Hemlines

New York-based Irish artist Catherine Owens has a new fashion-inspired exhibition opening at Dublin's Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery of Modern Art next Friday. Called In, the show explores all those knotty problems about what's hot now and what's not and whether we should really allow ourselves to become so preoccupied with the matter at all. Owens's work is never ponderous or didactic, so expect to be amused as well as provoked. In runs at the gallery until August 1st.

And here is another exhibition which seems to be investigating similar territory. Irish photographer Conor Healy has a show opening in Nottingham called Fashion Victims which takes the phrase, "to die for", to its literal conclusion. Instead of having his subjects say they wouldn't be caught dead in certain clothes, he asks them in what exactly would they like to be seen dead. Could you come back later to us with that one, Conor? We'd like a little time to think about it.

Best-remembered for his fashion photography during the 1940s and 1950s for Harper's Bazaar and Vogue, Erwin Blumenfeld's autobiography has just been published in English. His text is often far less charming than his pictures and offers a dramatic change from the usual, fairly vacuous fashion prose. Carmel Snow, for example, the Dalkey-born editor of Harper's Bazaar he describes as "one of the ugliest of the ugly career-women that are so plentiful in America" and is equally disparaging about her talented art director Alexey Brodovitch (a wonderful book on his work has just been published by Assouline). Definitely a meaty read, Blumenfeld's Eye to I is published by Thames & Hudson at 19.95 in the UK.