Meadham Kirchoff

Designers Ed Meadham and Ben Kirchoff are geniuses. Their Spring/Summer 2012 collection is a brilliant holocaust of candy-coated, Koonsian, couture. While this is indeed the case, and the designs are as critically complex as the aforementioned master of meta-kitsch, I must implore you, dear reader, give no heed to the facile analysis backed only by authorial authority supplied by dear, sweet, simple Ben and Ed. Be loathed to evaluate these works as some flimsy and diffuse critique of fashion's manipulations and deformations of femininity, a subject which I might mention seems the focus of every runway show since chauvinism was chic. Instead attempt to understand them as examples of Koons' new language, a symbol system born of the vacuity of consumer culture, not concerned with this vacuity, but rather exploiting it as a vessel for modern communication, the emptiness of an effective sign. They are works of semiotics, not freshman-year-feminism.

Autumn/Winter 2012