Toilets and urinals aren’t typical fodder for red-carpet conversation, but stall talk dominated on Monday evening as galagoers ascended the steps of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in ensembles that ranged from clownish to sublime. Guests were buzzing about the recreated CBGB bathroom (pictured) that is among the first things visitors encounter in the museum’s “PUNK: Chaos to Couture” exhibition, which opens to the public tomorrow. The cave-like space, scrawled with circa-1975 graffiti, is adjacent to monitors playing a looped selection of films and footage–of Blondie, the Ramones, Patti Smith, and Television–selected by Nick Knight and edited by Ruth Hogben.

“We’ve had great [design] moments in punk, but I’ve very excited about the urinal–a urinal at the Met!” said André Leon Talley at Monday’s gala. “According to Patti Smith, punk began in a urinal downtown somewhere that I never went to, so I’m excited to see that.” The Vogue veteran was dressed in an elaborately embroidered cape–think Joseph’s technicolor dreamcoat meets MacKenzie-Childs–designed for him by Tom Ford. “I love this coat and I don’t consider it punk. I just consider it appropriate for this occasion,” said Talley with a chuckle. “I said to Anna [Wintour], I didn’t do punk. I skipped punk and went straight to couture.”

The gleaming logo, spotlit on the exhibition’s title wall. At right, the cover of the exhibition catalogue, which includes prefaces by Richard Hell and John Lydon.

When it comes to punk, the graphics tend to get gritty–all ragey handwriting fonts and distressed stenciling–but while a hit of GO-RILLA or Kra Kra is sufficient to evoke a Sex Pistols state of mind or a Ramones-era DIY kerning moment, it doesn’t quite capture the sartorial chasm of “chaos to couture.” Enter Peter Saville, who created the exhibition logo for the “PUNK” exhibition organized by the Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He used lettering by Paul Barnes to evoke the “coup d’état in youth culture” that was punk. “There has been very little liaison with the Met and the photograph on your site is the first time we have seen the logo actually in use,” Saville tells us. “The logo employs an irreverent use of 18th-century typefaces (by Fournier) in keeping with Nick Knight‘s briefing for the design of the show, which was Versailles on the eve of the French Revolution.”

Three muses of Ann Demeulemeester, crowned in ‘dos by Guido Palau. (Photo: UnBeige)

Elaborately studded leather jackets, leopard print pants, and neon pink fright wigs were on display this morning at the Metropolitan Museum of Art–and that was just among those who had gathered in the Sculpture Court for a press conference, where museum director Thomas Campbell, Moda Operandi’s Lauren Santo Domingo, Givenchy creative director Riccardo Tisci, and curator Andrew Bolton spoke briefly about the Costume Institute’s “PUNK: Chaos to Couture” exhibition, which opens to the public on Thursday.

“Punk’s legacy has had an enduring and pervasive influence on high fashion and on the broader culture, often to surprisingly beautiful effect,” said British-born Campbell, who when first hearing of Bolton’s idea for the exhibition flashed back to images of his youth and the King’s Road scene that is celebrated in one of seven second-floor galleries. Bolton explained that he did not set out to examine the history of punk but rather to focus on the impact of punk on haute couture and ready-to-wear.

“No other subcultural movement has had a greater or more enduring influence on the way we dress today,” said Bolton, as a black-clad photographer with long, pointy green fingernails snapped away, “and I wanted the exhibition to underscore punk’s continuing relevance.” Sneak a peek at the exhibition in the installation images below as you ready your webby knitwear and skull-printed accessories for this evening’s gala.
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The Museum of Modern Art made headlines when it began adding video games to its collection (the first 14 are on view in the “Applied Design” exhibition), and now the Museum of Fine Arts Boston is getting in the game. The MFA has partnered with comic book creator Stan Sakai, video game company HappyGiant, and Dark Horse Comics for a unique collaboration that equips a samurai rabbit living at the turn of 17th-century Japan with armor from “Samurai! Armor from the Ann and Gabriel Barbier-Mueller Collection,” an exhibition on view through August 4 at the museum. The battle-ready bunny is Miyamoto Usagi, star of the Usagi Yojimbo (“Rabbit Bodyguard”) comic book series and the new Usagi Yojimbo: Way of the Ronin video game (a new comics collection is due out in July), and thanks to the MFA, he confronts a bonus level of the video game outfitted in a special suit of armor, helmet, and mask inspired by one in the “Samurai!” show. Players can unlock the special MFA level with a passcode posted at the museum. Download the game for free here.

