Jump To: Fashion + Technology Critiques of Fashion Cultural Questions Reviews Philadelphia Art, Culture, & Design Sustainability Fashion History + Theory We’re coming up on our fifth birthday here at Manic Metallic (on 1/1/2026), and to say that I am in awe is an understatement for a number of reasons. One of those reasons is that the odds are generally pretty low…
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Surrealism might have turned 100 last year, but the art movement’s impact is still being celebrated at the Philadelphia Art Museum. Part of a five-stop tour across the United States and Europe, Philadelphia is the only US city in which the Surrealist retrospective can be viewed. The first exhibition, shown at the Musées Royaux…
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Our latest guest on The Manic Metallic Podcast is Kanyinsola Onalaja, the founder and creative director of womenswear brand Onalaja. Kanyinsola’s designs are painstakingly embroidered and embellished, and I had to have her on the show as soon as I got a look at her work. Our talk was filled with priceless fashion and…
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This exhibit is “not a surrealist show, per se”. Scott Rothkopf, the Alice Pratt Brown Director of the Whitney Museum, was sure to hammer home this point in yesterday’s press preview of “Sixties Surreal”, the museum’s latest showing. The exhibit, surveying American art from 1958-1972, dispenses with the notion that American art was solely…
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Man Ray, the multidisciplinary artist whose name is closely associated with the Dada and Surrealist artistic movements, finally gets his due at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. The show, which primarily focuses on Ray’s work from the 1910s and 1920s, is the first solo exhibition that the museum has dedicated exclusively…
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In a recent issue of The Manic Metallic Substack Newsletter, we discussed the concept of “faith without works is dead”. Let’s take the opportunity to dive deeper into that concept. Faith Without Works Is Dead For those unaware of the origin of this phrase, it is a biblical verse from James 2:26. I am…
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In the most recent episode of The Manic Metallic Podcast, I sat down with Fashion Talk’s Amarissa Imoukhuede to learn about her journey through the fashion industry and gain some insight into how she chooses to run the lively Substack publication. Along the way, she gave our audience a strategy that she uses to…
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“Superfine: Tailoring Black Style” is the most culturally relevant Costume Institute exhibit that the Metropolitan Museum of Art has produced in years. It has already delivered the most profitable Met Gala of all time. Organized into twelve sections, with each meant to encapsulate a trait of Black style, the highly anticipated exhibit traces Black…
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Frieze New York’s 2025 edition wrapped up on Sunday, and it cannot be emphasized enough just how important that the fair was to the New York art world at a time of such social and global upheaval. Approximately 25,000 Frieze visitors visited over 65 galleries from across the world. While one of the reasons…
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Printemps, the inimitable French luxury concept store, arrived in New York recently and chose to set up shop in the Financial District — not an area known for its trendiness, per se, but here we are. The location – 1 Wall Street – seems an unlikely candidate for such a store (similar stores in…
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