every day is a child with teeth #6: feel the space around
New York Fashion Week ended last week, and then London came and went and then Milan came, but I’m still thinking about New York. I saw this great show at Pratt Manhattan Gallery called The New Village: Ten Years of New York Fashion, which I think everyone should go see. It gathers the work of a bunch of independent, sometimes art-leaning designers, who all share a similar sort of punk spirit, who work from outside the industry even when some are a part of it, and who may or may not be making things that are commercially viable, but they’re all using clothes as a way to communicate something beyond wealth or status or taste. While at the gallery it struck me how essential they are to the city’s fashion landscape (an Upper East Side swan alone does not a fashion scene make). Everyone keeps talking about how New York fashion is dead but it’s just because they aren’t looking—or they don’t want to see—the things that are keeping the city alive.
As part of the exhibition, there was a fashion show by an artist/designer named Giovanna Flores. I first came across her work two years ago through mutual friends, when she held a show inside a tiny room on Lafayette next to the Public. Everyone just stood around the perimeter and her models came out wearing swooping things and I loved it and I felt that electricity that you can still sometimes get when you moved to New York for a dream and suddenly you’re like wow I’m in New York for my dream, even if you’ve been here for almost two decades. This time around, the clothes felt more conceptual. They made me work harder to understand them, which I appreciated. I kept thinking about this one look, with a sheer mesh long sleeve tee with these bits of colored fabric around the seams, framing the body. Like she was making clothes from the absence of clothes. Circling the body instead of filling it. I spoke to her after that first show in 2022, and she talked about how she adds darts and seams to the clothes before she fits them on a body (usually these are techniques used to make a garment fit the body properly). I love the idea that she plays with the body as another sort of medium, which means that she can also play with its absence or implied absence. The show then becomes an essential part of her practice, because it’s not just a way to see the clothes but see how the clothes interact with the body, or more specifically with her idea of the body; the body simply being another three dimensional object.
A few weeks ago I had mentioned how I still hadn’t figured out the music vibe for the new year, which I think was unwittingly causing my some level of anxiety. I realize that I need the music to also fill the spaces around me. I think I was just randomly scrolling through the albums on my iTunes (which now that I am writing this I am realizing no one calls it iTunes anymore and it’s just Apple Music; but this isn’t just Apple Music, these are records that I burned from a cd to my computer years ago and have just kept migrating and migrating and migrating and the reason why that’s important is precisely so that when you are looking for something and you don’t know what it is, a record from 15 years ago that you had forgotten about can suddenly return to your life).
And that’s how I ended up listening to Telepathe’s 2009 record Dance Mother on repeat. I don’t think this band is still around, but I used to listen to this record all the time, it’s dance-y and space-y with breathy female vocals that alternate between sweet melodies and off-key sometimes bored-sounding vocals.
From Telepathe, it was a natural jump to Portishead—specifically their Live at Roseland album. I love watching videos from this performance because sometimes Beth Gibbons is just holding a cigarette while she clutches the microphone and it’s all very cool and sexy and groovy. It seems I wasn’t the only one in a trip-hop frame of mind. Portishead was on the soundtrack at two fashion shows I attended last week; a bit of one song at Maria McManus and then a medley of all their greatest hits at Ulla Johnson. I liked it best at Ulla, who I was reviewing for the first time. When I met her backstage after the show, she told me she was inspired by Judith Butler. “Gender is a performance, femininity is a performance, this is a performance,” she said gesturing to the place where the show had taken place. It was unexpected because her clothes are straight-up feminine—she loves a ruffle—but then that’s probably why it all worked. (And here let’s imagine a sound cue of Gibbons singing Give me a reason to love you/Give me a reason to beeeee a wo-man /I just want to be… a wo-man) She made a good impression on me.
And it wasn’t Portishead but Massive Attack that played at Willy Chavarria (but the vibe remains the same). Willy named this collection “Safe From Harm,” and appropriately opened his show with the song of the same name. The chorus is “If you hurt what’s mine/I’ll sure as hell retaliate.” It was a reflection of our current times. (Willy also made a short film for this collection and if you watch/see nothing else from the fashion shows, you should definitely just watch this.)
Anyway, the best thing about trip-hop is that it feels like a liquid you pour over you and it runs over your body and finds the holes and the canals and the cracks and fills them up. It’s music to be depressed with and music to vibe to and music to thrash to and music to fuck to (or at least it was when I was young and stupid and fun, something I miss sometimes).