CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 11/28/2017

Going beyond in 'Items: Is Fashion Modern?'

In MoMA’s historic new survey, Items: Is Fashion Modern?, five rising international photographers—including Omar Victor Diop, Bobby Doherty, Catherine Losing, Monika Mogi and Kristin-Lee Moolman—were asked to interpret some of the articles of clothing featured in the show. Featured here is one image from Kristin-Lee Moolman's eight-page photo essay produced in collaboration with IB Kamara. For it, pieces from Pierre Cardin’s Cosmos collection, a Swatch watch, and YSL Touche Éclat face highlighter were gleaned from a secondhand store in the center of Johannesburg. Collectively, all five photographers used the 111 items in the exhibition as “lenses through which to investigate form, color, gesture, environment, and more,” Paola Antonelli writes. “The resulting pictures embrace fashion photography and yet carry us beyond fashion into the realm of design and its many intersections with culture, technology, art, anthropology—in other words, with the world.”