A few days ago Vêtements unveiled its window display at Saks Fifth Avenue in New York. There was actually nothing extremely elaborate in the windows such as dummies in expensive fashion designs in the sort of dreamy sets that lure you to get in and immediately buy the goods you've just seen.
There wasn't even anything abstrusely conceptual in them, but a surprisingly messy pile of clothes, entangled with street signs and occasional shoes. Well, there is actually a conceptual twist about it: the pile grows as the days pass, hinting at excess and consumerism in fashion.
The garments in the windows were donated by Saks employees or came from out-of-season stock merchandise, but no Vêtements garments are sight. After the windows will be dismantled on 10th August the garments will be donated to RewearABLE, an organisation that recycles clothing and provides employment to adults with developmental disabilities.
So far so good, but "the bold statements", as Saks defined the windows, look a bit like Michelangelo Pistoletto's "Venus of the Rags" - minus the Venus.
As you may remember from previous posts, the work consists (Pistoletto did various versions of this installation) in an industrial reproduction of Venus (representing a degraded idea of the Western canon of beauty) with her face buried in a pile of clothes.
The garments in Pistoletto's work could be interpreted as shadows of human existences turned into rags, while the latter turn into physical witnesses to consumerism and the ephemeral nature of beauty.
As we stated in a previous post about fashion and art, you can change the statue and the color and style of the clothes/rags and come up with a perfect logo for any fashion week across the world: you could for example put the Statue of Liberty in the place of Venus and a pile of clothes made in the USA, and you could have an arty representation of New York Fashion Week.
Most fashion critics out there seem to think that everything done by Demna Gvasalia and his cult brand (that recently relocated to Zurich and announced it would be abandoning the runway in favour of alternative presentations) represents a style statement, but it looks like in this case Pistoletto may have made a more profound statement many decades before them.
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