FASHION Magazine

David Bowie is, the widely publicized multi-media exhibit on pop culture icon David Bowie will soon be leaving its current home at London’s Victoria and Albert Museum and heading on a much anticipated world tour. First stop, Toronto! That’s right, come September The Art Gallery of Ontario will be welcoming the exhibit complete with its 300 objects from the legendary British artist’s personal archive.

Bowie, who is known for his genre-defying music is one of the industry’s finest performance artists, having experimented with everything from surrealism to mime. The British sensation, dubbed the culture chameleon, maintains a personal archive of more that 75,000 objects. Archivists and curators from the Victoria and Albert Museum were given full access to explore and pick the items for display.

Recognized for his radical fashion sense and powerful influence on art and design, audiences can expect to see some of the most memorable costumes and objects from Bowie’s long career. Fifty stage get-ups, including the celebrated Ziggy Stardust bodysuits, will be combined with a selection of music videos, set designs, photographs (namely by Helmut Newton, Brian Duggy and John Rowlands) and album artwork for the exhibit. The experience promises to expose Bowie’s collaborations in the fields of fashion, sound, theatre, art and film. On a more personal level, the exhibit will also display Bowie’s own handwritten set lists, lyrics, diary entries, instruments and sketches.

Judged either by the vulgar mathematics of marketing or by higher, more refined artistic standards, fashion exhibitions are flourishing. Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty, a show that ran at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in 2011, attracted 661,509 visitors, making it one of the 10 most popular attractions in the Met’s 143-year history, right up there with the Treasures of Tutankhamun and the Mona Lisa.

Besides scoring big numbers, the show also ranked high on a scale of aesthetic satisfaction. “It was really about an artist who spoke very emotionally through his work,” says Valerie Steele, director of The Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology in Manhattan, who saw it three times and speaks of it as “the most extraordinary fashion exhibition I’ve seen.”

In 2013, the exhibition boom continues. Steele and her curatorial team tackle an explosive subject with Queer Style, opening at FIT next September. The first major show to explore the gay influence on fashion, it’s been a long time coming, but its arrival this year seems thrillingly on-trend, 2013 having got rolling with an inaugural address in which U.S. President Obama gave a shout-out to Stonewall and a showing of Chanel haute couture that concluded with lesbian brides.

And transgressive seems to be trending. Costumes worn by rock music’s great gender bender are featured in David Bowie is, an exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London (March 23 to July 28).

If your childhood was like ours and therefore marked with memories of ruby slippers, munchkins and lions and tigers and bears, oh my, then you fellow Wizard of Oz fans can rejoice as some fashionable Oz news has been announced. It has been revealed that the blue and white gingham dress that Judy Garland made […]

The post Attention Wizard of Oz fans: You could own a piece of Hollywood history for a cool $200,000 appeared first on FASHION Magazine.

By Sophie Walker

From slick new shops to gold medal–worthy gowns, Londoner Sophie Walker reports from the fashion frontlines at the 2012 Olympic Games.

Check out our editors picks for London »

Remember when Anna Dello Russo did a backwards yoga pose in her insane video for “Fashion Shower?” Well, looks like we’ll be seeing lots more of it! At a recent panel at London’s V&A Museum, the editrix/style star reveals that a career in music is next on her horizon: “I want to finish in fashion, […]

The post Quotable: Anna Dello Russo compares herself to the Queen and plans a music career appeared first on FASHION Magazine.