9781633450363 | DATE 11/27/2017

Holiday Gift Staff Pick 'Items: Is Fashion Modern?' transforms the familiar to historically significant

Reproduced from Items: Is Fashion Modern?—which the New York Review of Books calls MoMA’s “fashion ‘canon’ for contemporary life”—this photograph from Monika Mogi’s photo essay shows Capri Pants, Converse All Stars and a Fitbit. “Items offers a satisfaction similar to that of a completed list or a well-organized room,” NYRB’s Hilary Reid writes. “It is the catalog, though, that transforms the items from familiar to historically significant… To fully appreciate the pieces in Items, it is the viewer’s duty—delight, really—to imagine how she has encountered and used each item over time. That the playful and delightfully bizarre contemporary fashion photographs in the catalog offer a vision of our mundane items beyond what we already know is the show’s most rewarding surprise.”