Photo: Oli Scarff

If case you didn’t get the memo, shoes are the new bags. A pair of killer heels are where it’s at, both in terms of expressing a unique sartorial statement and helping retailers to meet their bottom lines. Perhaps that’s why iconic department store Liberty of London is launching a shoe salon, nicknamed the House of Heels, with a grand opening scheduled for next month’s London fashion week. Playing off the store’s historic Tudor architecture, the various rooms of the “house” create different tableaux in which the shoes are displayed, from warm and intimate in the “drawing room” to coolly contemporary in the “bedroom.” Collections include offerings from YSL, McQueen, Alaïa, Balenciaga, Prada, Westwood, and Chloé, with U.K. exclusives from shoe savants Nicholas Kirkwood and Rupert Sanderson.
Best of all, Liberty is launching an e-commerce site this September, and by Spring ‘09 the shoes will be available online.—Sameer Reddy

Photo:
Courtesy of Liberty of London

For your next dinner party, stick to American caviar only, please. It’s practically a steal at $49 for two ounces! We’re glad food magazines are getting real.

It’s been, what, a week since we last wrote about Kate Moss on this blog? Here’s a weekend fix of her tried-and-true style staples.

Now would be a good time to befriend some Russians. They like home cinemas and well-trimmed topiary, and they’re buying only the best of both all over London.—Alison Baenen

Photo: Just Loomis

Dust bunnies, dirt, old toothpicks, sugar cubes, and tiny pieces of poo are usually banished from galleries, not presented as important art. But Tom Friedman is an artist beloved for his witty and wondrous ways with the ickier aspects of everyday life. In “Monsters and Stuff,” the American conceptual sculptor’s first solo show at the Gagosian Gallery’s London branch, he presents a series of works made of scrap wood, small drawings on tinfoil, and huge paper collages, including one titled “Overseer”—a nine-foot-tall naked monster covered in body hair and wearing nothing but giant sneakers and socks. Friedman explains that “from a figurative standpoint,” the “monsters” of the title represents the abnormal, which is open-ended, whereas “and stuff” “states an unresolved conclusion.” Happily for us, “Monsters and Stuff” resolves itself by making the little things in life seem admirably more than normal.—Ana Finel Honigman

Photo: Tom Friedman, courtesy of Gagosian Gallery London

The stork has been rather busy here at Style.com, which will welcome three staff babies this year. But at Just Cavalli, the flashier flamingo (what else?) is the avian choice for fall. No offense, Mossy, but if we had to play “who wore it better?” we’d have to go with the dashing duo (above), photographed by the famous African portraitist, Seydou Keïta, whose less-well-known work will be celebrated this fall at HackelBury Fine Art in London. As for these sisters, they’ve been earning air miles—their portrait was exhibited at ArtHamptons last weekend.Laird
Borrelli-Persson

Photo: © Seydou
Keïta, “Untitled (Two Great Ladies)”/HackelBury Fine
Art,London

The figures may all be nudes, but Dutch artist Maaike Schoorel’s second solo show at London’s Maureen Paley gallery is actually a display of artistic discretion—the delicate swatches of soft color on her mostly white canvases hover like makeup stains on a shirt collar or the remnants of a candy rose licked off a petit four cake. When Schoorel is not painting her ethereal, Proustian paintings, she’s the singer for the slick London-based post-punk experimental band Skill 7 Stamina 12. While the group’s been celebrated by critics for championing “dingy, rat-infested studio-style creativity” (that’s what Splendid magazine had to say, anyway), Schoorel’s resoundingly silent paintings have their own unexpected emotional pitch.—Ana Finel Honigman

Photo: Maaike Schoorel, “Jemima Nude,” 2007. Courtesy of Maureen Paley, London.

Everyone has a mother, but not every son or daughter celebrates Mother’s Day the same way. Few kids, for example, are as dedicated as the sailor who has “Mom” inked into his arm. In this hardcore Mother’s Day spirit comes “Mothers,” a cyclical group show curated by Jasper Joffe, Emma Ridgway, Harry Pye, and Mat Humphrey. “Mothers,” which debuted in the East End of London four years ago and will be shown in South London in 2012 and then again in 2016 in North London, is now appearing at Sartorial Contemporary Art (in the U.K., Mothering Sunday is always three weeks before Easter). As its common premise, the show’s curators provided 100 artists with a same-sized canvas on which to represent their mothers. With work by Dinos Chapman, George Shaw, Chantal Joffe, David Shrigley, and Grayson Perry on display, the show has caused many a cynical viewer to tear up. “Each time an artist gave me their finished painting, I felt a buzz as though I was a child unwrapping a Christmas present,” said Pye. And the artists clearly felt the same tenderness toward the project. “For me, the notion of painting my mother was very difficult, and also extremely rewarding,” explained the British collage artist Mat Humphrey. “It forced me to sit down and think harder and more specifically about her than at any other time in my life. It also made me look harder at her face than perhaps I had before. It doesn’t take a psychologist to figure out why.” Nor does it take one to see that this is a show that not only a mother can love.—Ana Finel Honigman

