Starting March 30, vintage collector/filmmaker/writer and Hollywood royalty Liz Goldwyn is auctioning off a time capsule of Nineties-early 2000s anti-fashion history: pieces from Recent York designer Susan Cianciolo.
Made using deconstructed and reconstructed upcycled garments and textiles, Cianciolo’s 11 Run collections produced from 1995 to 2001 were one-of-a-kind, handcrafted alternatives to the prevailing Gap khaki and slick minimalist fashions of the time.
A part of Recent York’s downtown art scene, Cianciolo produced her collections with a collective of family and friends, and presented them in shows akin to happenings with movies shown, aerialist models hanging from the ceiling, or in a short lived restaurant in a gallery, as examples. Goldwyn produced a few of those shows and walked one, alongside model Frankie Rayder, artist Anh Duong and actress Julianne Nicholson.
Goldwyn met Cianciolo in 1996, when she was working in costume and conservation at Sotheby’s Recent York, and the 2 became muses for one another. Together they created garments comparable to a tiered denim skirt now within the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute everlasting collection, in addition to a 1998 custom dress that was on view as a part of the “In America: A Lexicon of Fashion” exhibition.
Goldwyn and Cianciolo, who works as a tremendous artist now, partnered for the auction with the Bridget Donahue gallery and Special Offer Inc., an up-and-coming media company that produced a video with archival footage of the shows and commentary about those bygone days.
“You are feeling like you might be seeing a love letter to Recent York within the Nineties,” said Goldwyn, whose most up-to-date book, “Sex, Health and Consciousness: The right way to Reclaim Your Pleasure Potential” (Sounds True) got here out in October.
Through the years Goldwyn has amassed a fashion archive with hundreds of clothes and accessories, with a special concentrate on Yves Saint Laurent, Sonia Rykiel and Cianciolo.
“I liked the artistry of it and he or she had an entire world which was form of cult-like. I definitely fell under the spell. She had all these women artists, models and musicians working and collaborating alongside her, it felt supportive and we had an inventive shorthand,” said Goldwyn. “It was fun also to be on this planet of Sotheby’s and accessing archival treasures, and taking something to her to see what she’d do with it.”
There are 56 pieces being auctioned at liz.run, including a corset-like “I Love Recent York” T-shirt, deconstructed dresses, a multipiece burlesque costume, and a set of Barbie dolls with miniature Run collection clothing. The videos and commentary will live to tell the tale online after the auction ends mid-April, like a museum show that lives digitally.
“I don’t think anyone would see her clothes and think corporate suit, but there are some things within the sale that were my corporate, uptown looks. I’d go from Canal Street where we each lived to Sotheby’s auction house looking like my dress was caught within the escalator,” said Goldwyn.
“It’s so funny to me how Gen Z and Millennials have this obsession with that point period, I feel they’re wanting to recapture a time before social media,” she said. “By way of fashion it was so different…you didn’t have the shows online…and there was a scrappiness…it was pre-designers being traded like chess pieces by big corporations.”
All bids will start at $111. “I would like it to be accessible because once I began collecting, it was a dollar a pound,” said Goldwyn. “I feel there’s something cool to having an entry point accessible to more people.”
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