Tag Archives: Bjork

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Dive Into the Creative Mind of Björk at MoMA’s New Exhibit

moma_bjork_postalbumcmyk Image: Stéphane Sednaoui courtesy of Wellhart Ltd & One Little Indian.

Starting next month, the Museum of Modern Art in New York City will host a retrospective dedicated to the multifaceted work of Icelandic singer-songwriter Björk. The exhibit will recount the artist’s two-decade career with her innovative music, videos, visuals, objects, costumes, and instruments.

blacklake_09 Image: Inez van Lamsweerde & Vinoodh Matadin courtesy of Wellhart Ltd & One Little Indian.

Chronologically the special showing begins with the release of Björk’s first mature solo album, ‘Debut’ (1993), and proceeds through her career up to her most recent work in 2015, including a new video and music installation commissioned especially for the museum, ‘Black Lake,’ which also appears on her new album, ‘Vulnicura.’ Conceived and realized by Björk herself, alongside director Andrew Thomas Huang and MoMA’s Chief Curator Klaus Biesenbach, the new exhibit offers an experience of music in many layers, with instruments, a theatrical presentation, an immersive sound experience, a focused audio guide, and related visualizations—from photography and music videos to new media works.

moma_bjork_biophilia_large Image: The Museum of Modern Art courtesy of Wellhart Ltd & One Little Indian.

Also included in the exhibit are some of the unforgettable and spectacular costumes Björk has worn throughout her career; demonstrating how the artist has always used fashion as both a creative medium, to enhance her unique music vision, as well as a transformative tool for her performance art. Never one to follow the fashion industry and its rules, Björk has always been involved in her styling choices and has worked closely alongside some of the most renowned talents in the industry such as designers Alexander McQueen, Bernard Willhelm, Jean Paul Gaultier, and fashion photographer Nick Knight.

Titled Björk, the new retrospective is a product of collaborations with artists from all creative fields and brings together a chronology of daring and unique works of various media, expressing the artist’s overarching project: her music.

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Riccardo Tisci’s Re-imagination of Art-Influence at Givenchy

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While the interaction between the worlds of art and fashion is a constant occurrence, the relationship is easy to overlook in today’s retail-dominated world of trend-hopping. Over the last decade, under the lead of Creative Director Riccardo Tisci, the house of Givenchy has continuously worked to pull the designer-stitched wool off of unseen eyes—often juxtaposing images from the deep seas of art history and cultural phenomena atop sleek and contemporary cuts—but it was Tisci’s Men’s Spring/Summer 2015 runway show this past month that particularly re-cultivated the idea with a unique sculpture from Dutch artist Paul Veroude. Building off the spectacle nature of the storied French label, Veroude hung from the ceiling of the arena a dismantled 1964 Reims Cessna F172E airplane, entitled “Exploded Plane,”  which served as the fashion show’s centerpiece.

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Circulating around the installation, the collection featured variations on formalwear in a black and white color palette. Outfits disrupted traditional men’s attire with floral graphics, sleeveless cuts, and a mix of formal with casual. Ties were paired with shorts, bombers were layered over button-downs, and nearly every outfit featured heavy black boots. These isolations mirrored the exploded plane by drawing attention to the individual parts of each look, and the omnipresent boots added an industrial aesthetic that echoed the separation of the suspended machinery.

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Not to say that this season’s runway show was an independent thought, but rather—a weighty reckoning for the public eye. Tisci himself has history as an appreciator of all art forms and frequently collaborates with the art/design group M/M Paris on like-minded avant-garde projects. A duo consisting of graphic designers and creative geniuses Mathias Augustyniak and Michael Amzalag, M/M is most famous for its artistic collaboration, having worked with musicians (Kanye West, Madonna, Bjork) and fashion designers (Yohji Yamamoto, Jil Sander, Tisci himself). The creative partnership between all three men has resulted in exclusive invitation design for Givenchy shows since Tisci joined the label in 2005—a series of elaborate creations that have become as anticipated as the shows themself—and a printed book, entitled “The Givenchy Files,” featuring works inspired by the designer’s collections. The anthology, like Veroude’s contribution to the Spring/Summer 2015 show, exhibits the symbiotic nature of fashion and the visual arts, transcending consumerism and, instead, emphasizing the oft-forgotten craftsmanship of designer fashion.

Givenchy Files

Givenchy Show Invite

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Admittedly, Tisci’s work hasn’t always been quite so high-browed. Shall we say that it is a bit ironic that the brand has become famous for those ubiquitous ‘Rottweiler’ sweatshirts and ‘Pervert 17’ t-shirts that have affected consumer culture in less-than-ideal ways? Since their arrival, countless e-commerce stores and St. Marks pop-ups replicated the designs, bombarding the initial boldness into a trend that surely lacked in innovation as much as it did in artistic heritage. Maybe. But Tisci’s offering for SS15 reads as a departure from the designer’s previous menswear, favoring crisp button-downs and combat boots over graphic sweatshirts and chunky high-tops. Perhaps Tisci will persist with this ‘formal’ style, but regardless, his ability to incorporate various art mediums into his collections through it all is refreshing and essential in an industry often unfairly viewed as the embodiment of vapid materialism. By emphasizing the bond between these two worlds, fashion houses can express the notion that their clothes are wearable art, and not simply attractions for the brand-whores. Moreover, Givenchy’s collaboration with Veroude this season provided a new perspective to the idea of a ‘collection display,’ showing that a fashion show could become a multi-dimensional artistic experience.

Images courtesy of CEYMS, Federal News Radio, Style.com, MrPorter, and M/M Paris.