became my own alma mater, and to whom I donated the six original Vivienne Westwood prints that Roxanne gave me. She will always be one of the most beloved people in our big (but small, really) fashion family.

COSTUME SOCIETY OF AMERICA MILLIA DAVENPORT AWARD

I am a long-time member of the Costume Society of America and I am always excited when the Society announces the nominees for the Millia Davenport Publication Award. The award “recognizes and promotes excellence in the publication of costume, dress, appearance, and fashion related scholarship. The award is given annually to a newly published book or exhibition catalogue that makes a significant contribution to the above studies, reflects original thought and exceptional creativity, and draws on appropriate research methods and techniques. . . . The award, is named in honor of Millia Davenport (1895-1992), noted costume scholar, theatre designer, and founding member of the Costume Society of America. Her theatre work brought her international acclaim. She established and catalogued the library at the American Folk Art Museum. Her major published work, The Book of Costume (1948), was a pioneering visual history of Western fashion from ancient civilizations through the late nineteenth century.”

The nominated books were all excellent and more than one were truly outstanding. The nominees were:

Black Designers in American Fashion, Elizabeth Way, editor, FIT/Bloomsbury.

Dress Codes: How the Laws of Fashion Made History by Richard Thompson Ford, Simon and Schuster.  

Sporting Fashion; Outdoor Girls 1800-1960 by Kevin Jones and Christina Johnson, FIDM/Prestel.

Sweet and Clean? Bodies and Clothes in Early Modern England by Susan North, Oxford University Press.

Traditional Costumes of Saudi Arabia: The Mansoojat Foundation Collection by Hamida Alireza and Richard Wilding, eds.; ACC Art Books.

The following are my reviews of some of the nominated books.

There can only be one winner and in 2022 it was Sporting Fashion - Outdoor Girls 1800-1960, the spectacularly illustrated catalogue of the landmark exhibition of athletic fashion that was organized by the curators at the FIDM Museum at the Fashion Institute of Design & Merchandising in Los Angeles. The exhibition was co-organized by the American Federation of Arts and is traveling to five museum venues over the next two years; see information and schedule at the Federation’s website. The formation of the collection of sports clothes by the FIDM Museum represents the primary research achievement of Sporting Fashion. I am not aware of any other comprehensive collection of women’s active sportswear (although the subject has been explored in more than one exhibition at FIT alone). The collection is illustrated with the highest quality photographs and the authors have styled the head-to-toe ensembles with all the appropriate accessories and equipment. The book is a visual triumph and the biographical sketches of female athletes from many periods that are scattered throughout the book are an excellent contribution to the mix. The book is weighty, literally, and its scale grants to the subject an appropriate sense of importance.

Other worthy nominees captured my attention as well:

Traditional Costumes of Saudi Arabia: The Mansoojat Foundation Collection is a huge achievement for an organization whose mission is to “revive and preserve the traditional ethnic designs and costumes of the various regions of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia; to promote and conduct academic research important for the understanding of the history and culture of the region, and to raise public awareness for the appreciation of this unique heritage.” The Foundation has made an outstanding contribution to the history of dress by forming a remarkable collection and documenting it in this splendid book. The most outstanding features are the photographs of the collection that form, at the very least, the core of a definitive visual encyclopedia of Saudi dress. The photographs, of dressed mannequins, have the simple clarity and high quality that allows for study of the dress of specific tribal groups and comparison from tribe to tribe. Due to the paucity of scholarship in the area of Saudi dress the editors readily acknowledge the necessity of drawing upon experts in a number of disciplines. This potential for editorial chaos, in fact, has led to a publication with a lively variety of scholarly perspectives. You can view much of the collection gathered by the Foundation on its website: www.mansoojat.org

Black Designers in American Fashion, a collection of essays by notable scholars, is excellent in every way, including scope, scale, scholarship, significance, organization and originality. The loosely chronological organization gives the book a clarity that could have been lost in a multi-author publication and supports the theoretical framework around which the book is built: Black fashion makers in the United States have a continuous history in which each generation has built upon the achievements of the preceding generations. The inclusion of a variety of makers, from enslaved dyers and weavers to seamstresses, dressmakers, designers of haute couture and of avant-garde jewelry, reveal the full scope of Black designers’ contributions to American fashion.