Sagmeister & Walsh’s “Now is Better” project, seen here installed at the Jewish Museum, will be included in the 51st D&AD Annual and is up for a Yellow Pencil. (Photo: David Heald)

• On Monday a 192-member jury of leading creatives and designers began the business of judging the 51st D&AD Awards. As you await today’s installment of nominations and “in-books” in categories such as branding, graphic design, and art direction, page through the first five decades of excellence in visual thinking with D&AD 50, new from Taschen.

• The Tribeca Film Festival organizers recently announced its first six-second film competition, challenging amateur and pro filmmakers alike to make cinemagic with the bold, new, yet Super 8ish medium of Vine. The festival’s director of programming has narrowed down the approximately 400 entries to this shortlist. A jury consisting of director Penny Marshall, Vine-loving actor Adam Goldberg, and the team from 5 Second Films will have the final say on the winners, which will be announced next Friday.

• Transform the leather jacket languishing in the back of your closet into something that doesn’t scream “Wilsons Leather circa 1998″ with Remade USA, designer Shannon South‘s freshly relaunched custom service that repurposes individual vintage leather jackets into new one-of-a-kind handbags, through redesign and reconstruction.

• And speaking of textile innovation, on May 1, New York’s Eyebeam presents “Smart Textiles: Fashion That Responds,” a panel that will bring together a diverse group of designers and scientists working in cutting-edge textile research and production–think nanoparticles, circuit boards, and clothing that’s more responsive to changing needs and conditions.

“It used to be that design was all about industry and it was very geographically anchored to the means of production. Then it became more dependent on the tertiary sector of design, on showrooms and fairs. In my opinion, the geography of design is now set by schools. You can’t talk about Italian design or British design—it’s old-fashioned. It really is about whether someone comes from [the Design Academy of] Eindhoven or the Royal College of Art in London. In this kind of scenario, meetings like the Salone are still very important because they are great business opportunities. The problem is that design has spread out in many directions and I think it’s important for the Salone to attract corollary events that are about interaction design and interface design.”

-Paola Antonelli, director of research and development and senior curator of architecture and design at MoMA, in an interview with Ermanno Rivetti for The Art Newspaper

Watch Antonelli’s recent appearance on The Colbert Report:

These days, fashion designers rarely agree on seasonal trends such as hemlines and skirt shapes, but runway watchers remain abuzz over statement shoes, even if they are all but invisible to those without front-row seats. Celine’s minimaluxe ready-to-wear and steady stream of hit handbags was recently outshined by the house’s furry stilettos and sandals, including a Meret Oppenheim-gone-grandpa style that is flying off store shelves. The Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology has seized the moment to present an exhibition that highlights the extreme, lavish, and imaginative styles that have made shoes central to fashion. We asked writer Nancy Lazarus to put on her reporting shoes and size up the show, on view through Saturday.

Roger Vivier’s Eyelash Heel pump, designed by Bruno Frisoni for the fall 2012 “Rendez-Vous” limited edition collection. (Photo: Stephane Garrigues, courtesy Roger Vivier)

“Everything here is wearable, it’s just not walkable,” said Colleen Hill, co-curator of the Museum at FIT’s “Shoe Obsession” exhibit. Leading a tour of the show during its final week on display, she explained that the focus was extreme, extravagant 21st-century shoes and boots. Hill and co-curator Valerie Steele included not only fan favorites like Blahnik and Louboutin, but also the latest experimental prototypes.

