Tag Archive | The Met

Eye On Design: Meat Dress By Jeremy Scott

Sep11

Meat Dress By Jeremy Scott
Photos By Gail

Even if you weren’t watching the 2010 MTV Video Music Awards at the time of its broadcast, everyone remembers at least hearing about Lady Gaga’s controversial dress made of raw beef, which was commonly referred to by the media as The Meat Dress, by designer Franc Fernandez. That dress was one-of-a-kind, but did you know that another designer, Jeremy Scott, made an entire line of meat inspired couture? Yes, it’s true. This form-flattering dress — with it’s jewel neckline and elbow-length sleeves — comes from Scott’s Spring / Summer 2011 collection and appears to be fashioned from prosciutto, but it’s actually just pink and white printed latex. I love it.

Photographed as Part of the Exhibit Camp: Notes on Fashion at the Met, Which Closed on September 8th, 2019.

Meat Dress By Jeremy Scott
Meat Dress Installation View

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Keith Moon’s Pictures of Lily Drumkit

Aug27

Keith Moon Drumkit
All Photos By Gail

If you can make it to the Metropolitan Museum of Art before the October 1st, 2019 closing date of its attendance record-setting exhibit, Play It Loud: Instruments of Rock & Roll you will find that it is so much more than just a collection of famous guitars. For me, the Oh, Wow factor is summed up in the true work of art that is Keith Moon’s Pictures of Lily Drumkit circa 1967. Jesus god, look at this beautiful thing. Just look at it.

Pictures of Lily Drumkit

Inspired by the song of the same title, Pictures of Lily is nine-piece Premier kit — comprised of a snare, two bass (or kick) drums (which are reproductions of the originals), three floor toms and two mounted (rack) toms, with two Paiste cymbals, which appear to be one ride and one crash — with custom artwork.

Pictures of Lily Floor Tom Detail
Floor Toms Artwork Detail

Keith Moon received this drum set at the beginning of The Who’s 1967 U.S. Tour and used it extensively for the performances that followed. The artwork features nude photos of Lily Langtry, the subject of the single “Pictures of Lily.” The psychedelic design incorporates a Union Jack and the text “Keith Moon Patent British Exploding Drummer,” a reference to Moon’s tendency to pack his drums with shells and flash powder in order to detonate them onstage. The two original bass drums are lost, possibly destroyed buy Moon’s pyrotechnics.

Keith Moon Kick Drum

Kick Drum Reproduction, Detail 

Keith Moon Drumkit

Eye On Design: Moschino Vintage Steam Iron-Shaped Handbag

Aug7

Moschino Steam Iron Handbag
Photos By Gail

It has been said that an ‘it bag’ is only an ‘it bag’ if you’re unlikely to ever own one. Characterised by exclusivity, celebrity and exorbitant price tags, ‘it bags’ were first introduced in the mid 1980s, and by the early 1990s small bags emblazoned with corporate designer logos were the accessories in fashion-conscious circles. Glossy advertising campaigns, glamorous brand ambassadors and celebrity style icons, including Lady Diana, encouraged power-dressing executives with high disposable incomes to snap up these luxury wares.

In critique of this phenomenon, Italian designer Franco Moschino produced a series of handbags that parodied the trend for conspicuous consumption. Among them were witty works such as the Steam Iron Handbag (Ferro da Stiro), using white lacquered and metallic silvered leather.  Marrying humour and irreverence, Moschino’s surreal visual puns satirised the fashion industry, couture conventions and consumerism. Yet they also drew attention to the social politics of the period, critiquing the stereotypical female clotheshorse and articulating the less glamorous reality that, despite their careers, women remain enslaved to the domestic realm in ways that men do not.  Combining luxury with eccentricity, this handbag is an extraordinary example of Moschino’s wit and talent.

Moschino Steam Iron Handbag

Photographed as part of The Exhibit Camp: Notes on Fashion, on View Through September 8th, 2019 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC.