The deadline to submit titles for consideration for the 2023 Millia Davenport Publication Award swiftly approaches: October 15, 2022. Learn more about the award, qualifications, past recipients, etc. at the website of the Costume Society of America: www.costumesocietyamerica.com

DONALD BAECHLER 1956-2022

His friends sadly mourn Donald Baechler. I met Donald at one of Keith Haring’s openings at Tony Shafrazi’s gallery, either 1982 or ‘83. I had already seen his work in a 1981 group show at Grace Borgenicht gallery, at 724 Fifth Avenue, an exhibition that also introduced me to the work of Walter Robinson, Mark Tansey, and Ida Applebroog. Reviewing the show in the New York Times Vivien Raynor observed:

The character of ''Episodes,'' a group show by seven relatively unknown artists at Grace Borgenicht (724 Fifth Avenue at 57th Street) is uncommon, to say the least. The paintings, all figurative, are visually quite plain - none of the rococo paint effects now in vogue -and they are often spiked with tart humor. . . . As chosen by the gallery's assistant director, Curt Marcus, the painters seemingly have in common the urge to avoid cant. Moreover, there flickers in some of them a spirit - not punk exactly, but ''punkoid'' - that in the visual arts has been more evident at the scene's edges than at its center.

Donald was handsome, intelligent and cool. And very serious. I always enjoyed the conversations we had, at all the usual places: art galleries, nightclubs and the streets of the East Village and SoHo. In 1985 I was working on the East Village Eye: my assignment, as a very junior contributor–just out of high school–was to fill ¼ and ⅛ spaces with little articles on anything cool. In September that year Donald was having a show at Ascan Krone gallery in Hamburg and I pulled together this little story on Donald and Madoka Takagi, a winsome and very serious photographer from Japan who was living in New York at that time. My brother Charles and I became friendly with Madoka and were photographed by her, participating in several of her conceptual photography projects. She photographed Donald in her series of portraits of artists from whom she requested a statement on photography. Donald complied with a handwritten declaration that someone could write a dissertation on some day:

PHOTOGRAPHY IS A CHAIR WITH THREE LEGS 

PHOTOGRAPHY IS A SPECIAL BRAND OF RICH MAN’S GILDED BOLSHEVISM

PHOTOGRAPHY IS THE DEMON PROGRESS OF THE NEW PAMPHLETEER

PHOTOGRAPHY IS THIS GUY WHO FOLLOWS YOU INTO A REVOLVING DOOR AND HE COMES OUT FIRST

When I was making art myself for a few years, in the late 1980s and early ‘90s, I traded art with Donald. He chose a large abstract black-and-white photocollage by me and I chose from him a beautiful painting on paper of a rose (we Rosenbergs love roses). 

Donald’s 2015 exhibition of “Early Work 1980 to 1984” at Cheim and Read, (with a catalogue essay by David Rimanelli) really solidified his position in the first rank of that generation, as important a figure to painting as Julian Schnabel or Sigmar Polke. Sadly his friends will no longer receive the Christmas cards Donald designed and sent each December: I treasure them. 

PARACHUTE: SUBVERSIVE FASHION OF THE ‘80S - MCCORD MUSEUM - MONTREAL

It’s a delight to be involved in a great design exhibition, even as just a footnote in fashion history, as my twin brother Charles and I are in Parachute: Subversive Fashion of the ‘80s at the McCord Museum in Montreal. In 1986 we were photographed by Serge Barbeau for the Autumn/Winter 1986/87 Parachute advertising campaign and the photo is included in the exhibition and in its remarkable catalogue. Alexis Walker, curator of the exhibition, was interested in our memories of the shoot and the fashion scene at the time. She did an incredible job of gathering stories and observations from a vast cast of collaborators in the mutable 15 year history of a brand that had a huge impact in a relatively short span of time. We came in as models towards the end of the Parachute story: as Alexis Walker wrote in the catalogue Parachute was “founded in Montreal in 1977 by British clothing designer Nicola Pelly and American architect and urban planner Harry Parnass, Parachute was active in the world of fashion until 1993 . . . From its beginnings inspired by New Wave subculture to its position as a veritable international fashion sensation, the Parachute brand from Montreal was recognized from New York to Tokyo for its visionary, bold apparel and innovative concept stores.” Parachute’s clothes and its enormous SoHo, New York, store were ultra cool in 1981, when I wore their khaki cotton military-style knickers the first time I went to the Mudd Club. As the catalogue notes: “Parachute’s spectacular success owed much to the brand’s Manhattan presence at the start of the 1980s. With the vision of Harry Parnass, Nicola Pelly and New York Partner Morgan Allard, the SoHo store on Wooster Street became a legendary downtown locale of the era, a cool, creative hotspot, and its triumph was the catalyst that brought the company international fame and fortune.” The exhibition is on view until April 24th 2022 and there is a lot of great imagery and information on the museum’s website: https://www.musee-mccord.qc.ca/en/exhibitions/parachute/

