March Madness
For us it has to do with the annual art fairs in New York. And this year, we were able to piggy back meetings around Coded_Couture to insure that our time was packed. It was!
Despite a crippling snowstorm, we were able to achieve all of our goals, clad in winter gear.
Our adventure began at the Brooklyn Fashion and Design Accelerator, the bold enterprise where new technologies, new talent, and new business ventures are brought together; where training for high paying jobs in the industry is offered; where a lively roster of events – talks, presentations, fashion shows, gatherings –animates this vast former Pfizer plant. Debera Johnson is the mastermind and force behind this whole enterprise.
We are hoping that two of our Coded_Couture designers, Alison Tsai and Mary Huang, will be making new work for the show, partnering with the Accelerator.
Next stop – Mary Huang’s live/work space in Brooklyn, occupying the top floor of a small modernist building, across from a park. Fitting that a bit of Corbu houses this nest of experimental thinking, where programming and design come together.
When Ginger recognized Five Leaves, right on our way to the subway, we dove in, famished as we’d each arisen at 5am. On the bar, jumped out their bottle of Tito’s Vodka, where our communications guru, Josie, will soon be sharing and honing her skills as she joins their advertising team.
On to the crazy art fairs, where acres of international art vied with the glitterati for attention.
Seeing colleagues – Susan Edwards and Mark Scala from The Frist Center for the Visual Arts — was a welcome relief.
Arresting was Hank Willis Thomas’s project for Artsy.
Next morning, we made our way through slush and snow to meet with the Chris Leonardi and Claudia Castro of BLumlein Associates to launch the design process of the exhibition Coded_Couture, always a tremendously challenging and exciting process. Ginger presented the exhibition, designer by designer, and then shared images of innovative solutions to the problem of how to present garments. We just don’t like mannequins!
The enthusiastic press on the New Museum’s 2015 Triennial: Surround Audience lured us across Manhattan and transported us, or attempted to, into alternate realities. Here’s Judy making her way through a virtual rain forest created by Daniel Steegmann Mangrané.
To wind up, wind down, and talk through all we’d seen, we ended up in the oh-so-cozy Freemans, fortified for hellish journeys home delayed by the storm. It finally caught up with us.
