A Fairchild Archive Exhibition: A Matter of Style
Fairchild Media Group celebrates NYFW with a fully immersive pop-up event founded in the creativity, design, innovation and wonder of the world of fashion. The museum experience offers the fashion community the chance to engage and interact with decades of the most elaborate and impactful fashion moments from the runways to the silver screen to the streets of iconic fashion cities, making this season a truly fashionable affair.
As the first event of the Fairchild Fashion Museum, the event explores New York City's fashion heritage through the Fairchild Media Group's vast image archive, featuring illustrations, vintage clothing, and exclusive photos depicting the runways, screens and streets of New York through the ages. There’s Jackie Kennedy, slipping out of her regular lunch spot La Grenouille. Downtown luminaries like Andy Warhol and Patti Smith appeared in its pages. Epochs in American history unfold in front of the photographer’s lens: the stiff skirts synonymous with the nuclear family; the beaded, fringed height of the hippies; and the dapper power uniform of the Black Panther era.
“Style is a language and reflects history just like any other sort of visual medium,” writer and image activist Michaela Angela Davis once told WWD.
In an interview with Artnews, the exhibition's curator, the visual culture historian, archivist, and design educator Tonya Blazio-Licorish said the exhibition "captures the history of fashion, which spans designers, runways, celebrities, music, art — no part of our culture is untouched. This show will specifically focus on the story of fashion in New York City."
She continued: “I’ve focused on the people, places, and things that made it a global fashion city, but also made it unlike any other fashion city. This is about creating a context: what was happening in that moment, disguised in what New Yorkers were wearing. I mean, just think about denim—consider the effect of that photo of James Dean in jeans and a white tee. You are instantly transported to that moment in time."
"The understanding of fashion as an art form has changed. Fashion is a cultural memory we live in; it makes sense for it to be opened to a highly critical space. Fashion is art—it has levels, it has processes. It has inspiration, it tells a story. The person who scuplts it can speak quietly or very, very loudly. And to go back to the idea of American fashion being democratic in self-expression. It is like art. It can feel out of reach or inaccessible. But that’s never the case", Tonya Blazio-Licorish.
