Too Big to Fail

(Balenciaga images from style.com)

Julie Mehretu's subject matter - the history of finance capitalism - in "Mural" is abstracted in layers of architectural drawings, map renderings, trade routes, population shifts, and figural representations of financial institutions.  She was commissioned by Goldman Sachs to create this work for the lobby of their building, which runs parrellel to the West Side Highway in Battery Park.  One can peer directly inside the lobby via the building's large glass windows, while also catching a glimpse of one's own reflection on the mirrored glass surface.  This imposes a shadow upon Mehretu's work, as if one's shadow becomes a part of the painting -- a looming, figural abstraction of one's own history. 

For Fall 2010, Nicolas Ghesquière for Balenciaga aimed "to ennoble everyday domestic objects" by using interesting and unidentifiable materials and textures.  They recalled tubing, plastic bubble wrap, newspaper and magazine print, styrofoam, neoprene, electrical wiring, stacked boxes, raked fallen leaves, egg cartons, metal fencing, and air condition filters.  Though, through the lens of Ghesquière, these materials were employed not so much in the surreal or found object mode but rather through a futuristic vision with inventive cuts and boxy silhouettes. 

In a season about the strength of women, it is radical to see this sort of translation on the runway -- household objects of the domesticated housewife, which one might think is distant from the independence and individualistic ideas shown through other designers' menswear and utility references.  But, if one uses Mehretu as a point of reference, one can understand that Ghesquiere uses these materials in order to show a history (and in this case, the history of women's suppressed containment in the home). It is as if doning domestic household products on one's clothing is to don one's acknowledgement of the past in order to proceed to the future. 

As Mehretu created a visual history for Goldman Sachs (let's not forget that she is a female artist illustrating the economic history of a predominantly male world), so too does Ghesquière for women via a satirical commentary about the strength of women, who are strong enough -- and witty enough -- to wear the remnants of their oppressed and gendered past as fashion. 

(Detail of Julie Mehretu's "Mural", 2007 - image from The New Yorker)