Eye On Design: Andy Warhol Campbell’s Soup Can Paper Dress

Jul31

The Souper Paper Dress
Photos By Gail

From Weng Contemporary:

The Souper Dress, inspired by the iconic Campbell Soup Cans series by Andy Warhol, was imagined and produced by the Campbell Soup Company as a mail order offer and as an effective advertising campaign when paper dresses were all the rage in the 1960s. Two labels from any different variety of Campbell’s Vegetable Soups and $1.00 got you the dress.

The Souper Paper Dress Installation View

The Souper Dress is a classic example where fashion, art and industry intersect into one image. The paper dress captures to perfection the vibrant, youthful, optimistic and consumerist zeitgeist of America in the 1960s .
This, then, disposable A-line dress made of screen-printed tissue, wood pulp and rayon mesh with binding tape, is printed with the Campbell’s Soup red, black and white labels. At the back of the neckline is attached the original label that reads: “The Souper Dress/No Cleaning/ No Washing/ It’s carefree fire resistant unless washed or cleaned/To refreshen, press lightly with warm iron/80% Cellulose, 20% Cotton.” Examples of The  Souper Dress is excellent condition can sell for as msuch as  $8,000 at auction.

Photographed as part of The Exhibit Camp: Notes on Fashion, on View Through September 8th, 2019 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC.

Modern Art Monday Presents: Josef Albers, Homage to the Square: On Near Sky

May20

Homage to the Square
Photo By Gail

Following an influential career at The Bauhaus school in Wiemer, Germany (1919 – 33) Josef Albers fled the Nazi regime and emigrated to the United States, where he taught at Black Mountain College in North Carolina, and then at Yale in Connecticut. Beginning in 1949 and continuing over the next twenty-five years, he created his celebrated Homage to the Square series, which is composed of more than a thousand works including paintings, drawings, prints, and tapestries. These works are based on a template of geometric abstraction, a mathematically determined format of several squares overlapping or nesting within one another. These works represent Alber’s experiments with theories of color and spatial relationships, which were informed by his studies of Mexican pyramids and pre-Colombian architectonic principles. Homage to the Square: On Near Sky was painted in 1963.

Photographed in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC.

Modern Art Monday Presents: Alejandro Puente, Untitled

May6

Alejandro Puente Untitled
Photo By Gail

Alejandro Puente (1933 – 2013) was at the fore of a group of artists from La Plata, Argentina, who shared with American Minimalist and Conceptual artists of the 1960s a devotion to the rigorous exploration of systems of color and form. This composition reflects Puente’s preference for the primary colors as they appear unmixed on a color wheel. Arranged together, four equilateral triangles make up a single, larger triangle, with the three primary colors radiating out from an anchor in black. An even white strip runs along two sides of each triangle, suggesting a state of incompleteness while also creating the perimeter of overall composition. As this composite work suggests, the abstract vocabularies practiced by La Plata artists effectively abandoned traditional painting by embracing the shaped canvas, the support assuming its own identity in space as an object

Photographed in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC.

Modern Art Monday Presents: Willem de Kooning, Easter Monday

Apr22

Easter Monday
Photo By Gail

A tour de force of Willem de Kooning’s gestural style, Easter Monday (1955-56) bristles with energy. Angled forms and lines collide, overlap and penetrate one another, while transferred newsprint, particularly visible at the bottom and top right, enforces a tenuous, grid-like structure. The work appears to be in simultaneous processes of creation and destruction, a perpetual state of both realization and erasure that finds some analogy in the continuous growth and decay of nature.

Named for the day on which de Kooning completed it in 1956, Easter Monday is the largest of ten monumental works that he exhibited that spring. Critic Thomas Hess likened the group to “abstract urban landscapes,” and Easter Monday does seem to reference the whirling pace and gritty detritus of the modern city.

Photographed as Part of the Exhibit, Epic Abstraction: Pollock to Herrera currently on extended view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC.