Melissa Marra-Alvarez and Elizabeth Way of FIT Transcript
Kerry Diamond:
Hi, everyone. You are listening to Radio Cherry Bombe, and I'm your host, Kerry Diamond, coming to you from Newsstand Studios at Rockefeller Center in the heart of New York City. I'm the founder and editor of Cherry Bombe Magazine, and each week I talk to the most interesting women and culinary creatives in and around the world of food.
Today, we'll be talking about the intersection of food and fashion, one of my favorite things, with Melissa Marra-Alvarez and Elizabeth Way of FIT, the Fashion Institute of Technology here in New York City. Melissa and Elizabeth are the co-curators of the exhibition Food & Fashion, which just opened at the Museum at FIT. You should go check it out. It is open through November 26th. Melissa and Elizabeth and I chat about everything from Elsa Schiaparelli's lobster dress from the 1930s to the grocery girl aesthetic of today. Stay tuned.
Thank you to OpenTable for supporting our show. I hope you all have the OpenTable app on your phone. You can use it to book lots of my favorite female-fueled restaurants, like Zou Zou's and The Odeon right here in New York City. We did a great dinner series with OpenTable this summer called Sit With Us, I know a lot of you were there, and part two is coming this fall. We'll be at Chef Camille Becerra's Come As You Are restaurant at Ace Hotel Brooklyn on November 11th. Stay tuned for more details, and learn more about restaurants near you on opentable.com.
Some Cherry Bombe housekeeping. We are celebrating the launch of our brand new Future of Food issue this Thursday night at Jolene Sound Room at Moxy Hotel in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Tickets are on sale right now at cherrybombe.com. I'll be there. Future of Food Is You host Abena Anim-Somuah will be there, and so will DJ Zeemuffin and Team Cherry Bombe. We would all love to see you.
And also, some of you know this because you heard my interview with our CEO Kate Miller Spencer the other week, but Cherry Bombe is raising money after 10 years of bootstrapping. We're doing it via a community round on Wefunder. We are 40% of the way to our goal, and I want to thank everyone who has become a Cherry Bombe angel investor. Check out our show notes for the link to our deck. This is not a solicitation to invest, just FYI. The Wefunder disclaimer is in our show notes, so be sure to check that out too. You can learn more about Wefunder and the Cherry Bombe campaign at wefunder.com/cherrybombe.
Now Let's check in with today's guests. Melissa and Elizabeth, welcome to Radio Cherry Bombe.
Elizabeth Way:
Hi.
Melissa Marra-Alvarez:
Hi. Thank you so much for having us.
Elizabeth Way:
We're super excited to be here.
Kerry Diamond:
Obviously you've been working on the exhibition for a few years. I would love to know, what was the inspiration? Was there something one of you saw or noticed? Elizabeth, why don't you start?
Elizabeth Way:
Well, I actually developed an idea for an exhibition on the five senses, and I pitched it to our director, Valerie Steele. And we talked it through, and she was like, "This is a little complicated, it's a little conceptual. I think it needs a little work." So that day, or the day after, Melissa and I went out to lunch to a lovely Thai place that is no longer there, and we were just talking about it. I was like, "Oh, this didn't work. I don't know. It's too complicated. How can we pare this down?"
And Melissa was like, "You should just focus on one of them." And so we were like, "Oh, taste. Taste is such a complex idea." And then we were talking and talking, and then we were like, you know what? Food and fashion. Let's just do food and fashion. It came up so, kind of, organically over lunch, which really never happens.
Kerry Diamond:
Was this pre-pandemic?
Elizabeth Way:
This was in 2018 or 2019? I don't remember when, but...
Melissa Marra-Alvarez:
It was 2018.
Kerry Diamond:
So this has been percolating for a while. Melissa, from your perspective, how did you get there? Was there something that you had noticed that was happening?
Melissa Marra-Alvarez:
Part of Liz's initial idea when she was looking at the five senses was, when she got to the sense of taste, she had said, "I was thinking we can do food-print clothing." So that was part of what kind of led us to saying "Oh, let's expand on taste and see where that goes," which eventually led us to the food concept.
But when we started digging into the topic of food and we started reading food culture books, we started to realize how vast the topic was. And that's really when the idea of food and fashion in the broader sense that we approach it really took off.
Kerry Diamond:
Your timing is amazing, because as you know, food and fashion have never been more linked. And this summer alone, we've got grocery girl aesthetic. We've got girl dinner, tomato girl summer, obviously they're all connected. I would love to know what you think is going on.
Elizabeth Way:
Instagram, I think, is really the game-changer here. And that took off with, in the food world among everyday people photographing their food in such an aesthetically beautiful way. And so of course designers jumped on that, because they eat. Models, all of us eat, but they want to present it in this aesthetically beautiful way. So they were really on the cutting edge of the best of food photography on Instagram.
There's so many factors that helped it along. The pandemic was one of them. We have so many designers who were trapped in their homes like all of us, but also exploring their food, exploring their domestic spaces and photographing it beautifully. So I think that really helped push it along.
But food is so much about identity, and so I think we are in a space where We're trying to be more individualistic in the way we dress and express something important about ourselves in the way we dress. And food's a really beautiful vehicle for that.
Melissa Marra-Alvarez:
Also, over the past, let's say 20 years, past few decades, I think food culture has just become so prominent as well. And then again, the fact that food and fashion are both expressions of identity, they just seem like natural topics that would start to gravitate towards one another. And as Liz mentioned, the pandemic, I think when we're all home and we're focusing on cooking recipes for fun or being on Zoom and shopping online or thinking about what we're going to wear on our Zoom calls, that definitely accelerated this kind of momentum that was already happening.
But the idea of food and fashion coming together has been happening... I mean, you think about 2014, Karl Lagerfeld did a Chanel supermarket collection, or Jeremy Scott from Moschino did a McDonald's collection.
Kerry Diamond:
Speaking of which, we need to give Rachel Antonoff a shout-out, because I do think Rachel has been behind so much of this for years and has been mining food as a subject. She did the pasta puffer that got a lot of attention and might be in the exhibit, I think?
Elizabeth Way:
It is in the exhibit.
Kerry Diamond:
Yes, exciting. The shrimp skirt. Tinned fish has been one of her motifs, but she also famously designed a sweater with a uterus on it. So food and fashion is maybe a little bit more substantial than some people even think.
Melissa Marra-Alvarez:
Yes, there's, lots of avenues where food and fashion can both be harnessed or joined together to convey political ideas. And so that is something that we do go into in a section of the exhibition, and also in the book that accompanies the exhibition.
Elizabeth Way:
The other Rachel Antonoff piece we have is a babka sweater, and we have it in our section that looks at cultural identity. And it's all about celebrating these Jewish bakeries throughout the Jewish diaspora, but in New York particular. These beautiful pastries, desserts that were coming out of this community and affecting all of us here in New York, you know, that famous Seinfeld episode. So even when it's fun and it's whimsical, it really says something important about her identity that other people can connect with.
Kerry Diamond:
I wonder how much of it has to do with control, and the fact that women literally have been losing control of their bodies over the past few years. Roe disappearing, things like that. And for, I won't say forever, but for a very long time women have been told what they can eat, when they can eat it, how they can eat it. I kind of see this food and fashion coming together as a rejection of that. Girl dinner is a rejection of that. It's like, "Don't tell me what I can put in my body or do with my body." Am I reading too much into this?
Elizabeth Way:
Absolutely not. And we have a section in the exhibition that focuses on the body. And an amazing scholar, Emma McClendon, wrote a chapter on food, fashion, and the body for the accompanying book. But we look at designers like Rebecca McCharen-Tran at Chromat who is embracing body positivity, rejecting food-shaming, and rejecting the idea that models don't eat. We have an ensemble that has a little bungee pocket with a Flamin' Hot Cheetos bag. Her models walked down the runway eating Cheetos.
