• MODERATOR'S NOTE: Please can all of theFashionSpot's forum members remind themselves of the Forum Rules. Thank you.

Phoebe Philo - Designer

Andrea Fraser: ‘I’m always trying to figure out how to fit in’
A pioneer of ‘institutional critique’, the feminist artist extends her tactics to question fashion
Sarah Thornton. Photography by Talia Chetrit

“This is a beautiful piece,” says Andrea Fraser, an artist with conflicted feelings about luxury goods and art markets. “A sophisticated composition of austere dignity,” she continues slyly. We’re on our third of three Zoom calls. Fraser is in New York for her Phoebe Philo photoshoot, and I’m at home in San Francisco. The artist is reciting lines from her 1991 satirical performance May I Help You?, where she plays the role of an art dealer. “It’s distinctive, disinterested, gratuitous, refined, restrained, sober, calm,” she continues. “It has such tact, such grace, such quiet self-assurance. It’s so far away from the passions that ordinary people invest in their ordinary lives.” We laugh, because we know that the elite phrases once used to sell high art can now be applied to minimalist fashion.
After Philo’s people contacted Fraser about this feature, the artist delved into the brand’s website and had “an intense emotional response” to the designer’s work. “The models seem to be hiding in the clothes, but also asserting themselves,” she says. Muscular from years of weightlifting and samba dancing, the brunette, who is 5ft 6in and 135lb, wears a black T-shirt and nerdy black-rimmed specs. “Collection B addresses the problem of fitting. This is how I feel all the time. I am always trying to figure out how to fit in.” It was Fraser’s idea to wear the clothes and mimic the poses of Philo’s lookbook. She explained that it was hard to perfect and hold postures that the models had swiftly moved through. Also evident is Fraser’s inability to deflect attention to the garments by lightening up her intense presence.
Born to a mother whose paintings were never publicly displayed, Fraser inherited her ambition to be a celebrated artist. She also absorbed her painful legacy of being ignored. In the 1960s, her mother’s gender, feminism and Puerto Rican ethnicity, and later her lesbianism, posed insurmountable obstacles to artistic success, leading her to abandon painting and become a psychotherapist.
By contrast, Fraser’s career has been punctuated by praise and acclaim. She has performed in person or in video in many major museums, including Tate Modern, Centre Pompidou and MoMA New York. Pioneering a genre called “institutional critique”, Fraser’s work initially addressed class, race and gender in the art world, but in recent decades it has expanded to explore these “institutions” in other social worlds as well. Well-known in Germany, in 2013 she enjoyed a solo retrospective at the Museum Ludwig in Cologne. She has just opened another, titled Art Must Hang, at the Zachęta National Gallery of Art, Warsaw, which runs until 8 June.
Fraser grew up in Berkeley, California, surrounded by queer hippies from whom she absorbed the camp adage “There’s no shame in being poor, only poorly dressed”. The fifth of five children, Fraser never had new clothes. “I wore hand-me-downs and reconstructed garments, like old jeans that were ‘hippified’ by inserting a triangle of cloth – usually a Madras bedspread – to create flares,” she explains. The sartorial pride of the family was Fraser’s eldest brother, who rode a unicycle wearing a suede fringe jacket and a satin top hat. (The artist’s affection for flower-child masculinity is explored in Men on the Line, a performance in which she recreates a 1972 round table discussion between four men who identify as feminists.)
Hierarchies are a key issue for Fraser. She is a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, and chaired its prestigious art department for nearly four years. Remarkably, for someone in this position, she does not have a single university degree. She dropped out of Berkeley High shortly before turning 16, moved to New York, talked her way into art school and then moved on to the Whitney Independent Study Program rather than graduating. The experience fuelled her desire to fit in and her awareness of clothes as social markers and metaphors. “When I was a teen circulating in the New York art world, I needed to pass as an adult. I also wanted to pass as someone who had a college degree and an income,” she explains. “People call it code-switching, but that implies a kind of mastery and play. For me, it was much more desperate.”


