“The art world shouldn’t be allergic to fashion”

I used to side with the camp that thought the Crystal Palace represented utopia. That is, until I entered the Javits Center, New York’s own Crystal Palace, last Thursday for the Armory Show’s ‘VIP’ day. Transparency, reason, equality – those were the optimistic qualities I learned during my undergrad literature course on Nikolay Chernyshevsky, that I once associated with the Hyde Park glass structure erected for the 1851 Great Exhibition. After a weekend at the Armory Show, the 30th edition of Frieze’s newly adopted child, I now understand what Dostoevsky saw in that icon of modernity, “Well, perhaps I’m so afraid of this building precisely because it’s made of crystal and it’s eternally indestructible, and because it won’t be possible to stick one’s tongue out even furtively.”

What scared me about the Javits Center was not the building itself, but the sense of stagnation inside. The end statement of Martha Schwendener’s review of the Armory Show for the New York Times certainly confirmed general frustrations about the current state of art fairs (“They’re here; get used to it”), as did my conversations with gallerists who both stuck their tongues out at the pretext of fairs and remarked that they ultimately must appeal to them to stay afloat and to realise what their artists rightfully deserve: to be seen and paid.

Whether attributing their decline to the Art Basel or Frieze-ification of once city-specific fairs, or the general fear of risk plaguing booth curation due to fees and building costs often exceeding $100,000 at major fairs, art fairs are by no means new to scrutiny – and the Armory Show is clearly not exempt from judgement. This past weekend, a large number of people told me they didn’t like it, that it was underwhelming and that they didn’t want to see work that was supposedly only being shown at a fair because it couldn’t sell in a gallery. Some of these people didn’t even attend the fair and merely repeated what others who did attend were saying.

For older critics, the central issue doesn’t seem to be inertia but change. The first edition of the current version of the fair took place in 1994 at the Gramercy Hotel, where, much like the trendy and intimate Felix Art Fair at the Hollywood Roosevelt, art was displayed in hotel rooms. Now the Armory Show takes place in the city’s largest convention centre and has, like most large fairs, become a playground not just for the art world elite but for a celebrity and influencer clientele with a voracious appetite for luxury. Rather than using this market opening as an opportunity to explore one of today’s most apt forms of innovation – cross-industry collaboration – the Armory Show largely sequesters any of its interdisciplinary offerings, including performances, away from the art on view at the Javits Center.

This attempt to hold onto a traditional model of presenting art amidst a changing cultural landscape can be sensed in the random assortment of non-art shopping experiences planted throughout the rows of booths. This year, there were pop-up jewellery and bedding stores; an Editions de Parfums Frédéric Malle pop-up where an employee reiterated to me time and again the importance of oud in their newest scent; two bustling Starbucks (I guess things really don’t change in some echelons); and various other restaurants and lounges where one could rest, post or presumably call clients, lawyers or advisors. The emphasis on leisure almost seemed to purposefully detract fairgoers from the booths themselves, and certainly added to the general air of artificiality. At Kasmin I saw a woman walk up to a Robert Motherwell canvas and knock on the side of the wood frame as if to test its authenticity. If people generally seemed disappointed or paranoid about what they were seeing, it was perhaps because of how artificial everything besides the art felt. Had the Armory Show taken some notes from the week’s competition, fashion, perhaps things would have felt more in line with the hyper-optimised and hyper-complex nature of culture today.

That night, south of 14th Street, Women’s History Museum’s (WHM) off-calendar Spring/Summer 2025 NYFW show ‘Indestructible Doll Head’ provided a foil to my commercial art world woes. Founded in 2015 by Mattie Barringer and Amanda McGowan, WHM is the apogee of New York conceptual art practice-turned-fashion labels. They routinely trouble the boundaries of fashion and art, having once sold vintage clothing at a Company Gallery opening and routinely sending one-of-one garments down the runway only to later present them as art objects. ‘Indestructible Doll Head’ was no exception, presenting processes of transition, becoming, and anthropomorphism through skunk fur garments, chainmail made from pennies, bear claw heels, a pigeon-adorned bra and a runway made of shards of glass. These uncanny transformations are particularly salient for New Yorkers, who the show notes describe as “a breed of their own, hardened by circumstance.” New Yorkers are built, destroyed and remade endlessly by the city. It’s a process of becoming that the New York art world has long cherished but that was more evident in the fashion week events I attended over the past week than in this year’s edition of ‘New York’s Art Fair.’

Even without considering the lineage of independent designers and brands, including WHM, Bless, Bernadette Corporation and Susan Cianciolo, eschewing boundaries between fashion, design and art, the fashion industry is often the starting point for cross-industry collaboration. Whether one finds LVMH’s launch of an entertainment division, YSL’s creation of a film production company, or the Pinault family’s acquisition of a majority stake in Creative Artists Agency to be sources of late capitalist ennui or excitement, there’s no denying that fashion labels are often the first to take advantage of the collapsing boundaries between creative industries. What’s more, the market rewards it. Younger audiences have responded to these changes particularly well, as multiple studies have shown that Gen Z is much more likely to purchase products from brand collaborations than older generations. Galleries and museums are also moving toward this collaborative spirit, as demonstrated by the trend in gallery co-representation and institutional exhibitions dedicated to fashion. However, the more traditional models of the art world are still visibly lagging behind fashion. Art fair collaborations are often limited to branded sponsorships or luxurious shopping experiences rather than the type of more generative cross-industry collaborations exemplified by, say, a fashion house working intimately with an artist’s estate for a capsule collection.

