assignment: Is Fashion Modern?
artist: Omar Victor Diop
At the end of 2017 MoMA opened an exhibition titled Items: Is Fashion Modern?
Items consisted of a selection of 111 garments and accessories that have had a strong impact on history and society in the 20th and 21st centuries, and that continue to hold currency today. Designs as well known, transformative, and coveted as Levi’s 501s, the Casio watch, and the Little Black Dress, and as ancient and culturally charged as the kippah and the keffiyeh, allowed the public to explore multivalent issues that these items have contributed to, produced, and shaped over many decades. By treating each as a focused lens, the exhibition considered the ways in which items are designed, manufactured, and distributed, and pondered the relationships between clothing and functionality, cultural etiquettes, aesthetics, politics, labor, economy, and technology.
For the catalogue of the exhibition, Senegalese artist was commissioned by the MoMA to create illustrations for a number of items. He created artworks which combined photography and collage, in the form of a set of playing cards.
The illustrations can be found in the catalogue, which was published in 2018, by the MoMA.