Although precise costuming is essential to a Fraser performance, the artist is notorious for appearing in the buff. One of her greatest hits, repeatedly requested by museums and private collectors, falls into “the grand old tradition of nudie performance art”, as she puts it. Written and first performed in 2001, Official Welcome is a kind of surreal one-woman awards ceremony in which Fraser plays the parts of nine artists who are being introduced and celebrated by nine gushing museum insiders. Midway through the performance, Fraser strips down to a black Gucci thong, bra and high heels, and says, “I’m not a person today. I’m an object in an artwork.” Later, she paraphrases vintage Damien Hirst (from the days before he quit drinking, and had a penchant for pulling moonies), declaring, “How about ‘Kiss my f*cking ***!’” before bending over to brandish her buttocks. A few characters later, Fraser slips off her remaining garments. While standing there stark naked, her character says earnestly, “Some people think she’s sacrificed her body for professional success.”
Self-reflexivity is woven into Fraser’s every move. Nudity is such a cliché of transgression that the artist jokes, “I’m not really naked because I’m in quotation marks.” When preparing to re‑perform Official Welcome, Fraser acknowledges that the most difficult decision pertains to the coiffure of her pubic hair: “Untrimmed, landing strip or full Brazilian – my choices have been inconsistent over the years.”
Fraser also ends up naked in her infamous Untitled (2003), which documents her sexual encounter in a hotel room with an art collector who pre-purchased the video documentation of their carnal exchange. By having the collector pay for the video rather than the sex, Fraser was able to represent artists in general as escorts of the rich while positioning herself as an amateur pornographer. Even though the idea behind Untitled is sensational, the video is comically unspectacular. It consists of one silent, static shot taken from a high angle, suggestive of surveillance cameras, and the participants come across as awkward strangers on a one-night stand. The video is so intentionally artless that, when it was first exhibited, the gallery’s visitors’ book was full of confused complaints about its lack of eroticism.
A prolific writer, Fraser also often pens her own press releases to assuage her anxiety about being misunderstood and extend her self-declared control-freakery. According to Fraser, for example, the metaphor of the artist as prostitute is about “the intimate entanglement of personal and market valuation that often drives participation in the art world’s steeply stratified economy”. One wonders if her texts, which are often laden with academese, don’t befuddle as much as they demystify.
Paradox is never far away from Fraser’s work. In a book-cum-artwork titled 2016 in Museums, Money, and Politics, Fraser itemises the political-campaign contributions made by every board member of the top 128 art museums in America. Consisting of 944 pages of dense text with no pictures, 2016 explores the relationship between cultural and party-political clout. The dry, unsexy tome is unexpectedly spicy, and made a big splash on the coffee tables of art world insiders with its prurient insights into their neighbours’ discretionary spending. Fraser is now working on a sequel, which examines the shifts in spending in the year of Donald Trump’s second presidential victory.
The data compiled across her various works would make most people’s heads spin, but Fraser finds terra firma in her love of memorisation, something she discovered at age 11 when learning Adrienne Rich poems by heart. Not only does Fraser memorise her performance scripts – the oldest of which she can still recite decades later – she has also committed long tracts by Pierre Bourdieu, the French sociologist of taste, to memory. In his landmark book Distinction, Bourdieu builds a monumental theory about social stratification on the key insight that education and “cultural capital” are in a complex struggle with wealth and “economic capital”. Fraser’s devotion to the late social theorist might be described as biblical. Bourdieu, in turn, once honoured Fraser as a cleric who knows that “religion is the opium of the people” but who continues her own priestly work, making “the socially unsayable actual and manifest”.
When asked about taste today, Fraser uses Bourdieu to interpret Trump’s right-wing bling. “It evokes the style of old monarchies, everything in marble or gold but only reproductions, because antiques are shabby. It’s hilarious,” she says. “But laughing at it reveals my sense of cultural superiority over a crass taste that flaunts wealth without refinement, sublimation or appreciation for history – all qualities associated with education.” Of course, the flip-side of Fraser’s fascination with quiet luxury would be an alienation from loud luxury.
Dictator-chic aside, Fraser sometimes shows a soft spot for conspicuous consumption. In one of the few physical art objects that she has made in the past 40 years, she collected hundreds of costumes abandoned after Carnival in Rio de Janeiro, then stacked them in a 9ft-high sculpture called A Monument to Discarded Fantasies. In Portuguese, fantasias means both “costumes” and “fantasies,” a semantic overlap (or pun?) that speaks to the power of clothes to alter realities.
Fraser’s most recent exhibition, held at Galerie Marian Goodman in Paris, marks another of the artist’s rare forays into sculpture. Modestly scaled neoclassical figures fabricated from scratch (rather than assembled from found materials) would normally be a recipe for sales, but these five works, Untitled (Objects I-V), are perversely uncommercial. Displayed under clear Plexiglas covers, five life-sized naked toddlers lie in various sleepy positions with mottled grey complexions that suggest, to my eye, that they’ve been dead for either 48 hours or 2,000 years. Are they uncanny literalisations of artworks as offspring, suggesting that Fraser’s fecund relationship to making art has taken a macabre turn? Or are they a puzzling feminist response to the curtailing of American women’s rights not to bear children and the recent vilification of “childless cat ladies”?
Many years ago, when I was working on another project (a book called 33 Artists in 3 Acts), Fraser told me: “One of the core fantasies of artists is unconditional love and the associated unconditional value attributed to anything that we produce.” Once I recalled the quote, I saw Objects I-V as metaphors for unconditional love and the inconsolable pain experienced when a loved one is lost.
A riff on still lifes, or what the French call natures mortes, the sculptures also have a residue of guilt. They somehow embody the conflict of loathing the inequities that underpin the art market while attempting to sell something within it. The quintet of figures are not beautiful, but they do congeal into a sophisticated composition of austere dignity. They have tact, and grace, and quiet self-assurance. And they are so very far away from the passions of ordinary people.

