Dress to Impress

Four curators share fashion statements from the season’s most stylish new exhibits.

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Courtesy of World of WearableArt Limited

The catwalks of fashion week seem meek when compared to New Zealand’s WOW World of WearableArt, an annual design competition that culminates in a wild runway show that draws 50,000 spectators. The Peabody Essex Museum’s exhibit of the same name, on view through June 11, has brought 32 of its extravagant ensembles to Salem, including this 2012 entry titled In the Op. “For this work, Hong Kong-based Lai Kit Ling was inspired by optical art and wanted to create the sensation of falling into a vortex of black and white spiral patterns,” says curator Lynda Hartigan.


Gift of Susan B. Kaplan / Photo © Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Throwback style is nothing new; your great-great grandma likely took fashion cues from the past too, as newly opened exhibit Past Is Present: Revival Jewelry reveals. On view at the Museum of Fine Arts through Aug. 19, 2018, it highlights 70 objects to explore how jewelry designers from the 19th century onward have drawn inspiration from bygone bling, from treasures excavated from Egyptian tombs to adornments depicted on old masters’ canvases. “This Renaissance-revival neck ornament, designed by G. Paulding Farnham for Tiffany & Co. around 1900-1904, was likely inspired by the gemset chains seen in Renaissance portraiture,” curator Emily Stoehrer explains.


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Jewelry is likewise in the spotlight at Brockton’s Fuller Craft Museum, where Playa Made: The Jewelry of Burning Man is on view through June 4. The exhibit showcases pieces created for or during the desert festival, like this bronze BRC map pendant designer Kenn Kushner made for his first visit to Black Rock City, setting a synthetic ruby at the spot where the Man burns. “Kenn is a Boston jeweler who typically works in very high-end precious metals and precious stones,” curator Christine “LadyBee” Kristen says, noting jewelry’s role in Burning Man’s gift-based economy. “For him it’s a huge thrill to be able to gift someone a piece of his, which would cost a lot of money to commission.”


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Photo by Sanja Marusik

Through May 21, Coded_Couture is outfitting the Tufts University Art Gallery with futuristic fashions from 10 artists and design teams, including Melissa Coleman, Joachim Rotteveel and Leonie Smelt’s Holy Dress, a frock that’s far from your average LBD. “Using a found lie-detector machine and a shock pen sold as a novelty device, the designers transformed a simple black sheath dress into a sculptural work of art that also administers shocks via a homemade truth test,” exhibition co-curator Judith Hoos Fox explains. The dress lights up while its wearer speaks and triggers a shock when vocal stress is detected—adding new urgency to the idea of wearing your heart on your sleeve.


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