"Monet Along the Runway" @nytimes @NYTimesfashion #fashion #Paris Fashion Week

JUST in time for Paris Fashion Week, the Musée d’Orsay opened “Impressionism and Fashion,” an expansive exhibition examining the depiction of contemporary dress in paintings and portraiture in the second half of the 19th century, when fashion here became both a booming industry and a leisure pursuit.

The show, a collaboration with the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Art Institute of Chicago, includes paintings and costumes and will travel stateside next year. But it is best seen here and now to spot unexpected parallels between the subject matter of the Impressionists, from roughly the 1860s to the 1880s, and that of the street-style photographers who document the exotically dressed creatures outside the fashion shows across the Seine in the Tuilleries.

It is the same as when Baudelaire described “the daily metamorphosis of exterior things,” only instead of the changing shape of bustle skirts, as the pouf derrière became wider in the 1870s and more decorative in the 1880s, the photographers document the exaggerated round shoulders of a Comme des Garçons coat in the 2010s. The thought occurs, while regarding a painting of a man holding an umbrella, standing just so in the bright daylight, that perhaps Claude Monet was The Sartorialist of 1868.

Visiting the exhibition with the Times photographer Bill Cunningham, we were fascinated by the clever staging of the show, with portraits arranged in galleries that are filled with gilded chairs, as if for a défilé. Place cards tied with tiny ribbons to each seat were inscribed with the names of guests. Charles Frederick Worth was seated between Mademoiselle Marie Duplessis and the Comtesse Clotilde Bonaparte.

The incorporation of fashion was thrilling, with a case of hats placed next to the millinery paintings of Degas, and a display of intimates laid out before “Rolla,” a painting by Henri Gervex that shows a naked woman asleep, observed by a man standing at a window.

As we entered the final gallery, designed to evoke Monet’s park settings with walls painted sky blue and the floor covered with a carpet of fake grass, Bill saw a group of children in schoolboy blazers sitting on the ground, and some tired tourists relaxing on a bench, and said, “Now that’s a picture.”

-By Eric Wilson

"Leaving the Shop, Not Curating, Behind" @nytimes

Danny Ghitis for The New York Times
WHEN Murray Moss started taking medication for Parkinson’s disease two years ago, his doctor told him that high-risk behavior could be a side effect and that he might want to start gambling.
He told his doctor he didn’t gamble. But soon enough he found himself bidding against other compulsive collectors on eBay for quirky vintage American office chairs.

“This one looks like a Prouvé,” he said the other day, about a diminutive brown chair at Moss Bureau, his new office and showroom in the garment district, where 17 various and quirky chairs line tables and compete for attention. “I do the same thing with glasses. I buy brilliant water glasses.”

Those line a wall of his Midtown apartment, where he constantly rearranges things with the urgency of a pushy shopkeeper looking to display his wares. “I just can’t stop myself,” he said. “I miss the store so much.”

The store: Anyone who fetishizes design knows it

Moss in SoHo was a mecca from 1994 until last winter for lovers of “narrative” products that were as provocative and expensive as they were functional. Mr. Moss and Franklin Getchell, his partner in business and in life for 40 years, closed it for financial and emotional reasons, and quickly opened their “bureau,” a floor-through office on West 36th Street, where they do as much curating and consulting as selling.

“I hate retail and always wanted to put up a sign in SoHo telling people not to come in,” said Mr. Moss, 63, as he passed a vitrine displaying rings made from doll eyes and a brightly painted door hanging midair in his 10th floor loft-like emporium. “One customer didn’t see why I’d sell a glass that broke if you dropped it. The trouble with owning a store is that too many people have opinions.”

They are bound to have plenty more at an Oct. 16 auction he has spent the last seven months curating for Phillips de Pury & Company. Titled “Moss, the Auction: Dialogues Between Art and Design,” the show, which opens this week at Park Avenue, pairs objects from the personal collection of Mr. Moss and Mr. Getchell with art. Designers include many shown at his store, including Maarten Baas, Hella Jongerius, Marcel Wanders and Giò Ponti. Artists include Frank Stella, Louise Nevelson, Alberto Giacometti and George Condo, among others. Mr. Moss wants to educate the public.

Why shouldn’t a table be admired for both its sculptural and functional values?

“I don’t see things as commodities, I see them as ideas,” he said with an idealism that seemed a cross between that of Frank Gehry and Willy Wonka, and whose green eyes spark. “When I look at design, it isn’t about functionality. It’s the narrative that interests me.”

His own narrative goes like this: Born to Russian immigrants in Chicago (his father was a successful engineer) who wanted him to have a cultured life, he had a piano teacher who came to his home and always placed a little bust of Mozart on the piano. “It was ceremonial and carried such value that it was an inspiration,” he said. So was the chance his parents gave him to decorate his room, which he did with objects from the gift shop of a Chinese restaurant.

After getting a B.F.A. in theater from New York University in 1971, he threw himself into acting in experimental productions, and became known for playing mad men and wearing straitjackets. “I would do anything onstage, and go so far, I’d pass out,” he said, “which was interesting because I was in a serious relationship with a respected psychiatrist at the time.”

When he came into some family money, he started to buy objects. Then a friend introduced him to Ronaldus Shamask, whose architecturally innovative drawings of clothes inspired Mr. Moss to help him start a curious retail line that Mr. Moss owned from 1978 to 1990. But while he was in Italy overseeing the manufacturing of clothes, he started to notice cool modern objects like lamps and vases integrated into daily life, often in historic buildings.

“It’s an object-oriented culture over there and it was very inspiring,” he said.

He shed fashion, opened his shop when SoHo was more about art than design, and the rest is history, including his recent shuttering because of economics (people treated the shop as if it were a museum, he griped) and the fact that many of the designers he championed went on to compete with him by opening stores nearby. But for a charmingly childlike man so good at reinvention (who also seemed sanguine about his illness and called it “no big deal”), lamenting the past isn’t an option.

Among his things, he is nimble and sprightly. Zipping around the bureau, he wound up a bronze alligator toy by Cathy McClure, placed it on an Alberto Meda table, watched it crawl and laughed at its $6,500 price with maniacal glee. Then he gloated about the six-foot-high metal carousel ($175,000) by the same artist, which occupies one end of the office and rattled like skeleton bones when spinning in a strobe light.

And when he sat down to look at photographs of objects in the upcoming auction, he couldn’t contain his pride, even as his hand shook a little when manipulating his iPad.

On it, 45 e-mails were unanswered. He didn’t care and said so.

“I don’t know how to use this thing,” he said. “But I love changing the screen saver.”

On it was a perfectly arranged tableau of his beloved objects. Of course.

-By BOB MORRIS