Imagine a world unlike the one we know. A better world, one of peace and unity. It’s what John Lennon urged us to do, and also, I think, what Susan Cianciolo is after. Her path is a spiritual one lit by what she calls “lightworkers.”
You don’t need to be aligned with Cianciolo’s specific beliefs to recognize that she continues to be a beacon for independent creativity. There’s an active School of Cianciolo in New York fashion— Eckhaus Latta, SC103, and Zoe Whalen number among her pupils, but there are many others. Some of them showed up to support the performance she put on at the opening of her new exhibition, “Light Workers - RUN 15 - Game of Life - (Thank You Pine Trees),” at Bridget Donahue gallery on Friday night. In such a supportive environment Cianciolo’s runway performance took on aspects of ritual. It felt, more than anything, like a prayer of communion.
The crowd was a mixture of new faces and familiar ones, Gabi Asfour and Victoria Bartlett, for example, were present. The feeling of goodwill and the togetherness of outsiders kept nostalgia at bay. This evening was about the positive force of creation and community.
Once a fixture on the downtown fashion scene, in recent years Cianciolo has pivoted to become more art-focused. She shows in galleries rather than during fashion week, though her work retains an “off-schedule” vibe. It’s difficult to define that work. A believer in the “fifth dimension” outside of time, Cianciolo cannot be put in a box—and that’s what makes her special. There’s something boundaryless, perhaps even mystical, to the way she works. Even authorship is not a given. “This work is not coming from me, I am a vehicle and instrument for it to come through.” Consider the motto “God is a Jacket” that she has incorporated into her pieces in the past; here it was painted onto the back of a filmy soft yellow dress. “Every inanimate object, even if it’s tangible, has a frequency and energy,” she says.
RUN is the name Cianciolo used for each of her collections, and by giving the title RUN 15 to a sculpture and performance in this exhibition, she is deliberately playing with fashion tropes, just as she played with art tropes at her 1995 fashion debut, held at the Andrea Rosen Gallery. (Click here for an oral history of RUN 1-11.)
This new exhibition showcases several different expressions of Cianciolo’s creativity. The first thing one sees when entering the space from a set of steep marble steps is a series of watercolors based on a pine tree in Maine she says she’s in love with. On the floor and walls are large collaged tapestries and two sculptural pieces relating to “kits and games.” On tables repurposed from past exhibitions lies a suit that was left outside to weather in the rain.
The show’s centerpiece, RUN 15, is tucked in the corner in the gallery’s second room, almost like a closet. Its circle of wire cables extending from the ceiling support 25 garment-sculptures. It’s a challenge to look at these sculpture garments and not see them as desirable fashion, and Cianciolo played an “are they, aren’t they?” sort of game when she took them down for a one-off runway performance.
Muchness is the operating principle in Cianciolo’s ensembles, which she accessorized with jewelry using found objects made in collaboration with Anna Santangelo. The sculptures, or “looks” in fashion parlance, are best described as assemblages, collages, accumulations, looks from past RUN collections intermingling with new designs. Here, make-do-and-mend is not a method for getting by, it’s a mode of thriving, and of eluding time. Indeed, this was a cross generational show; Cianciolo’s daughter curated the music, and the artist made use of one of her grandmother’s aprons in a look.
The costumes were festive: A cardboard happy-birthday banner was magicked into a belt, as if the look were a DIY party kit, and a metallic mylar balloon was part of another get-up. Drawings were pinned to garments, price tags remained attached. Everything was multi-layered and decorated, yet for all their exuberance, some of the designs had a kind of Puritan restraint that might have some connection to Ciancolo’s New England roots. From the back, a blue and brown get-up accessorized with a cardboard sculpture evoked a Hester Prynne-ish cape or liturgical vestments. Cianciolo’s garments have always been at once edgy and home-spun.
The format of Friday night’s joyful parade was that of a back-and-forth catwalk. Having broken standard runway conventions, Cianciolo says she now finds that kind of approach “cliche” and that “these particular things need that grounding of simplicity.” Similarly, she felt it imperative that they needed to be animated by a hand-picked cast of people dear to her. “It all comes to life for me when the energy of the person and the energy of the [clothes] are merged,” she said. “It’s celebrating something that person and I made together. It feels like the most perfect harmony.” Designers Mike Eckhaus, Sophie Andes Gascon and Claire McKinney of SC103, and Maryam Massir Zadeh all participated, and Coco Gordon Moore walked as her mother Kim Gordon did years before. Moore performed a poem as she made her way across the gallery, a violinist gave an acrobatic performance, and a mother and her infant daughter passed out paper bags of popcorn during their back-and-forth.
I wondered whether it was missing the point, even vapid, to consider a jacket-and-shorts set chic, because these garments exist outside of the fashion system, and so I asked Cianciolo how she felt about the art/fashion divide. “Sometimes I feel I’m not related at all to fashion,” she said. But she certainly does love the act of making clothes, and as haphazard as some of her designs look, they are carefully considered and as labored over as many a Parisian confection.
She spoke effusively of a piece she made recently: Working “on a mannequin and meticulously making a jacket by hand for months…I don’t know what could be more fun than that…. This has been the most enjoyable time for me. I don’t want to ever stop or sleep or eat, because there’s nothing I love more in the world than making clothing. It’s just truly my craft.”
In the spirit of the exhibition, Ashley Markle photographed RUN 15 in lookbook style.
“Susan Cianciolo: Light Workers - RUN 15 - Game of Life - (Thank You Pine Trees)” is on view at Bridget Donahue Gallery through 13 July 2024.