Photo: Courtesy of Sartorial Contemporary Art

Ryan Gander’s art can be understood as art only because it can’t be described as anything else. The London-based conceptual artist and scholastic magpie, whose solo show, Heralded as the New Black,” is
currently up at the South London Gallery, creates gestures and thought-provoking ideas in lieu of working in conventional media. At the gallery, visitors will be offered a local street map, tweaked to the include
street names that were in use in 1914, and can view an installation of 36 wooden printers’ blocks made in the style of Dutch graphic designer and typographer Wim Crouwel’s 1967 “new alphabet.” The star of the show is “A sheet of paper on which I was about to draw, as it slipped from my table and fell to the floor,” an installation of 100 small crystal balls, each of which contain a laser-etched image of a fluttering sheet of paper. The haikulike title is intended to symbolize writers’ block and any comparable creative hurdle. But considering Gander’s prolific output and expansive way of experiencing the world around him, it seems hard to imagine that creative blocks are anything but abstract ideas to him.—
Ana Finel Honigman

Ryan Gander, courtesy
of South London Gallery

Shezad Dawood mashes and mixes references in his sculptures, installations, and paintings, all the while parsing the ingredients that create cultural identities. Born and based in London, the half-Indian and half-Pakistani graduate of the Royal College of Art has restaged scenes from “Blowup” and “Taxi Driver” as Bollywood films; he once occupied a five-story landmarked building in London as a home and studio, then sold the house as an installation through a real estate agent who was inadvertently acting as an art dealer. Now, in his first major London solo show, at Paradise Row Gallery, Dawood combines neon signs incorporating the Koran’s concept of the “99 Names of God” with tumbleweeds, a symbol of the American Wild West. We sat him down and asked why.

Why did you reference “Blowup”?

I was interested in the fact that an Italian director was attempting to recreate swinging London after the fact. This perverse desire for authenticity, yet always in translation, is at the core of my work. Ideologies, cultures—I tend to see the artifice in all of it; they’re all constructs in a way. Which leads me back to Antonioni, who notably painted all the grass green in the famous park scene in “Blowup.”

Is that hyperreal look what attracted you to using neon in your new show?

I’ve always been attracted to neon. As a kid, when I would go home to Pakistan, there’d be neon signs everywhere with Arabic script, which always gave it a kind of spiritual aura—something I try and take into the new neon works on a very formalist level.

In the show, you’re contrasting the neon signage with symbols referencing the mythology of the American Wild West. Do you think Westerns are still relevant representations of American cultural values?

They are American cultural values—and perhaps they embody myth or epic drama in a peculiarly modern way. That becomes universal, as we live without doubt in an American age.

Is there one film that you think best articulates America’s core cultural identity?

“The Searchers,” with its troubled and fractured identity. It has John Wayne as Ethan and another white actor playing a renegade Indian named Scar—who performs as Wayne’s psychic doppelgänger. For me, this is the quintessentially revealing American Western.

Is there one city or community that you uphold as a multicultural model?

London—that’s why I live here. I always think of leaving because of the expense or the weather, but anywhere else feels relatively like a monoculture. So no matter how many CCTV cameras are put up, on another level it provides a freedom I have yet to encounter anywhere else.

What do you think is the most significant piece of political art?

Waking up in the morning, and carrying on.

—Ana Finel Honigman

Shezad Dawood, “Sambo,” © Paradise Row

We’re predicting an interesting year for Charles Anastase. First off, the
artist-cum-designer who counts Yoko Ono and Ronnie Cooke-Newhouse as fans is
returning home to Paris after several years in London. Then there’s his
collaboration with cult eyewear brand Linda Farrow Vintage. He’s
reinterpreting two styles of sunglasses, both of which are priced at $300
and are available from boutiques including Opening Ceremony and 10 Corso
Como. “It’s like a little girl who uses mother’s glasses to read a fairy
tale,” he says of the oversized Meredith design (above), inspired by one of
his runway models with the same name. The other, more classic model has been
christened “Emma” and includes a giant engraving of the designer’s favorite
animal: a swan. What else would it be?—Linlee
Allen

Photo: Courtesy of Linda Farrow Vintage