Camp: Notes on Fashion at the Met Museum

Fashion, Features/Op-Ed

The new exhibit by the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Camp: Notes on Fashion, is fraught on many levels, starting with a paradoxical nature of its theme. On the surface (no pun intended) Camp is not hard to spot because it’s so image-oriented. In reality the playfulness and irony inherent to Camp makes it elusive and intuitive. Like any sensibility or a matter of taste, Camp requires from its audience organic growth and (self)education. You can’t really stuff all of these things into a museum exhibit that is aimed at the general public – and the job of the Met is to cater to the general public. It’s especially hard to do because Camp is a fairly niche sensibility – there is something subcultural and underground in it. Camp takes pleasure in being stuck into people’s faces without them getting it. Really, it’s kind of the point.

TakahiroMiyashitaTheSoloist Opens a Pop-Up Store in New York

Fashion, Retail

Takahiro Miyashita of the Japanese menswear brand TheSoloist has always had affinity for New York. The only outpost for his first label, Number (N)ine, outside of Japan was here in TriBeCa. Much of it has to do with Al Albayan, who has been Miyashita’s right hand since the early N(N) days. Together, they have cooked up something for New York once again. RE:AL is TheSoloist is a pop-up shop, again in TriBeCa that opened last weekend and will run through July. The idea was to open a version of an airport gift shop. Miyashita is fond of traveling and not fond of diffusion lines, so doing something quite different but still familiar seemed like a fitting idea.