Moving right along from the ‘liposuction in a jar’ promised by Jean Lowe’s “Willendorf” products, a few doors down, the Craig Krull Gallery was showing “Phranc of California,” a kind of fossilized swim and surf line, evoking memories of those classic Jantzen-style and Olympic racer-back one-piece swimsuits, guy’s trunks in sweet little plaids and polkadots, and slightly mothballed wraps and surfer shirts, fins and boogie boards. All sculptures – in cardboard, gouache, tempera, paper, thread – they had the look of papier-mâché; all by the hand of that same Phranc we know as America’s favorite lesbian Jewish folk-rock singer. The girl next door (well, Santa Monica) with the phlat-top and surfboard who grew up to serenade us with “One of the Girls,” “M-A-R-T-I-N-A,” and her pastiche of Jonathan Richman’s “Pablo Picasso,” “Gertrude Stein.” (“Some guys pick up girls and get called ‘asshole.’ This never happened to Gertrude Stein.”) These days, when she’s not performing (or selling Tupperware), she calls herself a “Cardboard Cobbler,” crafting these sculptures that mediate slyly between Claes Oldenburg and Gaston Lachaise.
Without getting into formal concerns – physicality, presence and absence, implied action or interaction, its aftermath, its exaltation – we’re referencing bodies as sculptural vehicles and volumes. That is to say, when we’re no longer using them, when our suits might as well be planters and our fins just more starfish on the beach – when we’re pushing daisies, or maybe seaweed.
Okay – so you wanna get in the pool already? What was funny about the swimwear scene at Saks Fifth Avenue was the extent to which our, uh, ‘issues’ were actually addressed. We’ve been talking about the coming ‘coverage’ from Day One. But the last place we expected to see it was in the swimwear department. Well, voilà: options. What was intriguing about the La Blanca line was the way it covered (especially hips and derriere) – the padding, draping, pulling up ‘this' and re-shaping ‘that.’ Overall the line offers a much broader range – in coverage (or bareness), style, color, pattern. But there was no escaping the trend.
The La Blanca suits at Saks seemed to veer toward neutrals; but so did many other lines. Even those multi-colored and Tequila Sunrise colored prints – some in striking graphic patterns – seemed slightly faded. Snake and lizard skin seem to be another ‘summer craze.’ Which isn’t to say there wasn’t any ‘bold and bare.’ “That’s a not a good look in my circle,” I heard one sales person tell another who walked across the department with what looked like punctuation marks in black and white. Well you know they get it.
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