And it's all about changing this relationship, because when we talked about food and fashion, so many people were like, "Oh, well, fashion doesn't like food." And that has definitely changed in the 21st century, but there still is this stigma that we're dealing with about thin bodies and not eating that some designers are really interrogating.
Kerry Diamond:
Yeah, well, fashion did not like food. I was on the front lines for many years and can report that they did not. I remember when I was at Women's Wear Daily, being backstage, I was a beauty editor, and covering the makeup artists. And you couldn't help but notice a new model would show up one season, the next season she was even thinner than she was. There was never food backstage.
I remember when green juice became a thing, all of a sudden there was green juice backstage, and that was progress. That at least they're acknowledging that these young women need some level of nourishment. But a sample size is still a size zero, so I don't think designers are pushing back that hard.
Elizabeth Way:
And Chromat is an amazing brand that it really makes that its focus. But I think a brand can really get behind that. I think It's a really brave thing to do as a fashion brand, but it certainly has not permeated the entire industry. And it's interesting. In our book we show some fashion periodicals in which food is really fetishized in magazines and by the fashion industry, and there seems to be real fear but also fascination around it. There's shoots where models are gorging themselves, or their beautiful jewelry is covered in tomato sauce, things like that. And you can dig so many layers of psychological meaning behind these images. It really does revolve around fear.
Melissa Marra-Alvarez:
I think we're talking about this relationship between food and fashion and women's bodies or how women might be reclaiming this empowerment around food and fashion. And I think you can ignore also the fact that both food, cooking, and making clothes are traditionally part of the domestic women's sphere. And I think the fact that we have all of this merging of food and fashion today is also this very interesting way of reclaiming those fears and churning them out in a different way and doing something new with them, which is really interesting, really layered, really exciting.
Kerry Diamond:
When I was a magazine editor, it really was the male designers who were covered all the time, who had the advertising budgets. You can think of a handful of women, Carolina Herrera, Donna Karan, Stella McCartney, that did have money behind them and therefore could advertise and therefore got covered. I don't know if everybody realizes how deep a connection there was between the advertisers... Miuccia Prada, I should definitely mention Miuccia Prada.
But I don't know how much our readers realize there was a very serious connection, and still is, between who got covered editorially and who was spending on advertising. And I think that shut out a lot of women from being covered.
Melissa Marra-Alvarez:
A lot of younger women designers, too, are the ones engaging with food. Like, we think of Rachel Antonoff, you think of Olivia Cheng and Dauphinette, you think of Susan Alexandra, who are really known for their food-inspired fashion.
Kerry Diamond:
Olivia was just on our other podcast, The Future Of Food Is You, and I love how she's mined food as a subject.
Melissa Marra-Alvarez:
We have one of her pieces in the show as well. We have a spiked baguette bread bag that we're very excited about.
Elizabeth Way:
Next to our Fendi baguette bag.
Kerry Diamond:
Oh, how fun. That's great. I was just thinking of that egg dress she did. What was it, like a thousand hand-blown eggs and she made a dress out of all of them? Talk about stressful moving van situations.
Elizabeth Way:
It's really art pieces that she's creating out of these mediums. And I love that as a woman designer, she is moving into this very conceptual art space with her fashion. For so long, it's like, "Oh, if you're a woman designer, you have to design something practical, something that women want to wear, something that fits their lifestyles." And now we can break out of some of these stereotypes.
But one of the things I was thinking about when you were saying these women designers, we see the same thing with chefs, all these women in the food world. And in the book we talk about, this goes back to the 18th, 19th century, where, as Melissa was saying, making clothes, cooking, was women's work until it became professional, and then it became men's work. Then the chefs and the fashion designers, when it starts to become artistic, when it starts to become lucrative, then it becomes the man's domain.
