We find style inspiration everywhere we look—and in the arts, most of all. Our fellow creatives may talk strokes and shadows while we talk darts and seams, but if anyone can get us out of a fashion rut, it’s an artist with big dreams. So today, we’re rounding up our favorite moments in style inspired by paintings, sketches, and sculpture. They say life imitates art—and no one knows that better than the fashion set.
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Let’s not make any empty resolutions. While 2014 might mean (finally) getting active, we have no reason to confine ourselves to treadmills, pilates machines or bikes that go nowhere. Grab some skis, snowshoes, or skates, cause the great outdoors await. Here are a few vintage ladies who know what’s up. Learn from them, you’ll thank us later.
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Jane Birkin is one of those women that history just won’t be able to forget. Not that we want to, of course. The bangs, the baskets, and those big doe-eyes, Birkin in the 60s and 70s was an unmistakable and unforgettable woman. As she celebrates her 68th birthday today, we’re looking back on the moments that made her an icon – and a sex symbol. Between some very PDA chansons with Serge Gainsbourg, an an acting career anyone should be (at least a little) jealous of, the see-through dresses and the world’s most famous bag named for her, it’s no surprise that Jane is still one of few women who can rightfully claim the term “iconic” for themselves.
20 utterly unique historical photographs you’ve never seen before
Among the multitudes of photos of the past, there are some that show the history from a different perspective. The best of theses images can help you to imagine better than any book or movie what it was really like to live through that moment, now lost forever. Bright Side has picked out 20 fascinating shots which fit this description perfectly. Take a look.
Held in cavernous convention centers or monumental tents, fairs like Art Basel Miami Beach can be merciless on those individuals who have to hoof it around the halls. So while the art crowd often dresses up for the occasion, their footwear skews towards the comfortable. Polling the foot traffic at this year’s Art Basel Miami Beach, sneakers, loafers and platform sandals beat out more formal options like lace-up leather shoes and heels. “I always wear flats to run around the fairs. I am usually covering a lot of territory very quickly, so comfort is my main concern, but I never compromise style,” explained SOCO Gallery owner Chandra Johnson, who wore Acne sandals during her rounds. “Thank goodness the trends can allow for both these days.”
“I can tell you right now the most brilliant fair shoe brand in the world is Feit; they are a bespoke company that my daughter introduced me to,” recommends the art dealer Sean Kelly. “A few years ago, there was this thing that everyone was wearing sneakers to try to look cool. I think sneakers are fine for installation, but British men pay a lot of attention to footwear; and I think when you are trying to stand on a booth for hours and look elegant for clients, you need a shoe. Sneakers don’t cut it.”
Regulars like Lieske and Art Papers editor Victoria Camblin admit to hedging their bets by bringing multiples. “When packing, I go with a ‘more is more’ philosophy for fairs: I don’t pack smart, I pack everything,” says Camblin, who mans the publication’s outpost at the fair. “You have to rotate footwear, because no shoe is going to be comfortable all day. This year, I kept high heels at the booth — like an ’80s secretary changing out of sneakers and into pumps.”
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For those who didn’t pack enough, The Webster, a Miami-based boutique, provided a selection of solutions, including a new collaboration between Del Toro and the artist Rob Pruitt: black slippers emblazoned with Pruitt’s pandas. During the VIP previews, foolhardy stilettos dotted the crowd, however, the vast majority stuck to more sensible footwear including Art Week revelers like Aeffe president Michelle Stein, who scoped out the fairs after throwing a party for Moschino designer Jeremy Scott. Her sage suggestion: “Definitely the lightest and most comfortable shoes possible. A sandal or a Birkenstock accessorized by a creative pedicure is best.”
When you walk into “No Kidding,” the artist Deborah Kass’s exhibition opening tonight at Paul Kasmin Gallery, be prepared for a strange sensation: you can almost hear Kass’s new mixed-media paintings in addition to seeing them. “The thing about music is that it’s so democratic, and art isn’t,” Kass said when T visited her studio last month. Throughout the show, the artist alludes to popular song lyrics from a wide swath of eras, from the 1895 waltz “The Band Played On” to Fats Waller’s 1929 “(What Did I Do to Be So) Black and Blue” to Katy Perry’s 2010 “Teenage Dream.” The references are diverse, but taken as a whole, their message is clear: a deep-seated, and deeply droll, cynicism about the present political and artistic climate, and about our capacity to fiddle while Rome burns. Other pieces in the show ironically deploy phrases like “GOOD TIMES” and, in several three-panel works, “WHO BLUE WHO,” to much the same effect.
“I mean, I think things really suck; and yeah, it’s a big conundrum to be compelled and identify and spend your life doing something when your values are so different than the world you live in,” Kass said; her default tone is both wry and plainspoken. “I don’t know how many people feel really in sync with the world as it is right now. And the people who support the art world are probably the people who do feel most in sync — they’re the ones benefiting.”
Among the pieces in the show, “The Band Played On” and “Prepare for Saints” (a riff on the title of Steven Watson’s book chronicling the operatic collaboration between Gertrude Stein and Virgil Thomson) offer the most pointed critique of the art world specifically, rather than a broader political subject. Both paintings juxtapose their respective bits of text against the kind of paint-splattered background that has variously been called “crapstraction,” “zombie formalism” and, as Kass prefers, “citational modernism” — aesthetically unchallenging work that has saturated the art market in recent years. “That’s normcore painting, and that’s what people are buying and trading now,” Kass said, along with some slightly more colorful critique she opted to keep off the record. To pit the style against a phrase like “AND THE BAND PLAYED ON,” then, is a deliberate, barbed statement about the kind of art-world navelgazing that ignores social struggle.
Kass, by contrast, is constantly influenced by politics. “Think about Ferguson, think about Black Lives Matter, think about abortion, think about Donald Trump,” Kass said. “All this work from 2002 on is about politics. I, like Toni Morrison and Emily Dickinson and Audre Lorde and all the great people, think you’re supposed to make art about the world; and this is art about the world. It’s not poptimistic. I’m just not, anymore.” Several works in the show address these issues head-on: notably, “Black & Blue #2,” a painting divided down the middle, with a black background and “BLACK” in blue neon on the left, and a blue blackground with “BLUE” in black neon on the right. (Many of the works on view in “No Kidding” incorporate neon — a first in Kass’s career.) It’s both a loving wink to Jasper Johns’s play with language and color and a grim indictment of contemporary race relations; the Fats Waller song with which it shares a title laments the struggle of being a black man in America. Another canvas boldly proclaims “JUST A SHOT AWAY,” a line from the chorus of the Rolling Stones’ “Gimme Shelter” — a song that balances difficult subject matter with inventive form. “I would say that might be the aesthetic of my generation. That’s what formed us, being able to do that,” Kass said. “How do you make beauty political, how do you make politics beautiful?”
As for the painting inspired by “Teenage Dream,” which declares across four Ellsworth Kelly-style bands of color that “WE’LL BE YOUNG FOREVER,” Kass said she came to love the song after seeing it reimagined on “Glee.” “I live for ‘Glee!’” she exclaimed. “I would say it’s not like my work, it is my work. They literally did the same songs I did for the same reasons.” She identifies, she explained, with Ryan Murphy’s tongue-in-cheek sensibility. And despite the seriousness with which most of the works in the show were conceived, there’s a touch of the wicked jokester to Kass, too. “Katy Perry should buy this painting,” she said, deadpan. “Please put that on the record! Attention, Katy Perry!”
