How do you properly tell the story of a city, any city, but specifically New York, a 320-square-mile expanse of layered stories and a singular attitude? Let it be an ode to clothes.
“A Matter of Style,” a pop-up fashion museum opening September 9, is an exploration of New York’s clothing legacy, framed through the vast photographic archives of Fairchild Media Group, whose portfolio includes the stalwart style observer Women’s Wear Daily. (WWD is owned by Penske Media Corporation, the same parent company as ARTnews.) The museum, on view at AG Studios in Manhattan, will feature exclusive illustrations, vintage fashion, immersive experiences and photography in conjunction with New York Fashion Week.
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Fairchild, founded by John Fairchild in 1910, owns one of the largest archives of fashion photography in the media. It includes candids of quintessential New York personalities along with images of everyday people whose daily dramas play out outside of the spotlight.
There’s Jackie Kennedy, leaving her usual lunch spot, La Grenouille. Downtown luminaries like Andy Warhol and Patti Smith appeared in its pages. Epochs in American history unfold in front of the photographer’s lens: stiff skirts, synonymous with the nuclear family; the beaded and fringed height of the hippies; and the sleek power uniform from the Black Panther era. “Style is a language and reflects history like any other kind of visual medium,” writer and image activist Michaela Angela Davis once told WWD.
“A Matter of Style” comes at a fruitful time for fashion exhibitions. Possibly due to the enduring popularity of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute, clothing has entered the art institution, not always a continuous process, where its historical weight is taken into account. A survey of the work of the late artist and designer Virgil Abloh is currently underway at the Brooklyn Museum. And the Costume Institute’s last big outing also focused on American fashion, albeit with a greater emphasis on its relationships with European haute couture.
The New York-specific focus of the Fairchild Museum is a nice diversion. It should offer a sense of how the personal and the political intersect in our clothes.
To learn more about the show, ARTnews spoke by phone with its curator, visual culture historian, archivist, and design educator Tonya Blazio-Licorish. A condensed version of the conversation follows below.
Can you talk a bit about your role as archivist?
My work here revolves around archival content from all Fairchild brands. I came to PMC as a historian of visual culture. So I use my background in fashion history to bring a narrative element to the way I look at the Fairchild archive, which is just an incredible amount of information. Truly, this is a well-deserved moment for Fairchild, who has been there to capture exactly what fashion has been saying for decades. This year it celebrates its 112th anniversary. Captures the history of fashion, spanning designers, catwalks, celebrities, music, art; no part of our culture is intact. This show will focus specifically on the history of fashion in New York City.
And how did you decide on a story to tell about New York?
I have focused on the people, places and things that made it a global fashion city, but also made it unlike any other fashion city. It’s about creating context: what was going on at the time, disguised as what New Yorkers were wearing. I mean, just think of denim, consider the effect of that picture of James Dean in jeans and a white T-shirt. You are instantly transported to that moment in time.
And New York—America, really—evolved differently from European capitals; their fashions were more democratic. Denim and other fashions reflected America’s drive to form its own cultural ethos. Think of the youth quake of the ’60s, the Black Panther uniforms of the ’70s. Every generation was trying to say something.
How do you think WWD differed from similar fashion publications?
The exhibition focuses on how WWD has continuously captured fashion as the essence of culture and gives the viewer access to its intimate connection not only with the fashion industry but with all the interconnected spaces it inspires and vice versa. John Fairchild saw fashion as a conversation, WWD advancements could predict the trajectory of upcoming trends while speaking to the zeitgeist. Since its inception, WWD has captured fashion in conversation with lived everyday moments, in its “They’re Wearing” street style photo essays. There was also “The Ladies Who Lunch”, another trademark of the newspaper, dedicated to the fashionable happenings of the social scene and the socialites of the day. In a way, this was all an early form of social networking.
As a visual historian, what do you think of the “it is fashion art” debate?
The understanding of fashion as an art form has changed. Fashion is a cultural memory in which we live; it makes sense that it opens up to a very critical space. Fashion is art, it has levels, it has processes. It has inspiration, it tells a story. The person who carves it can speak softly or very, very loudly. And to get back to the idea that American fashion is democratic in self-expression. It’s like art. You may feel out of reach or inaccessible. But that is never the case.
Source: www.artnews.com