From October 17-November 5, 100% Silk will host the exhibition What’s a fashion image?, a rotating installation of artists Christina Pretti and Joe Silveira’s book, magazine, zine and ephemera collections alongside a series of their own personal photo works. Pretti and Silveira’s vast and deeply personal collections dance around the question of the exhibition. With sass and a playful bite they’ll mix images from The Wrestler Magazine, Anne Geddes’ Mapplethorpe era, rare early issues of Purple, and editorial shoots styled by Desirée Heiss (to name a few). 

Between Pretti and Silveira’s collections and the stories that enliven them, there lives a language for intimate, oblique, and feral expressions of culture, of fashion. Of course both are equally seduced by undeniable beauty and sexiness and the glamour of clothing made with immense talent and infinite resources (what are we, saints?). But both express a stronger interest in something else. When there is an impulse to collect, there is often a yearning to get closer to something not yet realized. Silveira names Calvin Johnson and K Records as a touchstone world that exemplified this kind of elsewhere. Pretti names Adrian González-Cohen and Buffalo Zine in a similar vein. Both acknowledge that these worlds are always collective efforts, not built on the infamy of an individual. Pretti described her commitment to meticulously transcribing from print to website copy, every single credit of every issue of each of the 85 titles of magazines she carried at Soop Soop over the years. This transcription, in a way, its own pursuit of the fashion image through this human metadata. Still, even when not arriving at this perfect, electric elsewhere place, both Pretti and Silveira acknowledge that it’s a miracle when something gets made – especially outside of institutions, especially these days and especially in the physical form. What’s a fashion image? Tutto è santo.