“Clothes that will stun the crowds in museum exhibitions in the future,” was how New York Times fashion critic Bernadine Morris summarized Yves Saint Laurent’s spring /summer 1988 haute couture collection. A highlight of the collection was the Irises jacket shown here, a simulacrum of Vincent van Gogh’s 1889 painting. The jacket echoes the original’s cropped composition, zooming in even further on the curved and twisting lines of the irises. More remarkably, the embroidery amplifies the luminosity of Van Gogh’s colors, and enhances the materiality of his thick, short, wavy brushstrokes. Continue reading Eye On Design: Van Gogh’s Irises On Bead Embroidered Jacket→
This black, heavily embellished dress from House of Balmain, designed by Olivier Rousteing for the Fall/Winter 2012–13 collection, feels less like a garment and more like a moment preserved in time. An unapologetic show-stopper, it reads as both armor and ornament —structured, deliberate, and unapologetically intricate. Continue reading Eye On Design: Balmain’s Beaded Time Capsule→
Monsters are usually pictured as scary creatures that represent the unknown. They stoke our deepest fears. Lee Bul’s version, Monster: Black (1998 – 2011) , harnesses sequence, crystals, dried flowers, and glass beads to create a defiant figure of social liberation. Continue reading Modern Art Monday Presents: Lee Bul, Monster: Black→
This striking sky-blue Venetian glass ewer captures the imagination with its fantastical dragon-shaped handle — a signature flourish of the 19th-century Venetian glass revival. During this period, master glassmakers looked back to the opulence of Renaissance designs, reinterpreting them with new techniques and dazzling colors. Recently, novel conservation methods have been applied to this ewer, reviving its original luster and reminding us why Venice’s glassmaking tradition has been celebrated for centuries.
Photographed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC.
In this photograph referred to as Glass Tears (1930–33), the face of a model known as Lydia acts as a backdrop for a group of small, gleaming glass balls. Man Ray made multiple variants of the image, in which the balls, like tears, appear to move and multiply across her static face from one version to another. He originally conceived of this shot as an advertisement for smudge-proof mascara.
Photographed as part of the Exhibit, Man Ray: When Objects Dream, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
