To Ryder Street last night for the ‘Viva London: Self Portraits’ exhibition hosted by Harper’s Bazaar.  An intimate gallery of photographs, paintings and drawings, individually pictured the talented young women the agency represents in the most honest way.

 [Olympia Campbell, Edie Campbell, Amber Atherton]

Self-portraiture as a style came to popularity in the Early Renaissance, with increased wealth and interest in the individual as a subject. The form seems more relevant than ever in our ‘Selfie’ culture, as we increasingly spend more time isolated on digital platforms we become our own subject for self-expression.  Frida Kahlo ( below) is most famous for her self-portraits, indeed of her 143 paintings, 55 are self-portraits which often incorporate symbolic portrayals of physical and psychological wounds. She insisted….

 “I never painted dreams. I painted my own reality.”

Last night I wore this lovely Peter Jensen dress, his s’s13 collection was shown in a gallery and in a extract from Interview magazine he weighs in on the relationship between fashion and art….  ‘I always think it’s pretentious when designers talk about what they do as art. I think when I was studying in the late ’90s, the two got much closer: all the designers wanted to be artists and the artists wanted to be fashion designers; the designers wanted to be conceptual and highbrow and the artists more pop culture.‘ 

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