Kerry Diamond:
Let's take a quick break and we'll be right back.
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Let's talk about the exhibition, because there's so much to discuss. I'd love to know what some of the highlights are and how it's organized.
Melissa Marra-Alvarez:
So we organized the exhibition thematically, and that was a really fun way to cover a lot of ground, because it is a really rich subject. And I think one of my favorite highlights of the exhibition is, we open the exhibition with this idea of a day of food and fashion. So we start in the kitchen at breakfast, and we see all of these spaces and places during the day where food and fashion can come together, or food permeates our fashion world.
So we have a fashion kitchen where we have our bread bags and a Dolce & Gabbana Smeg refrigerator. So we can talk about these kinds of lifestyle ways that fashion enters the food world. It then takes you into a market, a farmer's market, where we have all these produce. And as we go along, there's lots of... You see all of these metaphorical ways that fashion really likes to kind of glom onto the food world and use that, whether it's to talk about trends or it's to talk about consumerism or it's to talk about consumption. That's how we start the exhibition, is taking you through this day from breakfast, to the farmer's market, fast food lunch, and then dinner at our high fashion restaurant.
Elizabeth Way:
And that's in our introductory gallery. And as we move into our main gallery, one of the centerpieces is a sweets shop that we recreated. So we have all of these designers that are creating pieces either to dress women up as sweets, cakes, or we have a selection of Judith Leiber Minaudieres, the rhinestone bags that look like donuts and sundaes. And there's a kind of creator, fashion-maker, artist called The Shoe Baker in North Carolina, I believe. And he makes these shoes that look like cake.
So they're very fun and they're very whimsical, but they talk a lot about nostalgia and what it meant to us as children to have these treats, to have this sweetness. But there's also this layer about gender and what it means to be feminine, what it means to be masculine, and how sweets and sugariness, and even just this idea of being pleasing, being aesthetic, is communicated through these fashions. So I think it's a really rich topic, but it's also a very fun section.
Kerry Diamond:
Jeremy Scott did a whole Moschino collection of women dressed as cakes, right?
Elizabeth Way:
Yes. 18th-century kind of women as cakes, and we really wanted one for the exhibition. Unfortunately, apparently those dresses are very fragile, which is a shame. It makes sense. They're very large and very beautiful. But we do have them. And actually, one of them is the cover of our book.
Kerry Diamond:
But that's obviously such a political statement on his part, sending women out dressed as vintage cake.
Elizabeth Way:
Absolutely.
Melissa Marra-Alvarez:
Well, and this idea of women as cake or women as pastries goes back centuries. One of the things that we talk about in the exhibition is, especially so during the Victorian era, there was this really concerted idea of conflating women with consuming sweets. And that kind of just took off. And then you have the 1950s where you would have magazines that would have dresses that were styled and then cakes that were styled, and they had such amazing aesthetic similarities there.
Elizabeth Way:
During the 18th century, we have this aesthetic, this Rococo aesthetic that we see in the fashion, that we see in the pastry. It really was a women's movement away from the Baroque, which was very heavy and masculine. And this turn towards... And of course, we're talking about aristocratic women, very, very wealthy women.
But this idea that a home didn't have to have all these huge public spaces that were for men. They could have these small, intimate domestic spaces, and that the food could have these aesthetics and that the fashion could be more feminized. And of course, men and women are wearing similar fabrics and using similar trims, but there is this kind of turn towards a feminine way of doing things. So it did start as kind of an empowering thing for a very select group of women.
Kerry Diamond:
Who were some of the designers featured? I know you've mentioned a few already.
Melissa Marra-Alvarez:
Some that look at fashion, food, and art. And so we have a really great dress by Comme des Garcons that has printed on it, this Arcimboldo print of, he did all of these portraits where his subjects were made up of, they were composed of fruits and vegetables.