The next day, back at the Armory, I ran into a classmate from grad school who now works as a researcher for Isaac Julien. Minutes later, I somehow found myself at a toast following a curatorial ‘Summit’ talk between Lauren Cornell and Julien. During the toast, Eugenie Tsai, curator of the show’s Platform section, described the theme as “reverberations of art history in the present.” The Platform section was one of the strongest areas of the show. The dozen or so large-scale installations dealt with the conceptual interaction of material and memory, providing a sense of historical grounding amidst rows of lazily clumped together group booths. Two highlights from this section included Sanford Biggers’ Mirror (2024), a pink marble sculpture of a feminine figure clothed in Greco-Roman drapery with a traditional African mask for her head, and Karon Davis’ Sable Venus (2016-24), a gold Venus emerging from a still-dripping plaster shell.

Other highlights in the show included Blue Velvet Projects’ presentation of text-based works by the late Greco-Roman artist Chryssa, Corbett v. Dempsey and Fierman’s booth of 1970s Jimmy Wright drawings at the Chelsea Hotel, and Two Palms’ solo Tschabalala Self presentation. Writer-turned-artist Paige K. Bradley’s works at Blade Study and Scott Reeder’s anti-art text paintings at Saenger Gallery provided a quippy respite from a fair generally too concerned with earnestness. Things felt far more serious than what was on view elsewhere in the city. Besides some of the post-internet works on display in new galleries, there was little of the tongue-poking fun that one could find crosstown in gallery shows like Christine Tien Wang’s crypto paintings at The Hole. There was also a notable absence of the less is more conceptual attitude that, say, Diamond Stingily’s ‘Orgasms Happened Here’ at 52 Walker makes crystal clear.

Elsewhere that weekend, young artists and designers offered more examples of lessons the art world could learn from, one of them being that the art world shouldn’t be allergic to fashion. Perhaps I had been holding a grudge from the sceptical looks I received on ‘VIP’ day for wearing a somewhat goth outfit – black jeans, an archival Beauty and the Beast top, and an asymmetrical Frederic Homs Own Wear jumper, but gathering from what attendees were wearing on the first day, the consensus of what’s considered acceptable to wear to a fair originally known for its avant-garde ethos (as fairgoers, not gallerists of course) still seems rather puritanical. Thankfully, the opening for Amanda Ba’s ‘Developing Desire’ at Jeffrey Deitch on Saturday night was just the type of fashionable affair that the Armory Show was desperately missing, and there wasn’t a champagne flute in sight. In fact, Ba’s work stood well above a majority of the figurative work on display at the Javits Center last weekend—and it was the busiest opening I’ve attended in New York. Her monumental sixteen-panel billboard painting stood out in particular. On the billboard’s front, Ba takes on 16 roles ranging from a self-portrait as a painter to a Chinese military officer. On the back, she’s added wheatpaste drawings inspired by posters from the Chinese Cultural Revolution. At the base, large concrete blocks function as the billboard’s foundation, mirroring the visible process of construction, deconstruction and libidinal investment that run across the show – qualities often embraced by fashion and at odds with the attitude at art fairs that position art as an ‘eternally indestructible,’ already perfected institution that doesn’t have to change with the times.

It came as little surprise that I recognised many of the faces at ‘Developing Desire’ from the Women’s History Museum show a couple of nights prior. It was even less surprising to see the same faces the next night at Gabe Gordon’s Spring/Summer 2025 show, which literally took us back to school. Upon arriving at the Grand Street school, we were sent in elevators to an upstairs waiting area where we queued for seating assignments in the same way one queues for a name tag on a school orientation day. From there, we were led to the cafeteria, where some were directed to sit at long tables and others in front of trophy cases. I was sat at a booth next to two RISD alumni, where Gordon himself studied textiles. Similar to the Women’s History Museum show and the Platform section of the Armory Show, the collection had a material interest in history. However, Gordon’s interest in the past was more personal and psychic than it was to do with history overall. The collaged advertising imagery, distinctive fraying and carefully placed moth holes in the knitwear-based collection gave the impression of pastoral nostalgia. The strewn hay left behind by a few of the models in the cafeteria was also caught on others’ hair or clothes and reminded me of my own rural high school, where cowboy boots dragged hay, dirt and other detritus onto the school’s fabric flooring.

For the Armory Show to become its old self again, that is, to become contemporary, it ironically needs to look back. The parts where it did this year, including the Platform section, were some of its best. Until it again prioritises the high-risk, high-reward philosophy that made it what it is, it might just be on a path to further market homogenisation. If the Armory were to take any one piece of advice from fashion on how to refresh itself, it’s that nothing (the past, or the very industry itself) is so sacred as to not be questioned or transformed.