2007 American Craft Council

Baltimore, Maryland - February 2007

Atlanta, Georgia - March 2007

Charlotte, North Carolina - November 2007

Filoli Flower Show - Woodside, California

May 2005 www.filoli.org

SALAD DRESSING: Food in Fashion

COPIA - The American Center for Wine, Food and the Arts

 September 2003 – January 2004

Clothing is often decorated with natural imagery, such as flowers, trees and animal prints. In the case of food, some clothing has gone even further, mimicking the forms of edible plants and food packaging. Salad Dressing will present an inventive array of costumes and accessories created as art and fashion, theatrical costumes, or for advertising, that often look good enough to eat. The costumes and accessories will be augmented with sketches and photographs.

"Bad Apple"  - Wayne Wichern

"Bad Apple" was originally created in 1998 for "A Feast of Hats" an exhibit of work by Pacific Northwest Milliners in Seattle, Washington.  "Bad Apple" now in the Textile Collection of the M. H. de Young Memorial Museum, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco is part of SALAD DRESSING: Food in Fashion, an exhibit at COPIA - The American Center for Wine, Food and the Arts in Napa, California.

A message from the Curator of SALAD DRESSING -  Melissa Leventon

Normally we put food inside our bodies, but with Salad Dressing, I wanted to look at food as a decoration for the outside of the body.  It's a wonderful way for both designers and wearers to distinguish themselves, because wearing food imagery -- or real food -- may be one of the most provocative things you can do with your clothes on.  Food as a subject for fashion offers fabulous opportunities for wit and play (visual puns in particular) and also for provocation:  underlying the humor are often more serious themes like body image, sex, and women's roles.  Food is also a perfect Surrealist subject for fashion and strong Surrealist and Pop Art threads run through many of the pieces in the exhibition.

We have drawn costumes from public and private collections all over the United States, Great Britain, Chile, and Japan for the exhibition.  They include about 25 full-size costumes -- designer pieces like Jean-Charles de Castelbajac's Campbell's Soup Dress and two stunning Adrian dinner dresses -- one of them decorated with a still life of jugs of milk and a loaf of bread placed strategically on the body; wearable art like Teresa Nomura's "Keep Your Sunny Side Up," which is a cocktail dress imagined as a breakfast table, with two fried eggs over the breasts and rashers of bacon across the rib cage; and the signature pieces of the exhibition, four incredible salad ensembles by theatrical designer Willa Kim  -- Pasta Salad, Potato Salad, Garden Salad, and the Romaine Lettuce Coat.  In addition, there are more than 60 accessories.  Hats are the garment most often trimmed with faux food, and we have chapeaux by Stephen Jones, David Shilling, Bes-Ben, Raymond Hudd, Candace Kling and Phyllis Beals, and Deirdre Hawken, that have been transformed into heads of lettuce and cabbage, wedding cakes, a pot of onion soup, and boxes of chocolates, while others are decorated with everything from an oversized martini glass to a Carmen Miranda-like tower of citrus fruit.   Finally, there are photographs, representing especially the work of the great fashion designer Elsa Schiaparelli, who often used food imagery in her Surrealist-influenced work, and the artist Robert Kushner, who created a series of mock fashion-shows in the early 1970s in which he and his models constructed and modeled clothes made from supermarket produce.

I think most museum-goers will find something to delight and amuse them in this exhibition. I also hope our visitors will leave the show with a deeper appreciation of both food and fashion and their intersection.  And best of all, they can consume this show without concern for their waistlines; it's low in calories and high in fiber!

The exhibition was curated by Melissa Leventon, a principal with Curatrix Group and formerly Curator-in-Charge of Textiles at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, and organized by COPIA. The objects are drawn from public and private collections in the United States, Europe and Japan. 

 COPIA - The American Center for Wine, Food and the Arts

 500 First Street, Napa, California

 de Young Museum - Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco