“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.”

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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.”

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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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• 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.

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-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:

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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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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.

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“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.

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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.

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Armory Week has come and gone in New Amsterdam, but the European Fine Art Fair (TEFAF) is just beginning in the Dutch town of Maastricht. Gluttons for masterpieces, we decided to take a field trip. With some 265 exhibiting art and antiques dealers, the 26th edition of the fair opened to the public today after a vernissage that, in the words of a colleague, “makes Art Basel look like a slum”–all savvy lighting, high ceilings, and spacious aisles bursting with tulips, thanks to fair designer Tom Postma.

TEFAF has long been a must for collectors of Old Masters and antiques, and in recent years has boosted its offerings in modern and contemporary art, design, and photography. Were the fair crass enough to have a slogan, it would be “where the museums shop.” We arrived in Maastricht and, fortfied with stroopwafels, set out to see works spanning 6,000 years of history. Let’s just say it’s a good thing that the fair runs through March 24. Here are 25 of our early favorites.

The multilayered stand of Axel Vervoodt. We couldn’t muster the courage to ask him whether he receives a monthly royalty check from Restoration Hardware.

Wartski of London offers (for six figures) the shot that almost killed Tsar Nicholas II of Russia. Fired–maybe accidentally, maybe as an assassination attempt–in 1906, the lead pellet was mounted in gold by Carl Fabergé and presented to the tsar as a creepy souvenir.

Among the standouts in the design section of the fair: a 1921 Wiener Werkstatte table lamp by Dagobert Peche (at Bel Etage, Wolfgang Bauer, Vienna) and a preppy combination of works by Gerrit Thomas Rietveld (at Galerie Ulrich Fiedler).

Claude Lalanne‘s “Grand Lapin de Victoire” (2001) stands sentry at the Ben Brown Fine Arts stand and keeps an eye on the 1984 Basquiat across the way, at Tornabuoni Arte.

At the stand of Robert Hall, bottles, bottles everywhere, but not a drop to drink.
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This year Zwirner gave over its prime rectangle of the fair floor (near the entrance and opposite the champagne bar) to Los Angeles-based video artist Diana Thater, whose haunting “Chernobyl” accompanied the gallery’s post-Sandy reopening last November. The Armory booth unveiled a trio of multi-monitor videowalls playing “Day for Night” (2013), footage of bruisey purple blooms that tremble like viscera through a persistent drizzle and the 16-millimeter haze of multiple camera techniques.

Thater began with bouquets of flowers, placed on a mirror on the ground, and hoisted her camera up on a crane to shoot from above. “They’re all made in sixteen-millimeter film, on a very old camera, and they’re double-exposed film, so they’re not layered in the edit process. They’re layered in the camera,” Thater told us at the fair. “It’s something very simple that’s made in a complicated way.” The bright blue L.A. sky, reflected in the mirror, is made dusky by a day-for-night camera filter. “I brought it down to look like evening so that the flowers would kind of melt into the sky,” she explained.
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Rotterdam-based Studio Makkink & Bey, led by architect Rianne Makkink and designer Jurgen Bey, has long envisioned a progressive office in which the multitasking extends to the furnishings: a seat that doubles as a self-contained desk and cupboard, a flexible “WorkSofa,” a cozy chair that can be coupled up to create instant meeting space (the “EarChair,” pictured above). The studio is showcasing these designs and more as part of “Fantasy Room for Working,” an exhibition on view through Sunday within the Creative Lounge MOV, a huge shared office space in Tokyo. Earlier this week, among the KadE Chair, Vacuum Cleaner Chair, stools, and aprons, was Bey himself–he put his designs to the test by working from the flexible fantasy office for eight days. Studio Makkink & Bey’s Prooff (Progressive Office) “working and living landscape” interior was also recently acquired by Utrecht’s Centraal Museum, where parts of it are on view through May 25. Take note, Marissa Meyer.

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London’s Design Museum, which opened in 1981 in a former basement boilerroom of the Victoria & Albert Museum, is gearing up to move out of its current home–once a banana warehouse–into a $125 million new building, the former Commonwealth Institute, spruced up by OMA and with interiors by John Pawson. Until the big move, slated for 2015, the museum is pulling out the stops, or at least the stories, for an exhibition of memorable objects from its permanent collection.

“Extraordinary Stories About Ordinary Things,” which opened today, focuses on stories such as national identity (road signage, the Euro), the dominance of plastic in our lives (from 1960s furniture to recent Issey Miyake garments made from upcycled plastic bottles), and Modernism, in which visitors can marvel at the work of designers such as Marcel Breuer and…Erno Goldfinger (Ian Fleming borrowed his name for a Bond villain because of a personal vendetta, according to the museum). Among the objects singled out for special treatment are the Anglepoise lamp and Jasper Morrison‘s Handlebar Table, which is among the latest additions to the museum’s 3,000-object-collection. Another recent acquisition? An AK-47, soon to be followed by a Russian cosmonaut spacesuit. Until you can make it to London (the show will be on view until 2015), visit vicariously via the Design Museum Collection App, free on iTunes.

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“After several Biennales dedicated to the celebration of the contemporary, ‘Fundamentals’ will focus on histories–on the inevitable elements of all architecture used by any architect, anywhere, anytime (the door, the floor, the ceiling etc.) and on the evolution of national architectures in the last 100 years,” said Koolhaas in a recent statement. “In three complementary manifestations–taking place in the Central Pavilion, the Arsenale, and the National Pavilions–this retrospective will generate a fresh understanding of the richness of architecture’s fundamental repertoire, apparently so exhausted today.”
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