Ready When Worn: the Avant-Première of MM6 Maison Margiela AW24

For the Avant premiere of AW24, MM6 explores the liminal state of a silhouette morphing between urban cool and couture refinement. Looks hover in limbo. Elegance with wit, puns and double entendres. Clothes that aren’t ready-to-wear: they’re ready when worn, molding to the character of the wearer. Oblique references to Man Ray bring an undercurrent of bohemian elegance, evoking artists, celebrities, friends, lovers and other singular types who move through life like it’s a work of art. Characters inhabiting an uncannily parallel world, with unexpected textures, raw finishes and, of course, white paint.

The familiar skews obscure as staples and archival garments adopt new attitudes, blending minimalism with maximalism on vintage-leaning pieces and riffing on classic masculine codes of dress, with cleverly placed darts reconfiguring silhouettes and tailoring language extended to pieces considered outside the traditional tailoring realm.
Pockets come to the fore as functional, multiple, exaggerated emblems of utility, with asymmetrical placements creating critical distance from the usual technical sportswear tropes.

For night, a bedding theme plays out in Lycra bodysuits and dresses in an allover trompe l’oeil quilt print as well as on a pink t-shirt with a flocked Party Bear motif lifted from an old kids’ duvet. True to MM6 codes, humble materials become ornamental: the lining of a black dress is pulled out, twisted and looped around the neck to create intriguing yet elegant volumes. Waistbands are flipped to create couture-like tulip hem effects, and tops are slashed with zips, sexing up something quite mundane. Roughly hewn “replacement” panels on pants suggest customization as hard-loved, well-worn clothing, like sun-bleached ribbed knits and ultra-wrinkled stonewashed denim, take on a new personality. A white cotton shirt, biker jacket and trench coat are gutted and reconstructed with all the details flattened out, their open collars and cuffs sewn into place permanently.

As if lifted from a construction site, a bucket and a rubble sack join the MM6 accessories universe as a molded EVA bucket bag and a tote. Footwear additions include a cream version of the Anatomic clog, a vulcanized lace-up, the Stitch-Out Anatomic boot with a raised ridge detail on the toe and the Tube boot with an anatomic toe, cigarillo heel and wide shaft in suede. Throughout, a sleek monochromatic palette of black, white, camel, gray and chalk is enlivened with shades of green and jolts of pink.

The season also marks the launch of the first ready-to-wear collaboration with Salomon: a capsule of minimalist classics — a five-zip mackintosh, a five-pocket jean, a shell jacket with long body zips, a classic men’s tuck-in shirt — are made from bonded Gore-Tex, bringing an almost alien functionality to a cityscape. The complementary Seamless line blends influences from compression base layers worn by athletes to speed recovery and MM6 bodysuits on a compression top, leggings, arm warmers and a bodysuit. The Water Bottle bag, the Trailblazer.

Pocket Backpack and a cap complete the lineup. By focusing on simple gestures that transform everyday dressing, MM6 continues its exploration of clothing, form and wearability. Pieces spark an immediate connection and play on the duality of perception, slipping easily into a wardrobe purposefully prepared to let personality shine through.

model standing profile wearing long black knit turtleneck and baggy black parachute trousers with back bubbly tabi boots

The Intimacy Of No Wrong Holes "Thirty Years of Nayland Blake" @ Institute Of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles

From pop culture to corporal humor, Nayland Blake’s exhibition No Wrong Holes, currently on display at LA’s Institute of Contemporary Art, plays with intimacy from every angle. Pieces like Starting Over (2000), which features Blake in a 147 lb bunny suit tap dancing to Michael Jackson, put Blake's body and its capacities on display to consider cultural belonging. Engaging with their own White passing, Blake interrogates how the bonds of culture are both formed and broken along the fault line of cultural expectation.

Blake’s consistent use of kitsch icons like Bugs Bunny asks what kind of intimacy pop culture gives us; How do recognizable figures stand in as avatars for human expression and escapism? Blake also evokes pop culture to interrogate cultural bias, pointing to the racial and homophobic stereotypes that Br’er Rabbit—originally an African folk tale—and Bugs Bunny are imbued with. 

In a number of pieces, Blake cultivates historical closeness. Through works like Magic (1990) and Joe Dallesandro as Augustin (1994), Blake serves as a kind of queer biographer, archiving the contributions of overlooked queer icons such as Wayland Flowers, Hans Bellmer, and Ethyl Eichelberger. Blake's 30-year engagement with the HIV/AIDS crisis speaks to the closeness that tragedy brings. 

The exhibition ends with a focus on Blake's current community-based practice. This work is aptly paired with Bay Area artist Sadie Barnette’s iridescent and arresting installation piece The New Eagle Creek Saloon, a replica of the first black-owned queer bar in San Francisco, founded by her father.

No Wrong Holes "Thirty Years of Nayland Blake" will be on view at ICA LA until January 26, 2020. text by Rosa Boshier, photographs by Oliver Kupper

Robert Moreland: Deliberation @ Wilding Cran Gallery In Los Angeles

Just when you think you have the measure of them, these composites of painting and sculpture slip out of mental reach. At first glance Moreland’s latest body of work evokes the geometry of industrial spaces: a saw roof; bi-fold windows; up-and-over garage doors…. But the closer you approach, the more the architectural undertones are disrupted. In the face of brightly painted, leather-hinged, canvas-covered wooden panels, architecture gives way to a story of making. Tacks, tucks, folds: no part of fabrication is disguised. These crafted elements may lurk in the shadows but they are handled in such a way as to become significant features. Like the sixties Minimalism movement that it references, Moreland’s work is without pretension; unlike the Minimalists, it is not devoid of emotion or artistic gesture. There are just discernible brush strokes on the painted surfaces, and his striking use of color points up the geometry of each piece. Deliberation is on view through October 27 at Wilding Cran Gallery 939 South Santa Fe Avenue, Los Angeles. photographs by Lani Trock

Tamara Santibañez "Landscapes" @ Slow Culture Gallery In Los Angeles

Slow Culture presents artist Tamara Santibañez's first Los Angeles solo exhibition, “Landscapes.” As a multimedia artist and well-respected resident amongst many at Saved Tattoo New York. Tamara embodies more than meets the eye from the canvas of her on clients to the canvas of her paintings. Known for representations of objects such as handcuffs, whips, chains and leather, she moves to educate her audience in the scope of BDSM culture, that these objects and materials signify more than subversive notoriety or sexual innuendo. Tamara’s diverse forms of art and authorship in totality have created social mindfulness and aim to defeat ignorance in the eyes of fear and judgement. Landscapes will be on view until October 22, 2016 at Slow Culture in Los Angeles. photographs by Oliver Maxwell Kupper