ESSAY—TRACES OF LIPSTICK ON GLOSSY SURFACES

When I meet Irene Ha, the artist behind Baby Reni, in the exhibition space of Das Leben am Haverkamp, it is still empty. But when she tells me about her plans, I can clearly picture what it is going to look like. It will become a showroom, with enormous photographs on the walls that seem straight out of a glamorous beauty campaign. I imagine myself walking in. In the corners of my eyes, I catch something shimmering. The space is composed in such a way that my gaze is naturally drawn towards the elegant displays. It is clear that something is being sold to me here, and I know immediately that I want to have it. I’m just a girl. My hand is already resting on my purse in my trouser pocket. Longingly, I walk towards the displays, but they are empty. Strange. I want to have it. But I am not entirely sure what ‘it’ is.

One: the shop window

Ha studied fashion at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy and found her way into visual art through that route. When I interviewed her, she told me that her childhood drawings always featured a clothes line, and that she used to draw the clothes she wanted to own hanging from it. As a child, I was not particularly fond of drawing, except in my TOPModel colouring books. Every page was filled with the same six to eight girls, for whom you could design the outfits yourself. I carefully put together matching outfits for the girls and coloured them in with my favourite pencils. When I was bored, I would flip through the book and look at my own creations. I imagined what it would be like to wear them myself. Like Ha, I fell in love with fashion at a very young age.

In my teenage years, the obsession only grew stronger. I devoured fashion blogs and magazines and cut out photographs to hang up in my bedroom. Every season, I knew what the latest collection from every major fashion house looked like. I tried to copy celebrities’ outfits with whatever I could afford from Zara with my clothing allowance. At that time, there were many things I could not quite grasp: the social dynamics of secondary school classes felt rather impenetrable to me, and I simply could not seem to get small talk ‘right’. But I had complete control over my clothes. I could make myself stand out or disappear into the crowd. I could pair a floral dress with an enormous leather jacket and worn-out combat boots. Every day, I could be someone else.

There is something touching about a young girl with a love for fashion. She has found a first way of presenting herself to the world as she sees herself. Or as she wishes she could be. But there is also something uncomfortable about it. To what extent is she being pushed in this direction by the world around her? Sometimes I wonder why, as a child, I was never really taught to build things, like my younger brother, who was always busy with saws and hammers. In the meantime I endlessly changed my dolls’ outfits and braided the manes of my My Little Ponies. Not that I did not enjoy it, but how much choice did I really have in a children’s realm where this simply seemed to be how things were supposed to be, where the toys handed to me mostly revolved around appearance? From a very young age, I was unconsciously fed the message that that was the best I could be: beautiful.

The exhibition BEUTE is set up as a showroom without a product. The title of the exhibition refers to a typo made by Baby Reni’s regular photographer Nikola Lamburov when he wanted to name their joint drive-folder “BEAUTY.” Lamburov and Ha collaborated closely on the concept for the exhibition, which originated from the idea of ​​shooting an editorial together for a magazine.

The title BEUTE is not only the result of a typo; it also refers to a German word meaning loot or prey. It reminds me of how, during my teenage years, I felt increasingly uncomfortable in the shopping streets where I searched for treasures. Where it once felt as if I had claimed my new clothes as loot, I later began to feel more and more as if I myself was being lured into shops as prey. Or was I being made into the perfect prey for a man? Dazzlingly beautiful, with the skin of a child, balancing on high heels I cannot run away in.

Behind the gleaming shop window lurks a dark world; we all know that.  I don’t need to tell you about sweatshops, landfills, mass consumption and polyester. Towards the end of my teenage years, I realised that following trends essentially means constantly getting rid of clothes and buying something new. I opened the fashion magazines I had loved so dearly in previous years and could see nothing but greed and excessive luxury. Everything about it felt fake. My childhood love had turned into something that disgusted me.

Two: the studio

Coincidentally, Irene Ha and I both have a grandmother who has worked in a sewing atelier.  There are certain skills that feel as though I have always possessed them, which I could really only have inherited from my grandmother through my mother. For instance, I can feel what fabric a garment is made of and know what to look for to determine whether it is sturdy and well-constructed. I can tell which fabrics will wear out quickly or lose their shape after only a few washes. I put outfits together as though creating a collage on my own body. I know which colours and fabrics complement one another and how to build an interesting silhouette. It feels so instinctive that I sometimes forget not everyone can do this.

