In Conversation: Huguette Caland and the Art of Fashion with Emily Bode, Cynthia Merhej and Tiffany Jow

Presented in conjunction with the exhibition Huguette Caland: Tête-à-Tête, this conversation with The Slowdown's Executive Editor Tiffany Jow, American designer Emily Bode and Lebanese designer Cynthia Merhej explores the expressive potential of fashion—from garments that tell stories and communicate personal narratives, to perennial wardrobes that test and reinterpret stereotypically conventional modes of dress. Inspired by Caland’s own approach to fashion as a way of moving through the world and defining her body on her own terms, Jow, Bode, and Merhej take the artist’s wardrobe of irreverent caftans as a starting point.

Huguette Caland: Tête-à-Tête is the artist's most comprehensive solo museum exhibition. Bringing together works on paper and canvas from the past five decades—as well as caftans, mannequins, sculptures, and notebooks on and in which she wielded her pen—the exhibition shows how Caland used the candidness and mutability of the medium of drawing to challenge traditional representations of sexuality, the body and desire.

This conversation was recorded via zoom on July 18, 2021.

Huguette Caland

Huguette Caland was the only daughter of the first president of the Republic of Lebanon, Bechara el Khoury. She began painting at the age of 16 under the private tutelage of Fernando Manetti, an Italian artist who resided in Lebanon. At the age of 20, she married Paul Caland, the nephew of the publisher of a pro-French daily Le Jour.

By 1964, she had lost both her parents, and shortly after her father’s death, Caland created her seminal painting, Red Sun. Later that year, she enrolled in the fine arts program at the American University of Beirut where she studied painting and drawing. In 1970, she moved to Paris and it was there that she began to explore themes of sexuality and desire in her work. This includes her series Bribes de Corps or “body bits,” in which isolated and interlocking body parts resemble landscapes. In 1979, she was commissioned by the fashion house of Pierre Cardin to create a line of high-fashion caftans. In 1987, Caland settled in Venice, California, where she built the home and studio of her dreams. The artist lived between there and Beirut until her recent death at the age of 88 in September 2019.

Credits

Free online programs are made possible by the Cy Twombly Foundation.

The Drawing Center's Education and Community Programs are made possible by the May and Samuel Rudin Family Foundation, Inc. Major support is provided by The Evelyn Toll Family Foundation.

Additional support is provided, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council, The Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, and the Milton and Sally Avery Arts Foundation.