Sarah Thornton’s latest book, t*ts Up, is published by Pan Macmillan


Stylist, Emma Wyman. Styling assistant, Verity Azario. Hair stylist, Lucas Wilson. Make-up artist, Emi Kaneko. Make-up assistant, Amelia Berger. Producer, Brock DeHaven. Production assistant, Sasha Peyton. Photographer’s assistant, Aleck Venegas. Lighting technician, Butch Hogan

ft
 
I like Phoebe, if only for her deadpan trolling of the sheep. She's the real life Regina George confidently wearing the cut-out tank that Janice attempted to sabotage-- only to have all the sheep desperately copying the look the next day.


Financial Times HTSI May 3 2025
"I Am Always Trying to Figure Out How to Fit In"
Photographer: Talia Chetrit
Feature Editor: Sarah Thornton
Star: Andrea Fraser
Financial Times HTSI  5 2025.jpg1 Financial Times HTSI  5 2025.jpg2 Financial Times HTSI  5 2025.jpg3 Financial Times HTSI  5 2025.jpg4 Financial Times HTSI  5 2025.jpg



"Now and Then"
Photogapher: Mark Kean
Stylist: Jane How

5 Financial Times HTSI  5 2025.jpg6 Financial Times HTSI  5 2025.jpg7 Financial Times HTSI  5 2025.jpg8 Financial Times HTSI  5 2025.jpg9 Financial Times HTSI  5 2025.jpg
Financial Times HTSI May 3 2025
 
Not sure this photoshoot did any good to seduce the average woman to try her clothes when you have a direct comparison between a fashion model and a woman with regular proportions and closer to the age where one can afford such expensive clothes - The cut of these clothes does nothing for these women, the sleeves and trouser legs are excessively long and I doubt there are many customers who would want to have their body shape conceiled behind a shapeless curtain, just to have then one leg exposed to a degree that is sure to cause an unwanted reveal.