The exhibit’s selections represent a commentary on an era rather than a reflection on wearability, Hill noted. “The inspiration for these shoes is sculpture and architecture. Some are shoe objects, one-of-a-kind or limited editions,” Hill said. Three styles are on display: single-sole stilettos, platforms, and more avant-garde heel-less shoes favored by the likes of Daphne Guinness and Lady Gaga.

Recent shoe designs tend to rely more on manmade materials. A few prototypes utilized 3-D printing processes. One experimental design was made of resin, while a pair of slippers was glass. A pair of Pierre Hardy heels sported neoprene, more often associated with athletic wear.
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A photo by Corey Arnold that will be included in “Wish You Were Here,” a group postcard show that opens April 25 as part of Month of Photography Los Angeles.

On the global art and design calendar, April is dominated by Salone del Mobile, which gets underway–in a flourish of directional chairs and modularity–on Tuesday in Milan, but stateside, there’s a focus on photography. The AIPAD Photography Show is on through Sunday at NYC’s Park Avenue Armory, and over in Los Angeles, the photo-themed fun runs all April long as part of the Lucie Foundation-sponsored Month of Photography Los Angeles (MOPLA). Now in its fifth year, the citywide program is expected to draw nearly 15,000 attendees with the 2013 theme, “Wide Angle: Exploring New Photography from Los Angeles and Beyond,” and will go out with a bang on April 26-28 with Paris Photo Los Angeles, the inaugural U.S. edition of the famed Paris fair. Among the must-see MOPLA happenings is “Wish You Were Here,” a group show of 30 photographers from Los Angeles and beyond, curated by Stephanie Gonot. Admission is free but it’s bring your own stamps: the work will be presented on a series of postcards that can be purchased and mailed from the gallery space. The exhibition will be on view through April 30 at the MOPLA Pop-Up Gallery in downtown L.A.

“I fell into a job working for a book printer in Los Angeles. He taught me how to set type—metal type, by hand—and that was a learning experience for me, just being exposed to books and piles of paper, pinched together by binding. And somehow the simplicity of that affected me and work. And this printer was a letterpress printer, so I got into the beauty of the pressed letterforms and paper. Somehow that moved me along into doing books. And I didn’t necessarily have to repeat the letterpress idea, but books and pages and flipping of pages, just drove me crazy. I had to deal with it. I had this deep need to make some kind of book, and it didn’t matter what it was about. I just said to myself, ‘I have to make a book. Now is the time to make a book.’

So it sort of evolved, backwards and inside out. I had no logical thoughts behind it, and finally my mind went back to those times when I was either hitchhiking or riding across country, and US 66 and gasoline stations, and they were like belches in the landscape, and I just felt like I want to capture these things somehow, and maybe this is the excuse—to make a book. So it’s the idea of a book that came first and the second was this idea of gasoline stations.”

-Ed Ruscha, in a recent conversation with Paul Holdengraber at the New York Public Library. An exhibition (pictured) of Ruscha’s books, together with books and works of art by more than 100 contemporary artists that respond to his original project, is on view through April 27 at Gagosian Gallery in New York.

Robert Longo, “Capitol” (2013)

Want a good look at our nation’s Capitol? Take a detour from D.C. and head to Ridgefield, Connecticut, where the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum has unveiled Robert Longo‘s monumental charcoal drawing of the United States Capitol building. “The building appears to be moving forward toward the center of the room,” writes curator Kelly Texter in a publication that accompanies the exhibition, on view through August 25. “Varying opacities of black create clouded sky and landscape, which blanket and surround the building executed in tonal grays and chalky whites. A differently shaped moulding adorns the top of each window, with snippets of tapestry unique each opening barely visible through glinting glass.” The 41-foot-long work, which spans seven panels and gets an entire wall of the museum’s South Gallery to itself, is shown with 81 of Longo’s ink and charcoal studies, with subjects ranging from the furniture of Sigmund Freud and Franz Kline‘s 1956 AbEx classic “Mahoning” to the Hollywood Sign and Steve Jobs.