Photos from the De Young

Last week I went to the new De Young Museum in Golden Gate Park. It's very modern and looks like an airport; I know it's retrofitted (omg, did you feel the earthquake an hour ago?) and the old De Young was no great beauty but I have to say I prefer the old one. This one has this massive copper-colored mesh overhang and lots of black and ugly track lighting and I am against it. Anyway, here are a few photos I took. They are all pretty crappy in terms of lighting and focus, but the subjects are nice.

This is from the exhibition of socialite Nan Kempner's clothing. Obviously I love clothing shows at museums, and it's nice to see clothing looked at in a similar way that art is. Of course, it seems like the clothing shows are always dominated by the collections of very rich people who bought the sort of couture that was made especially for them, and in this case there was very little vintage, but it was still interesting.

The shape of this coat, whose designer I can't remember (sorry, I didn't know I would be posting it in a blog, but it is modern and maybe Gucci) looks a bit like an early 60's funnel neck coat, with a slight/cocoon/egg shape, but the sort of mod shape is balanced by the felted embroidery/patchwork design, with looks kind of folkloric and fairy tailish. It had such a beautiful fit and was obviously so well made in person; I do think most designer clothes are retarded but occasionally the work on them is amazing, though you see this mostly in older pieces.

This is a Peter Max (of "Yellow Submarine" fame) print from Max/some summer of love type thing they had. I actually love some vintage psychedelic art- a lot of it was inspired by art nouveau, and I love the bright colors and swirling shapes and stuff. (Simone, we should have gone to that show at the Whitney this summer- and gotten totally high beforehand, which would have been lame/awesome.) I have a few of his star sheets in blue (ohmygod, there are towels too! so awesome!) with a similar pattern, and I once failed to bid on some Peter Max curtains and am still depressed. I used to look for Peter Max on eBay years ago but I never spend money on homewares because I don't have a home to put them in but now I think they all go for a lot, even his inflatable plastic pillows (somebody buy me this tooth one for my birthday!) Marc Jacobs ripped off a lot of Peter Max prints back when I liked his clothes.

This was great! It's a knit Missoni two piece "bathing costume" that looked very 70's but was from the 90's. You can't see it, but the belt had four little buttons on it. I usually hate Missoni but I thought this was fab. I was going to say how nice it would be to be rich and buy expensive, impractical knit bathing suits, but considering how many vintage bathing suits I own and how often I go swimming/am in weather warm enough to wear anything short sleeved, I guess I can relate.