The participating artists and fashion designers in ASYLUM have several things in common: a slightly surrealistic touch, an interest in the body, and the creation of a persona.
© A-S Dåvik
During the 1930s the photographer Hans Bellmer created gruesome tableaux and sculptures by disjointing dolls and then assembling the parts to form macabre bodies. Seventy years later the fashion designer Ann-Sofie Back created dresses out of parts of design patterns which actually did not fit together—a kind of art historical assemblage-technique, if you will.
Fitting together by sewing became Maria Miesenberger's way into the world of sculpture. Her first objects were influenced by the homemade clothes which her mother had sewn from pattern sheets bought in a textile shop. Pa...
Not in Fashion. Fashion and Photography in the 90s is the title of the new special exhibition at MMK Museum für Moderne Kunst. As the title already indicates the focus here is not on the glamorous fashion world of the rich and the beautiful. On the contrary, the show at MMK presents an anti-movement that in the 1990s consciously ran counter to the images of prêt-à-porter, haute couture and the mainstream fashion magazines. Especially in the first half of the decade, designers, stylists and photographers dedicated themselves to giving fashion strong roots in society not just as an industry with a feeling for the zeitgeist, but as an artistic form of expression and as a "politics of the body". Thus, fashion in the 1990s covered substantially more than the latest collections brought out by the in...