Project Runway: Louisville Style
Isabelle de Borchgrave, Banyan and Waistcoat.
Three local artists take on the challenge of creating ready-to-wear replicas from the Speed Art Museum’s Isabelle de Borchgrave exhibition By LAURA ROSS Photos by KATHRYN HARRINGTON and provided by the SPEED ART MUSEUM
T
he Speed Art Museum’s wildly popular spring exhibition, “Isabelle de Borchgrave: Fashioning Art from Paper” features life-size, trompe l’œil paper costumes by Belgian artist Isabelle de Borchgrave. Following a visit to the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum in 1994, de Borchgrave began crafting the first of four major paper trompe l’œil fashion collections. The collections are based on three hundred years of fashion history from Elizabeth I to the Ballets Russes, the sumptuous Florentine ceremonial dress of the Medici family, and through the elegance of twentieth-century Venice fashion. “As with any new exhibition, the Speed team always develops creative events and ideations to complement the art,” said Karen Tate, Speed Art Museum advancement & programming events manager. Since this exhibition focuses more on fashion – an unusual turn for the museum – the team took its creativity to a new level. “We kept coming back to the television show, Project Runway,” laughed Tate. “We proposed our ideas to local 56
THE VOICE OF LOUISVILLE
| VO I C E -T R I B U N E . C O M
JUNE 2021