sarah in nyc

 I have been looking forward to seeing  The Sonia Delaunay  show at the Bard Graduate Center for quite a while. Both her fashion and  and her art Have a cool girl "in the know" sort of a vibe. I have admired her clothes for a long time. It was a baby quilt that Sonia had made for her child that got her thinking about color and art.  (Interestingly, I got my own start in this universe of textiles making baby quilts) Sonia's next textile adventure was making this ensemble. Here in a photo taken soon after she made it. Photos of the actual garment are below. I suspect, because of a description of her work on a vest elsewhere in the show that she covered an existing garment with this wonderful patchwork of fabrics.  This is the vest. She apparently made lots of these and they were worn by both men and women and were constructed over a base of a simple workman's vest. There were lots of sketches of her garments. Some of it was meant for street wear and other gar...

Yesterday, my husband and I went to the Bard Graduate center to see  French Fashion, Women, and the First World War . The Bard museum is a small one housed in a townhouse on 86th street. I have seen some lovely exhibits there in the past. Between scrolling through their virtual gallery and looking at my photos you will get a pretty good sense of the exhibit. One big theme of the exhibit was how the role of women changed because of the war. In France women took over jobs normally done by men, delivering mail, running the rail system and the transit system, working in the fields ... There is an excellent silent film at the start of the exhibit showing contemporary footage of women at work during the war. We normally think of Rosie the riveter being a WWII phenomenon but during WWI women donned jumpsuits and kept the home front working. Both the changed role of women as well as fabric shortages caused by needing to supply the war-front simplified clothing. The Bard ...