Modern Beauty Trends: The In List

Thursday, October 5, 2017

The In List - October 5, 2017

In: Scary Movies and Radical Art From the desk of W editor in chief Stefano Tonchi, comes The In List, a guide to everything that's "in" right now.
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“Drama is life with the dull bits cut out.” – Alfred Hitchcock

Nights (and Days, and Afternoons) at the Museum

Designers this past spring season decided that if they can’t be artists themselves, then they might as well show their new collections alongside priceless works of art. In New York, Carolina Herrera took over the Museum of Modern Art’s Sculpture Garden, Tory Burch opted for the Cooper Hewitt’s, and Oscar de la Renta sent its models down the escalators at Sotheby’s, as if ready to march into an auction. The trend continued in London, where Christopher Bailey unveiled a collection at Old Sessions House that was inspired by an exhibit he curated of 20th-century British social photographs, as well as in Milan, where Donatella Versace paid tribute to her brother, Gianni, with her show at the Triennale Museum. Even in Paris, the Dior show took place inside an enormous sphinx's breast on the grounds of the Musée Rodin, a recreation of one of Niki de Saint Phalle’s large-scale sculptures. The timing couldn’t have been better; everyone’s tired of the same old venues. For me, the takeaway was simpler: When you need a beautiful escape, make like these designers and run away to the museum.

Scare Tactics

Raf Simons gave the fashion crowd a good scare at his Calvin Klein show. No, he didn’t make everyone go to a dead-end street in Bushwick—or anywhere in Brooklyn, for that matter—or introduce a $2,000 handbag modeled after, say, a UPS package. Instead, he took inspiration from American horror, both real and imagined, and decorated his midtown showroom with suspended axes, scored his spring collection to samples from The Exorcist, and paraded a series of Hitchcockian dresses that looked like body bags, some of them paired with pumps recalling Jason Voorhees’s hockey mask from the Friday the 13th series. In doing so, he was picking up the thread from what has been the dominant conversation at the movies this year: Horror is back! Long dismissed as Hollywood’s black sheep genre, scary movies—from Jordan Peele’s Get Out, Andy Muschietti’s It to Sofia Coppola’s The Beguiled and Darren Aronofsky’s Mother!—are not guilty pleasures anymore, but enjoyable thrill rides. And why not? As George Romero proved long ago, in times of political unrest, audiences crave to see their worlds reflected back to them, if only from the comfort of a movie theater where they’re safe from certain maniacal clowns.

Radical Art

Los Angeles right now is an embarrassment of art world riches, thanks to the Getty Foundation’s “Pacific Standard Time” series, which in its third iteration takes up the herculean task of highlighting the work of Latino and Latin American artists. Seeing the 80 exhibits in “LA/LA,” sprawled out throughout over 70 institutions would be a marathon for anyone, and I will confess I didn’t catch them all, though the whole program ought to be a required viewing for anyone in Washington these days. But there are gems among them that are must-sees, especially at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, where I’ve spent recent afternoons savoring the spectacular canvases by the late Chicano artist Carlos Almaraz and “Lost in Translation”—a rabbit hole of an exhibit tracing the conversation between Mexican and South Californian design. As Andrea Giunta, co-curator of “Radical Women” at the Hammer Museum, pointed out, this show is “only the tip of an iceberg.” And, if you can’t make it to L.A., you’re in luck: After it closes on December 21, “Radical Women” is coming to the Brooklyn Museum in April.

Yoko Ono

@yokoonoofficial

Yoko Ono is a fairly recent convert to Instagram, but she already seems to be a natural, posting inspirational quotes—usually hers—and selfies like a regular influencer. She’s even come up with a foolproof riposte to her haters and Beatles antagonists: “Yes, I'm a witch, I'm a bitch/I don't care what you say.”