We have pieces by the Spanish fashion designer, Agatha Ruiz de la Prada, who's known for her kind of food references in her art. She's always infusing her work with a sort of surrealist twist. And we have work by Steven Jones, the milliner. We have this great peanut butter and jelly hat sandwich. All of those are surrealist-inspired, and so they're taking their cue from designers from the past in the 1930s, like Elsa Schiaparelli, who did her famous lobster dress.
Elizabeth Way:
We have pieces by Chanel and Dior and Givency, but we also have these amazing designers from around the world. There's a Singapore brand called Reckless Ericka that has an ensemble with chili crab and durian on it, or a New York-based brand called Post Imperial. The designer is Nigerian American, and he has this ensemble inspired by jollof rice, but it's all about the colors and the textures and the comfort of jollof rice.
Carla Fernandez in Mexico City, who is this amazing sustainable designer and did this whole collection around corn and how corn is so indicative of Mexican identity. Sandy Liang is another New York-based designer who has this very kind of downtown, cool style, but her dad started Congee Village, and she had a fashion show there and she does T-shirts with the logo. We have a lot of great New York designers. We have designers from all over the world, but some of the New York ones I think are the best.
Kerry Diamond:
You mentioned the Elsa Schiaparelli dress, and I think that's, for a lot of fashion students, one of the first things that comes to mind, because it still is referenced all the time. A dress from 1937. I had no idea Salvador Dali had actually painted the dress.
Melissa Marra-Alvarez:
Schiaparelli was one of the early designers who was very, very interested in fusing fashion and art. And so she collaborated a lot with surrealist artists. And so she was friends with Jean Cocteau and Salvador Dali, and Salvador Dali also had an interest in fashion. They collaborated, and they worked on what today is known as the lobster dress together. So it's a white dress, it has a hand-painted lobster. Dali painted these little green pieces of parsley, so it looks like a tablecloth and the lobster on top of it.
And there's this very funny story that when the dress was complete, I don't know if it's true or not, but that Dolly wanted to slather mayonnaise all over it. But that Schiaparelli was like, "No, no." And so that is one of those kinds of legends around that dress. But it is a very iconic dress. I think it's the one dress that we associate Schiaparelli with the most, and it kind of became this emblem of her relationship with surrealism in her fashion design.
Kerry Diamond:
I had no idea Wallace Simpson wore the dress.
Elizabeth Way:
I think that's really how it became so well-known so quickly. She was pictured in Vogue wearing the dress and it was a part of her wedding tousseau.
Kerry Diamond:
That's interesting because I also read, thank you Wikipedia, that Salvador Dali thought lobsters represented sexuality.
Elizabeth Way:
And the lobster's kind of crawling up the dress towards the woman's midsection, so there's a lot of sexual connotations... And a lot of things, eggs, bread, a lot of these things were very eroticized by Dali. But the lobster was definitely a symbol of kind of female sexuality.
Melissa Marra-Alvarez:
Well, also, it was a phallic symbol for him. He had a lobster telephone, he had a bunch of other sculptures where he did lobster themes. Bread and lobster were the two food areas that Dali liked to use in his work a lot.
Kerry Diamond:
I'd love to know from each of you, what is your favorite thing about the exhibition? Elizabeth, you want to go first?
Elizabeth Way:
I'm going to take the easy way out and say, I love the way it all comes together. I think when you walk into both galleries, you're kind of submerged in these spaces that really are fun and whimsical, and hopefully when you read the labels, I know not everyone does, you kind of learn something. And we do certainly have more serious sections that look at activism, that look at sustainability. But it really is a fun exhibition. It's pink in the main gallery, our very talented exhibition designer, Kim Ackert, designed it to look like Leal, a food hall. So I think just the environment of being there with everything is my favorite part.
Melissa Marra-Alvarez:
I think my favorite part is all the symbolism. I want visitors to come through, in part, and we have some very obvious direct connections between food and fashion. We have production, processes of making in which food and fashion come together. And then we have these areas where food becomes a stand in for these elements of our day-to-day life. I think that's really important, and I think that's part of the reason, again, why it's so prevalent today and it's so important. And I think that's going to be a lot of fun for people as well. And so that's one of the things that I hope our visitors who visit the show are able to see and come away with.
