April 27, 2022 Fashion & Style Barneys Fantasia By Adrienne Raphel SPP Installation at Barneys, 2017. LICENSED UNDER CC0 1.0. FLOOR LL In 1923, Barney Pressman pawned his wife’s engagement ring for five hundred dollars and opened a five-hundred-square-foot clothing store on West Seventeenth Street and Seventh Avenue, in downtown Manhattan, where he sold well-tailored menswear at steep discounts. He hung a sign over the doorway: NO BUNK, NO JUNK, NO IMITATIONS. Abandon hope, all ye who enter here. By the time Barney retired, in 1975, the store was doing $35 million per year in business. Barney’s son, Fred, added women’s wear, expanding the store into a row of town houses across the street. Under Fred’s leadership, Barney’s adopted a cool, upscale, whimsical vibe. Barney’s scaled up—it was the first place in America where you could buy Armani suits—yet maintained a patina of accessibility through its legendary warehouse sales, where you could find Norma Kamali sleeping-bag coats in wacky colors at whacked-down prices. In 1981 Barney’s became Barneys, discarding the apostrophe, becoming plural instead of possessive—the royal we. Read More
March 25, 2022 Fashion & Style The Dress By Cynthia Zarin Illustration by Na Kim. I bought the dress known in inner circles—that is, in the echo chamber of my closet—as the Dress in 1987, for a rehearsal dinner in New York for a couple I’ll call Peter and Sally. I found it on sale at Barney’s on Seventeenth Street. On the hanger, it looked like a long, black cigarette holder. It was February, and outside on the street, the wind was coming up Seventh Avenue. I had been married for exactly one month. That year, all my college friends were getting married. We barged from one wedding to another, carrying shoes that hurt our feet. In some cases, we knew each other all too well; sometimes the marriage was the direct result of another marriage, on the rebound: someone’s beloved had married someone else, chips were cashed. In this instance, I had hung around with the groom on and off through college, and the bride had once been the girlfriend of the man I left when I met my husband. The Dress was a sleeveless crepe de chine sheath, with a vaguely Grecian scooped neckline composed of interlocking openwork squares, which sounds dreadful but was not. It was sublime. Cut on the bias, it skimmed the body—and, it turns out, it skims everyone’s body: the Dress has been worn to the Oscars three times—in 2001, 2009, and 2018—though not by me. Read More
March 23, 2022 Fashion & Style How to Choose Your Perfume: A Conversation with Sianne Ngai and Anna Kornbluh By Jude Stewart Sianne Ngai, Anna Kornbluh, and Jude Stewart try perfumes. Photograph by Seth Brodsky. Even after writing a whole book about smell, I still resisted finding “my” perfume. Perfume has always seemed gimmicky, too expensive, anti-feminist. But researching my book got me rethinking these objections. I wanted to get to yes with perfume but do so honestly. I mentioned this to my friends Sianne Ngai and Anna Kornbluh, who both really like perfumes. Sianne is a professor of English at the University of Chicago and specializes in aesthetics and affect theory in a Marxist context. She has written books about the “ugly feelings” of envy and irritation; contemporary aesthetic categories like “cute,” “zany,” and “interesting”; and, most recently, a theory of the gimmick. Anna is a professor of English at the University of Illinois Chicago and specializes in formalism, Marxism, aesthetics, and psychoanalysis. Sianne, Anna, and I are middle-aged women who admire each other, loudly and often. Our sensibilities overlap but also diverge in intriguing ways. We met for this conversation in September at Sianne’s high-rise apartment in Chicago’s South Loop. It’s an airy, glassed-in space with views of Lake Michigan and the South Side in many directions. The day was unseasonably warm, so we’d brought our bathing suits to swim in her building’s rooftop pool. But first we spread out tiny bottles of perfume on her kitchen table, and sprayed and sniffed for a good long while. NGAI Let me start by asking, Why a perfume? Why not several? A lot of people have perfume wardrobes. You can have a depersonalized relationship to perfume and just ask, How do I want to smell, in a performative way? I like perfume. I got really sucked into it and then I had to pull away because I had a dog whose nose was very sensitive. The irony is I ended up with a boyfriend who’s so romantic that he gets upset when I wear anything other than the scent I wore when we met. When I first got into perfumes I thought about it all wrong. It was very conceptual, like, I bet I’ll be someone who likes citrus. I was reifying my identity, thinking of myself as a certain kind of person. It turns out I don’t like citrus at all in perfume. I don’t like florals either, especially jasmine or rose. I do like earthy, woody smells. When I leaned into what felt good at the level of sense, it became easier. Read More
