Voss is the seventeenth collection by British fashion designer Alexander McQueen, made for the Spring/Summer2001 season of his fashion house. Voss drew on imagery of madness and nature to question beauty standards and critique the fashion industry, with showpiece designs made from unusual materials such as razor clam shells (dress pictured), an antique Japanese screen, and microscope slides. The runway show was staged on 26September 2000 in London, inside a room-sized mirrored glass cube, the audience seated outside. The interior was styled to look like an insane asylum and models were directed to act unwell. In the finale, a glass cube inside shattered to reveal Michelle Olley, fat, nude, and covered in moths. Critical response was positive, especially towards the showpieces and the performance art aspect. The show is regarded as one of McQueen's best, and has attracted a large amount of academic analysis. Several ensembles appeared in the retrospective Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty. (Fullarticle...)
The Astronomer is an oil painting on canvas by the Dutch Golden Age artist Johannes Vermeer, completed in 1668. The work depicts an astronomer studying a celestial globe beside a copy of Adriaan Metius's Institutiones Astronomicae Geographicae. Closely related to Vermeer's The Geographer, it is thought to portray the same sitter, possibly Antonie van Leeuwenhoek; a 2017 study showed that both paintings were made from canvas cut from the same bolt. The painting was seized by the Nazis from the Rothschild family during the Second World War, returned to them when the war concluded, and acquired by the French state in 1983. It is now in the collection of the Louvre in Paris.
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