Bless | The Intersection of Art and Fringe Fashion in the 1990s Is the Subject of a New Book
Department
Challenging JewelleryDirector documentation 2020-08-03
BLESS: Desiree Heiss and Ines Kaag, Directors of finished Temporary Programme Challenging Jewellery (2018-2020) were recently featured in Vogue article The Intersection of Art and Fringe Fashion in the 1990s Is the Subject of a New Book, Fashion Work.
Nostalgia doesn’t look at history with a loupe but rather through rose-colored lenses. This edited approach to the past (whether lived through or only longed for) works very well in the digital age, where platforms like Tumblr and Instagram serve up attractive, bite-size portions of what has been. While the 1990s are at the top of the menu because they happened in a pre-internet era, it’s not possible to “eat a rainbow.” But a forthcoming book by the Danish-born, New York–based curator Jeppe Ugelvig, Fashion Work: 25 Years of Art in Fashion (Damiani), certainly seasons our understanding of the subcultures that grew up around the genre-blending practices of Bless, Bernadette Corporation, DIS, and Run (Susan Cianciolo), about which Ugelvig dishes up new and detailed information from disparate archival sources.
One of the reasons the 1990s remain a constant preoccupation within fashion today is because, to some extent, they mirror our times of uncertainty, the tension between convention and new ways forward that often do away with existing boundaries—like those between art and fashion. To Ugelvig, the distinction between the two fields—an endless topic of conversation—should not be focused on “aesthetic categories” but rather “systems of labor,” i.e., how things are made. (Hence the work in his title.)