Kerry Diamond:
Do you hope people dress up?
Elizabeth Way:
Oh, yes.
Melissa Marra-Alvarez:
I hope they come with all their food clothes.
Kerry Diamond:
I know earlier I talked about what I think is the political connection between this and women taking back ownership of their bodies and what they can do and eat. I forgot to mention the joy associated with this.
Melissa Marra-Alvarez:
It is super joyful, and it's a lot of fun. I think going back to why it's so popular right now, I think We're coming out of this very hard time in the world in general. There's lots of economic instability, there's lots of anxieties, and food is this joyous way of having a little fun with your clothes, of expressing a little bit about who you are, and That's really important.
Kerry Diamond:
And I think we're seeing that in the food world, specifically expressed through things like all these new cake artists, who've emerged, we're really seeing cake vocabulary change, which is so interesting. I mean, I'm sure the three of us all grew up with the same basic cake shapes and designs, and now you've got folks like Frosted Hag and Young Kombucha and From Lucy all just throwing out the playbook for that. Same with pop-ups here in New York City. Same in most cities across the country right now, it's such a pop-up moment where mostly young culinary creatives are kind of rejecting what the traditional restaurant has to be and doing things their own way. It's taking ownership of your life, your career, your body.
Melissa Marra-Alvarez:
You're talking about pop-ups, you see the same parallels in fashion, right? There's lots of young designers. Maybe you're starting off, you can't afford to have a boutique or a store, but you can have a pop-up, and it's a way of celebrating fashion and having fun and having your brand out there. Again, we're seeing these parallels between the food world and the fashion world.
Elizabeth Way:
And I think that social media has been such a game-changer, because you can advertise for yourself, you can find your community. And I think it does empower people to say, "This is what I want to do. And I don't have to make sheet cakes that are really sellable to start a business. I can do the weird, specific, unique thing that I do and find those people, connect with those people who want my thing." And I think it works with food, it works with fashion. We're just much more connected now. So people are empowered to just really lean into their creativity and individuality.
Kerry Diamond:
Let's go back to the exhibition for a second, because I know some of our favorite chefs are maybe in the exhibition? Did I hear that Angie Mar is in there?
Melissa Marra-Alvarez:
She is. When we were writing the book, or researching for the book, we came across her cookbook, and I personally was so blown away by her cookbook. It's just such a seductive, informative cookbook. And what was really interesting about it was, I felt that it was really laid out almost like a fashion magazine, right? You had photos, you had recipes, you had editorials, you had her essays that she wrote. You had these really heady, decadent photos that were in there and Angie's wearing all this high fashion, mixing it with food. And as we started to research more into her, we realized really how intertwined for her the worlds of food and fashion were. I remember reading that she designed a whole menu off of a Dior haute couture collection. Now you're bringing a whole other element of the combination between food and fashion, right?
They're about texture, materials, ingredients, and how they all come together, and the beauty that can come out of that, and the experiences. And so that is really how we started on our journey, diving down the Angie Mar road. So she's featured in the book. We have a dress that you wore in Town & Country that was designed by Christian Siriano in a section of the exhibition called The Fashion Cookbook. And so we look at designers and chefs who are coming at this topic of cooking through the lens of fashion or how they're using cookbooks to help establish a brand identity, which I think Angie's Cookbook was doing also.
Kerry Diamond:
Absolutely. And I think Christian designed the uniforms for her restaurant, Les Trois Chaveux as well.
Melissa Marra-Alvarez:
He did. And she's friends with so many designers. And so that wasn't also a nice way for us to approach the food and fashion topic a little bit from a different angle. We can't have food in the gallery, but here we had this chef who is this kind of emblem of these two worlds coming together.