For a woman whose selling point has been 'from women for women', I feel this is oddly complicated and (sorry for the brashness but after seeing also this god ugly pouf-y taffetta apron) dumb design.
 
Phoebe Philo should shut down her boring label and come back in 5 years, IF she’ll have something to add to the conversation and fashion design. Until then, she’s just making her designs less and less desirable. 🤷🏼‍♀️
this is an interesting opinion!
Please could you elaborate why her designs are less and less desirable? It’s not sarcasm I would genuinely love to know more about your opinion !!
Because to me personally her designs are very comfortable and easy to wear . I don’t think they’re timeless or inject anything new to the fashion design but I think that this was her purpose initially with her namesake brand
 
I don’t understand the hate toward current Phoebe Philo. I’m far from being a fan of her, but if people rarely complain about the pricing of The Row, then why isn’t Phoebe shown the same level of tolerance? Do you expect her brand to be as successful as Tom Ford label or sth? Her brand is 100% fan service and very niche in a way, no one’s forcing you to like it.
 
I still love her work and would wear them if I could afford them easily. It still looks very desirable, even if it is just for a certain type of woman and body. The problem is that the whole thing feels different because we are so used to Celine types of marketing, shows and advertising, and without all of that it doesn’t feel as desirable and luxurious as a Maison. A show would really change everything
 
feel as desirable and luxurious also in real life a show could be as low budget feeling if not done in certain expected ways people will comment on this as well wrong location or set etc

fashion does not exist only in a show format to be valid or strong ..... there is so much more moments when it has to translate any ways online and in real life and in magazines , but i understand the excitement of a show moment of course

the fashion gays don't like fashion made by woman for woman unless your being fierce like prada or token choice of the season.

long pants can be made shorter, curtains can be made into napkins, i don't see the issue with the choice to cover up as much as woman please or if Ophra is the right phoebe woman or not she's not in an adv campaign for her etc

the brand is barely established, The Row was established in 2006 , with a t shirt and leather leggings !!!!!! ...and i love the twins and their styles evolution and The Row for its efforts even if the brand is not perfect they did something great but with time.

its both their own brand its not like ancora for gucci when more is at stake and its not your own name and money on the line etc

if tomorrow ancora&co started his own brand he can do as much dances he like and take all the years needed to grow some proper storytelling skills or have direction.
 
I don’t understand the hate toward current Phoebe Philo. I’m far from being a fan of her, but if people rarely complain about the pricing of The Row, then why isn’t Phoebe shown the same level of tolerance? Do you expect her brand to be as successful as Tom Ford label or sth? Her brand is 100% fan service and very niche in a way, no one’s forcing you to like it.
Are the fans present in the room tonight?
 
Comparing The Row to Phoebe Philo doesn’t really hold up. The Row was the Olsens’ first step into fashion, a slow build that started with basics. Phoebe, on the other hand, has over 25 years of experience. She knows how to lead a team, she brought her favorite Céline designer with her, and she has the backing and resources from LVMH to manage the business side.

That’s why I don’t think her brand is meant to be a spectacle. She’s not here to go viral or push out merch for clicks. She’s simply making the kind of clothes she wants to wear and building a label around that. Not every designer needs to perform or serve up a “yass queen” moment to be taken seriously. Though judging by this forum, maybe that’s what people are looking for now.

Honestly, I’m not even sure what kind of true newness is possible in fashion anymore. Designers like Thom Browne, Pieter Mulier at Alaïa, Matthieu Blazy, and all the chaotic student collections have pushed things so far that fashion history feels completely plundered. There’s barely anything left to reference that still feels fresh.

In a way, I think fashion design itself is kind of dead right now. The only thing that can still excite me is good styling.
 

Users who are viewing this thread

  • New Posts

    Forum Statistics

    Threads
    213,906
    Messages
    15,242,416
    Members
    87,859
    Latest member
    Eddu
    Back
    Top