At the Met, we saw two exhibitions.
Manus x Machina is the Met Fashion Insitute's annual homage to the art of fashion. This year, the theme is hand-made and machine-made materials and fashions. For someone like Greg who is not a fashionista, the exhibit was nevertheless fascinating. Check it out.
The most interesting item was the "floating dress", pictured below. The dress is metal, motorized and remote-controlled, with spring-loaded spinning, lighted butterflies. For the full monty, check out the video here.
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Hussein Chalayan (British, born Cyprus, 1970)
"Kaikoku" floating dress, autumn/winter 2011–12Courtesy of Swarovski Photo © Nicholas Alan Cope |
The centerpiece of the exhibition is a wedding ensemble made for the House of Chanel. Greg nicknamed it the Shotgun Wedding Dress. The reason for the nickname will become apparent below.
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| The Wedding Ensemble's ornately embroidered train. Fit for a queen, to be sure. |
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| Close-up photo of the train, showing the detailed embroidery. |
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| Not the most flattering of cuts, UNLESS you are expecting. In that case, the wedding dress could not be any more beautiful. |
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| What makes this dress interesting is how it was made. The process involved fabric covered with molten rubber infused with metal and then drawn into varied textures with magnets while being sprinkled with colored paint. The Michelin Man never looked like this. |
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| Made with plastic drinking straws, Greg thinks this dress sucks. |
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| "I have nothing in my closet that I can wear this evening. I guess I'll warm up my 3-D printer and create a new dress." |
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| "Sleeves? We don't need no stinkin' sleeves!" |
After touring Manus x Machina, we strolled over to another exhibition, Turner's Whaling Pictures.
From Metmuseum.org: "Exhibition Overview: This
focus exhibition is the first to unite the series of four whaling
scenes made by the British landscapist Joseph Mallord William Turner
(1775–1851) near the end of his career. [T]he
whaling canvases confounded critics with their "tumultuous surges" of
brushwork and color, which threatened to obscure the motif, yet the
pictures earned admiration for the brilliance and vitality of their
overall effects."
"The exhibition also highlights connections between Turner's whaling scenes and Herman Melville's 1851 whaling epic Moby-Dick.
It is not certain that Melville saw the paintings when he first visited
London in 1849, but he was unquestionably aware of them, and aspects of
his novel are strikingly evocative of Turner's style."
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| Joseph Mallord William Turner (British, London 1775–1851 London)
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After the Met, we headed off to Carl Schurz Park and then Maz Mezcal.
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| At Maz Mezcal on East 86th Street, friend Michael with some random Mexican dude. |
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