ADOLFO SARDINA - "ADOLFO" - 1923-2021

Adolfo Sardiña, the fashion designer known by his first name, has died at the age of 98. In 1995, two years after Adolfo had retired, I wrote the entry on him for the Saint James Fashion Encyclopedia, which was edited by Richard Martin. Richard brought together a large team of writers to assemble the encyclopedia and we were given a very long list of designers to choose from. At that time Adolfo was widely known for his 1980s Chanel style suits, favorites of Nancy Reagan, but I was intrigued by his fanciful designs of the 1960s and interested in his stylistic evolution:

In April of 1993, Adolfo closed his salon on New York's East 57th Street, after more than 25 years producing his classically elegant knit suits, dresses, and eveningwear. The outcry from his clientéle was emotional and indicative of the devotion his clothes inspired in his "ladies," including C.Z. Guest ("It's just a tragedy for me. He has such great taste, style, and manners…I've been wearing his clothes for years; they suit my lifestyle. He designs for a certain way of life that all these new designers don't seem to comprehend."); Jean Tailer ("I'm devastated…. He's the sweetest, most talented man. With Adolfo, you always have the right thing to wear."), and scores of others, such as Nancy Reagan, the Duchess of Windsor, Noreen Drexel, and Pat Mosbacher. 

These loyal clients were among the many who returned to Adolfo season after season for clothes they could wear year after year, clothes that looked stylish and felt comfortable, style and comfort being the essence of his customers' elegant and effortless lifestyle. 

Adolfo began his career as a milliner in the early 1950s, a time when hat designers were accorded as much respect and attention as dress designers. By 1955 he had received the Coty Fashion award for his innovative, often dramatic hat designs for Emmé Millinery. In 1962 Adolfo opened his own salon and began to design clothes to show with his hat collection. During this period, as women gradually began to wear hats less often, Adolfo's hat designs became progressively bolder. His design point of view held that hats should be worn as an accessory rather than a necessity, and this attitude was carried over into his clothing designs as well. 

Adolfo's clothes of the late 1960s had the idiosyncratic quality characteristic of the period and, more importantly, each piece stood out on its own as a special item. This concept of design was incongruous with the American sportswear idea of coordinated separates but was consistent with the sensibility of his wealthy customers who regarded clothes, like precious jewelry, as adornments and indicators of their social status. Among the garments that captured the attention of clients and press during this period were felt capes, red, yellow, or purple velvet bolero jackets embroidered with jet beads and black braid, studded lace-up peasant vests, low-cut floral overalls worn over organdy blouses, and extravagant patchwork evening looks. 

Adolfo remarked, in 1968, "Today, one has to dress in bits and pieces—the more the merrier." By 1969 he described his clothes as being "for a woman's fun and fantasy moods—I don't think the classic is appealing to people any more." Just one year later, however, he changed his point of view and at the same time increased the focus on his knits, which had been introduced in 1969. In a review of Adolfo's fall 1970 collection, Eugenia Sheppard, writing in the New York Post, declared "he has completely abandoned the costume look of previous years." Adolfo was always responsive to his customers' needs and this sudden change of direction probably reflected their reaction to the social upheavals and excesses of the last years of the 1960s. 

By the early 1970s the 1930s look, inspired by films such as Bonnie and Clyde and The Damned, swept over fashion, drowning out the kooky individualism of seasons past. His explorations of this look led Adolfo, in 1973, to hit on what would become his signature item. Taking his cue from Coco Chanel's cardigan style suits of the 1930s, Adolfo translated the textured tweed into a pebbly knit, added a matching silk blouse, and came up with a formula his clients returned to over and over again until his retirement. These revivals of a classic became classics in their own right and the look became associated in America with Adolfo as much as with Chanel.  

Adolfo's collections were not limited to suits. When other American designers abandoned dresses for day in favor of sportswear separates, Adolfo continued to provide his customers with printed silk dresses appropriate for luncheons and other dressy daytime occasions. Adolfo's clients also relied on him for splendid eveningwear combining luxury with practicality. Typical evening looks included sweater knit tops with full satin or taffeta skirts, fur trimmed knit cardigans, silk pyjamas, and angora caftans. 

The designer himself once remarked that "an Adolfo lady should look simple, classic, and comfortable." He brought modest and characteristically American design ideals to a higher level of luxury and charm, combining quality and style with comfort and ease.