The craftsmanship behind making fashion and clothing is often overlooked. For much of history, it was considered women’s work, carried out quietly behind the front door. Women skewed and mended for their own families, or to bring in a little extra income. The knowledge required for this was passed down to their daughters. This was how the girl math of delicate lace, difficult knitting patterns and intricate embroidery was handed down from generation to generation. Meanwhile, men occupied themselves with the boy math of selling fabric and clothing for far more money than they paid the women who made them.

Ha’s grandmother had her own sewing atelier in a Vietnamese village. Today, the small studio has been taken over by her aunt. School uniforms are made there, along with wedding dresses and other traditional garments for people in the village. The atelier also alters dresses so they fit the wearer perfectly or can be worn again by someone else.
“Sometimes people think that everything that comes from Vietnam is fast fashion, but then they fail to see the craftsmanship that exists there too,” Ha tells me. She shows me the handmade fabrics she brought back from Vietnam. Although she has lived in the Netherlands her entire life, she says the sense of community from the Vietnamese village lives on within her, and in her art. Baby Reni brings her collaborators into the spotlight. Just as a fashion brand often surrounds itself with a circle of it-girls and other people who share the aesthetic, Baby Reni also has a regular photographer, a make-up artist and a number of models with whom she frequently works together. Often, like Ha, they are Asian; and  they always share the same sense of fashion and beauty. The exhibition BEUTE also grew out of a close collaboration with photographer Lamburov, rather than being Ha’s work alone. Ha therefore sees ‘Baby Reni’ not merely as an artist’s name; she describes it to me as a ‘fictional agency’.
The name does not represent a single person, but embodies the work, style, and creativity of many people. The focus shifts to the people surrounding the artwork. It is as if the shop window offers a view straight into the studio, where you can see people going about their daily work and witness the care and attention with which each garment is made.

From this same sense of community, The Baby Reni Foundation was born. It is an art space in Ha’s own living room, where she hosts exhibitions by female and queer artists whose work nourishes her own. She tells me she often misses the voices of those artists in other exhibition spaces and therefore decided to create a place for them herself.
“I wanted to see whether I could use the things I’ve achieved with my own artistic practice to give visibility to other people I find inspiring.” Like the rest of her work, the name "Baby Reni Foundation" carries a sense of humor. The somewhat grand notion of a “Foundation” is put into perspective by applying it to her own living room, while the term could equally refer to the beauty product.

Last year, Baby Reni created BOWS, a sculpture consisting of two enormous girlish bows: one velvety black, the other pink with polka dots. Bows are often seen as decoration and therefore unimportant, but here they are elevated to the work of art itself. It is a comical critique of the dichotomy between art and decoration. Baby Reni dissolves a similar dichotomy by organizing exhibitions in her own living room: that of the public versus the personal or domestic, that of the creative director versus the woman sewing from home. With her artworks, she has already brought the girl's room to the museum. Now, her own home is a museum too. Life and art flow into one another; they can’t be separated. 

Three: the magpie

The shop window and the studio have come to symbolise my love-hate relationship with the fashion world. I have turned away from its commercial façade and fallen in love again with the craftsmanship and hidden history of women’s labour behind it. Yet I cannot escape the fact that the fashion world requires both. Without the sale of expensive perfumes and logo-covered handbags, the ateliers of major fashion houses could not preserve artisanal traditions. But then how should I feel about my lost childhood love? How do I reconcile these two extremes?

Baby Reni teaches me that I don’t have to. Her work is full of apparent contradictions that coexist. Colourful and humorous artworks can also ask profound and substantial questions. You can be just a girl and still be taken seriously.
The exhibition BEUTE resembles a polished showroom, yet its title contains spelling mistakes. Ha admitted, with some amusement, that she feels like a magpie sometimes. “When I see something shiny, I want to have it.” I do not have to either hate the fashion world or love it. I don’t have to take stock of the fashion world as a whole and then pass a definitive moral judgment. I am allowed to pick out the things I find beautiful and collect them like shiny jewelry and beads.

After our interview, Ha occasionally sends me a photo of her work in progress. She has painted the walls mint green and purple carpet is going to be laid. I see the images from the photoshoot she has chosen to hang in the showroom: three pairs of lips, stained in bold colour combinations. Between the teeth sits the glossy tube of a lipstick. The images are indistinguishable from those of a high-end beauty campaign, except that on one of the lipstick tubes some traces of lipstick have been left behind. It breaks the perfection of the image, makes it human.  

Read more about the exhibition 'BEUTE' here.

Author: Linde van Wingerden
Editor: Laure van den Hout (Mister Motley)

Foto: Nikola Lamburov
Make-up artist: Kathinka Gernant
Models: Yade Noe, Thu-Anh Nguyen, Ren Takagi

Supported by Creative Industries Fund NL and Gemeente Den Haag.