wed 23/04/2025

fashion

Art Gallery: GSK Contemporary - Aware: Art Fashion Identity

A masked lace dress by the late Alexander McQueen, from 1998, turns the catwalk into pure theatre

Fashion and conceptual art come together, sometimes awkwardly, often provocatively, in the Royal Academy’s third and final annual GSK Contemporary exhibition. Instead of celebrating glamour and excess, designers and artists – as well as those, such...

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Fashion Gallery: Future Beauty - 30 Years of Japanese Fashion, Barbican Gallery

Exhibitions about fashion tend to divide the public. Those passionately interested in fashion go to them; everybody else doesn’t. There’s a prevailing view that we already hear enough about top models, superstar designers and their attendant...

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Trinny & Susannah: From Boom to Bust, Channel 4/ Nigella Kitchen, BBC Two

They always say that women over a certain age are, in televisual terms, extinct. Well, it seems that science is going to have to get back to the drawing board. Palaeontological reports are coming in from last night of strange terrestrial sightings...

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A Gothic homage to late fashion icon

The portrait brings out the 'gothic quality' in Isabella Blow's personality, say the artists

A grisly "shadow portrait" of the late fashion muse and stylist Isabella Blow goes on show today at the National Portrait Gallery. Crafted from taxidermied animals, including a raven, a species of rat linked to the black death and a snake, as well...

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Shoes, Sadler's Wells Theatre

The Health and Safety number: You too can leave your 'shoe-fession' on the Sadler's Wells site

Every time I go to Sadler’s Wells now I come out wondering if there’s something wrong with my hearing, so loud and numbing are their speakers. It’s a blight on a lot of shows, but on none more so than Shoes, because this is the first major London...

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Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky

She glides on the arm of a tail-coated swain into an elegant Belle Epoque drawing room. Music swirls, eyes swivel. And no wonder. Her thin black dress hugs a gamine frame, a look of masculine confidence rests on her face. Gabrielle Bonheur Chanel,...

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Fashion pop ups in unlikely places

The first floor at Browns: 40 Years of Fashion Innovation

While wandering back from a meeting with a hedgie on Haymarket, I noticed a banner emblazoned with the logo of Browns, clothes shop to the well heeled (to mix metaphors), above the entrance to what appeared to be a building site. It was indeed a...

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The Concise Dictionary of Dress, Artangel at Blythe House

On the roof of Blythe House: 'Armoured' shimmers in the light

Judith Clark is a fashion curator, Adam Phillips a psychoanalyst and writer. In collaboration with Artangel, that font of innovative artistic commissions (including Rachel Whiteread’s House, Michael Landy’s Break Down), they have produced what is...

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Ron Arad: Restless, Barbican Gallery

The Rover Chair: made its television debut on Top Gear

Like Philippe Starck, whose Alessi tripod lemon squeezer is a bit like an evil-looking Louise Bourgeois spider, Ron Arad emerged in the Eighties as something of a “rock‘n’roll” designer. It’s a label that’s stuck, as has its sexy variant “post-punk...

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The V&A is Wrong

I took advantage of one of the last "extra" opening days the V&A is offering for its musical instruments gallery to check out the fuss. Having been sitting on the fence - sympathetic to the pleas for historic fashion displays, though drawn by my...

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V&A concedes a few final extra viewing days

The V&A has made a small concession to the musical outcry over its plan to substitute musical instruments with fashion galleries - an outcry you read first on theartsdesk. It is opening the instruments gallery for extra days before the closure...

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Vox Pop: The V&A - Musical Instruments or Fashion?

The Victoria and Albert Museum intends on 22 February to disperse its collection of musical instruments to other venues, to allow more room for fashion and textile exhibits. Conductor Christopher Hogwood and composer Oliver Knussen are two more...

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