October 16, 2017 Fashion & Style The Macaron That Tastes Like Marina Abramovic By Hannah Foster Raphaël Castoriano, Marina Abramovic’s Taste, 2017, from the series “Pastry Portrait.” Stepping into the small office suite in midtown Manhattan, I half expected to find gurgling pots filled with caramelizing crystals, molds crusted with chocolate, and white powder dusting the doorway. Instead, in the headquarters of the sugar/art company Kreëmart, I found a cluster of normal-looking rooms with a small kitchen. The company’s director and founder, Raphael Castoriano, offered me a cup of tea and a variety of sweeteners, saying, “Pick your poison.” The bottle he held must have contained simple syrup, but, feeling suspicious, I opted for unsweetened tea instead. I sat down with Castoriano and his programs manager Simone Sutnick to discuss Kreëmart’s newest edible endeavor. Castoriano explained that sugar is an ideal medium for art because both sugar and art are “not necessities—they are luxuries.” His first foray into the sugar medium was in 2009, at the American Patrons of Tate Modern show. He teamed up with pastry chefs at the Milanese pasticceria and confetteria Sant Ambroeus and the artists Teresita Fernández, Ghada Amer, and Vik Muniz. The artists were no strangers to molding and sculpting, though perhaps not in material as frangible as frangipane. The evening’s most memorable reveal was two cakes crafted into the shapes of George W. Bush and Tony Blair. Amer decimated the cake politicians’ heads with a hammer, exposing the simulacrums’ respective strawberry and raspberry guts. Read More
August 14, 2017 Fashion & Style The Enduring, Gloriously Déclassé Style of Barbara Windsor By Laura Bannister Barbara Windsor in Carry On Doctor. In 1969, the English actress Barbara (Babs) Windsor costarred in her fourth motion picture in the Carry On franchise, a succession of low-budget, campy comedies that dominated national cinemas for two decades. For Carry On Again Doctor, she assumed the role of a walking trope named Goldie Locks: a comely but rattlebrained blonde who’d fallen while modeling for a baby-food commercial, and thus required a checkup. In a now cult scene, a stern hospital matron peels back a blanket to reveal Windsor’s milky, bruised flesh, privates obscured only by heart-shaped nipple pasties and a matching glitter G-string. A male doctor gawps and splutters and spins around at the sight of her. The matron shoots him a censorious glance. Windsor, or Goldie Locks—all alabaster skin and towering, curly beehive—asks, “What’s wrong?” with Gorblimey cockney intonation. A clichéd comedy of errors ensues. Since its inception in the late fifties, Carry On was an easy, if surprising, cash cow for its founders: deliberately slapstick, smutty and formulaic in plot, expert in recycling themes and motifs to engineer maximum audience delight. It internalized a then-lowbrow English attitude to sex; scripts were carnivalesque, replete with all the bawdy innuendo, double entendre, and wheezy wisecracks of a seaside postcard. (A writer for the Telegraph would later opine that Carry On adopted “innocent smut that plays Grandma’s footsteps with its subject, furtively creeping up on it, then freezing and corpsing when it comes face to face.”) As the second-longest running British film series, bested only by James Bond, it leveraged a universal-adaptor cast of comics to send up various Blighty institutions: the monarchy and the Empire, the police force and trade unions, the National Health Service. Perhaps that irreverence and lack of prudishness is why viewers hung on. Thirty-one films in total were churned out, conveyer-belt style, from Pinewood Studios, about twenty miles west of central London. Sometimes they took as little as six weeks to make. There were other spin-offs, including four Christmas specials, a thirteen-episode TV series, and three plays. Carry On was always cheap and high-energy, increasingly interspersed with nudity, always a lot of the same (ditsy plot, cheeky dialogue, rudimentary, drama-school costuming). It was whipped-cream and zany slapstick chase scenes and jovial leering at Windsor’s ample cleavage. Read More
May 25, 2017 Fashion & Style Lolita Fashion By An Nguyen and Jane Mai Drawing by Jane Mai, from the cover of So Pretty/Very Rotten. Have you ever seen the Japanese movie Kamikaze Girls (aka Shimotsuma Monogatari)? It came out back in 2004 (released in the United States in 2006) and was based on the 2002 novel by Japanese author Novala Takemoto. The story is about an unlikely friendship between two high school girls—Ichigo, who is a member of a Yanki girl biker gang, and Momoko, who wears a niche fashion style called Lolita fashion. In Shimotsuma, a rural town in Ibaraki prefecture, Momoko stands out in her Rococo-inspired Sweet Lolita outfits with lots of lace, frills, ribbons, and colors like pink, red, and sax blue from her favorite brand Baby, the Stars Shine Bright (BTSSB). On the weekends and holidays, she makes a two-and-a-half-hour train trip to Tokyo so she can go clothes shopping in the Harajuku and Daikanyama neighborhoods. Being a high school student, she does not have a job, so she swindles money from her dad by telling fake sob stories about friends in distress or trying to sell bootleg “Versach” merchandise, through which she meets Ichigo. It’s been a long time since I last watched the movie in its entirety, but one of the scenes has stuck with me through the years. At the end of Momoko’s monologue about her life up to that point, she floats slowly into the sky as she says, “So what if I was deceitful? My happiness was at stake. It’s not wrong to feel good. That’s what Rococo taught me. But actually my soul is rotten.” Momoko talks about how Lolita fashion is connected to the romantic, decadent, and aristocratic parts of the Rococo era and tries to find happiness through material things. She has decided to devote her life to clothing, but her connection to other people is lacking. Even though she wears pretty clothes, she feels that deep down there is a part of her that is rotten. Read More