Inspired by Surrealist Meret Oppenheim’s performance ‘Cannibal’s Feast,’ Japanese photographer Michiko Kon’s food-based sculptural creations from the 90s fascinate and disturb in equal measure. This photo, currently on view at Robert Mann Gallery, showcases a boot crafted from ark clam shells and a real fish head. By evoking luxury goods popular in pre-crash 90s Japan and creating them in perishable materials, Kon updates the vanitas genre for more recent times. (On view through Oct 19th).
‘Camp: Notes on Fashion’ at the Metropolitan Museum of Art ends with a bang in a two-tiered gallery showcasing outrageous garments, from a wrapper resembling the contents of a TV dinner to a tiered ball gown of ruffled pink fabric that juts out from the shoulders and continues expanding as it descends to the ground. Here, alongside earrings shaped like old-fashioned faucet handles, Karl Lagerfeld’s shower head necklace makes a clean break from tradition. (On view on the Upper East Side through Sept 8th).
Gianni Versace’s 1991-92 jacket, featuring a Madonna and child embroidered in crystals, draws on the gold tile and opulent patterning of Ravenna’s Byzantine architecture. Part of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s stunning ‘Heavenly Bodies’ Costume Institute exhibition, the garment joins icons from the Met’s collection in a contemporary reinterpretation of opulence. (On view on the Upper East Side through Oct 8th).
Jamal Nxedlana’s portrait of South African stylist Bee Diamondhead leaps off the wall in Aperture Gallery’s ‘Summer Open,’ offering a tantalizing glimpse of South Africa’s fashion elite. (On view in Chelsea through August 16th).
Designers Amanda McGowan and Mattie Rivkah Barringer, who create garments under the name Women’s History Museum, explore a barely-there aesthetic partly inspired by their experience of tiny, ‘almost unintelligible’ Instagram images of clothing. Though this outfit looks like it may be worn by a fashion-conscious desert island cast-away, the mannequin’s position before a faux-cottage suggests a whimsical escapee from a fairy-tale. (On view at Gavin Brown’s Enterprise on the Lower East Side through February 25th).