I invite you to read the entire article on Adolfo here.
You can find the rest of my contributions to the Fashion Encyclopedia here.

REDISCOVERING PAUL HULTBERG (1926-2019): ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONISM IN ENAMEL

A good time was had at the opening on 18 June of “Rediscovering Paul Hultberg (1926-2019):
Abstract Expressionism in Enamel” at Moderne Gallery, Philadelphia, on view until 24 September 2021. I initiated the exhibition and contributed the lead essay to the accompaniying catalogue, which includes a fascinating complementary essay by Glenn Adamson. On an amusing personal note Glenn and I are both identical twins! If you can’t get to Philadelphia you can take a 3D virtual tour of the show at Moderne Gallery’s website: https://www.modernegallery.com/ This project began when I contacted Paul and visited him in Pomona, NY, in Rockland County where he brought out many of his abstract expressionist enamel- on-copper paintings from storage for me to look at. I had continually encountered his name and work as I was researching craft publications from the 1950s and 60s for my 2003 article “Alluring Enamel, published in Modernism magazine. I lectured on the subject and Paul’s role as a leader in the fine craft movement at the Bard Graduate Center that year. Following Paul’s death I was pleased to be able to introduce Paul and Ethel’s son Lawrence to Robert Aibel of Moderne Gallery, who has an impeccable reputation as the leading galllery for American studio craft of the mid 20th century. Paul’s enamel-on-copper and enamel-on-steel paintings are beautifully complemented by furniture by George Nakashima and Wharton Esherick. Another feature of the exhibition is a continuous screening of the remarkable 13 minute screening of the film “REFLECTIONS: the imagery of Paul Hultberg enamelist” made in 1967 by George Ancona, which can also be viewed on Youtube: https://youtu.be/tYK9JEQm5FM. Lawrence Hultberg continues to restore his father’s work, which is remarkably well-preserved for glass on metal. As I wrote in the catalogue “enamel is much like life: paradoxically fragile and easily broken if mishandled but durable and very long-lasting when treated well.”

RAGS MAGAZINE

The Waverly Press has published a boxed set of facsimiles of Rags, the short-lived counterculture fashion magazine. Here is my complete set of the original issues, published in 1970- 71. I treasure them especially for the articles written by editor-at-large Blair Sabol—someone should publish a collection of her writing. You can see the contents of some of the issues here.

CARLYLE BROWN ARTICLE PUBLISHED THE JOURNAL OF CORNWALL CONTEMPORARY ARTS

I am happy to let you know that my article on artist Carlyle Brown has been published in the Spring 2021 issue of the Journal of Cornwall Contemporary Arts. Brown began his career as an artist under the influence of the Russian expatriate painter Pavel Tchelitchew. By the time of Brown's death in 1963, at the age of 44, he had established his own identity, recognized for his brilliant draftsmanship, masterful painting, exquisitely poised compositions and eerily enigmatic subjects. Between 1948 and 1963 Brown had eleven one-man shows and his works were acquired by the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and numerous private collectors including noted connoisseurs such as Edward James, Hugh Chisholm, Millicent Rogers, Van Day Truex, Henry McIllhenny and Baron Alexis de Rede. Growing interest in the influence of surrealism on American mid-20th-century art has been spurred on by recent exhibitions such as Real/Surreal at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Artists who were almost forgotten are being reevaluated and museums are revealing paintings that have been shut away in storage for decades. Although many of these works of art transmit an ominous mood of foreboding the prognosis is good for renewal and rediscovery. Please contact me if you would like to receive a PDF via email.

PAUL HULTBERG ARTICLE PUBLISHED IN METALSMITH

I am excited to report that my article “Paul Hultberg: Abstract Expressionist Enamelist” has been published in the special enamel-theme issue of Metalsmith, the magazine of the Society of North American Goldsmiths. Enamel has been known since antiquity and its appeal, then and now, lies in its rich visual and tactile qualities, its jewel-like colors and glossysmooth surface. Paul Hultberg (1926–2019) took this traditional craft medium and spread it broadly and even brashly over wide copper fields, just as his abstract expressionist peers were doing in paint on canvas. Where once it was delicate, Hultberg made enamel bold. While most traditional artists had chosen to reflect light in enamel’s mirrorlike surface, Hultberg played smooth against rough surfaces, in planes that glisten with explosive color but also absorb and exude darkness like a celestial black hole. Please contact me if you would like a PDF, alanrosenbergcurator@gmail.com.