Kerry Diamond:
The first cookbook that came to mind when you mentioned fashion cookbook is Bill Blast. I know there's a Bill Blast meatloaf recipe that has been floating around forever.
Elizabeth Way:
He was from the Midwest, right?
Kerry Diamond:
Indiana, I believe.
Melissa Marra-Alvarez:
Wally Simpson had a cookbook.
Kerry Diamond:
Did she really?
Melissa Marra-Alvarez:
She did. It was all about being a hostess.
Kerry Diamond:
Wow. Have you seen it?
Melissa Marra-Alvarez:
I have not seen it.
Kerry Diamond:
Oh my gosh. We have to track that down. That's a fascinating artifact.
Elizabeth Way:
Christian Dior had a cookbook that his company released in 1972. He was a huge gourmand, and he loved food and he would name his dresses, Bonbon or Chantilly Cream. So we also include Philip Lim, who does that beautiful cookbook, and the Smithsonian Family Cookbook, which I think is such a perfect example of this idea of the brand identity, because it's filled with the whole family around the big table. Of course wearing Sony, but it's just a whole aesthetic that you really see come through in the clothes as well.
Kerry Diamond:
Are there any talks associated with it? How can folks engage with the exhibit?
Melissa Marra-Alvarez:
It will have a symposium that is going to be a day of food and fashion. Actually, Angie is going to come and speak at our symposium. We're going to have a conversation with her where she's going to talk about her work, but it's going to be a day. We have some of our book contributors that wrote essays for the book who'll be speaking at the symposium. We've invited designers, industry people. It should be a really fun day.
It'll take place on November 3rd, which is a Friday. It will be at FIT in Archaic Murphy Amphitheater. And It's free. So it's free to the public, you just have to register. So we hope to have a bunch of our listeners come and join us at the symposium.
Elizabeth Way:
But the Museum of FIT website is where you can find all the information.
Kerry Diamond:
Any other talks or ways people can engage?
Melissa Marra-Alvarez:
We're having a really, really fun event around the exhibition with two women called the Taste Curators. One was a textile or fashion forecaster, and the other in the duo is a chef. And so we've paired with them, and We're going to have an event in which they are designing little bites around objects in the exhibition. So they're looking at qualities like color, texture, form, concept. And they are designing little tasties that you can come and have. And so we're going to have an evening where you can join us and Liz and I will be with the Taste Curators talking about the exhibition and the pieces and why we picked them, and They're going to talk about the recipes that they created and where the parallels between food and fashion lie.
Kerry Diamond:
Yeah, they're fantastic. They're Bombesquad members.
Melissa Marra-Alvarez:
So we're excited about that. And I think this exhibition has been a fun departure from some of the programming that We're normally able to do, because everybody loves food and a lot of people love fashion. We all get dressed, we all eat. And so it's created a space in the museum where we can step outside a little bit of some of the programming that we typically do and get our hands a little dirty.
Kerry Diamond:
Well, I can't wait to see the exhibition. Thank you so much for coming on the show. This is clearly a topic I love. I love FIT. I took your FIT Live program when I was in high school, and I do think it was kind of life-changing. I love the school and I'm so proud that it's here in New York City, and just love the work you're doing.
Melissa Marra-Alvarez:
Oh, it's great to count you as an attendee. I also am an alumni of FIT. I went to graduate school there, so working at the museum is kind of a dream come true.
Kerry Diamond:
Well, thank you both.
Elizabeth Way:
Thank You so much for having us.
Melissa Marra-Alvarez:
Thank you.
Kerry Diamond:
That's it for today's show. Hopefully I will see some of you at our launch party on Thursday or maybe I'll bump into you at the FIT exhibition. Our theme song is by the band Tra La La, Joseph Hazen is our studio engineer at Newsstand Studios. Our producer is Catherine Baker. Our associate producer is Jenna Sadhu and our editorial assistant is Londyn Crenshaw. Thanks for listening everybody. You are the Bombe.