Found Object - funnily enough, is an art term.

Objets trouvés, in French of course. Which I feel makes the phrase all the more elevated and elegant with a touch of sultry. Clearly, I’m longing to go back to Paris but thats a story for another time.

Found Object refers to things elevated by being chosen and placed. Marcel Duchamp was a pioneer for this, and an artistic movement transpired. Largely used by Dada, Surrealist and pop artists and continued to be used by modern artists - Damien Hirst and Sarah Lucas.

Duchamp chose an object not originally intended as art, then repurposed it for it’s aesthetic, surreal, or conceptual value. That’s exactly what I do in this series. I find the object, I choose it, and the choosing is the art. My art (or my choosing) is careful, considered and deeply personal.

So… Welcome to Found Objects debut! Now, its your time to make art and do the choosing. I’ve just made it that little bit easier to start.

Shop everything mentioned in this video here:

Vintage Wavy Wire Bottle Holder: 80s Memphis Style

Vintage Mid Century Modern Chrome & Faux Leather Magazine Rack

Vintage Artwork: Mid Century Tile Wall Decor

Bortoli Vintage Clear Glass Coupe Glasses Pair | Sculptural Stem Italian Barware

Vintage French Swan Letter Holder

Vintage Black Metal Candlestick - Postmodern ZigZag Design - Italy 1980s

Vintage Sculptural Post Modern Chrome Grid Fruit Bowl Italian Design

History Of Modern Furniture - Vintage Coffee Table Book

Vintage Mid Century Modern Bookends

Vintage HERMLE Wall Clock – 1980s German Postmodern Design – Memphis Era Bauhaus Style

As a thank you for reading this far - here is a secret link with sooo many more current online vintage finds! With love from me to you.

I watched the Met Gala carpet this year with one eye on my phone and one on the door, waiting to be surprised. The theme was Costume Art. The dress code, Fashion Is Art. And I kept thinking, someone is about to do something that stops me completely. Someone is going to make me feel something extraordinary.

They didn’t.

Not really. Not in the way that it should.

The exhibition itself, the actual show inside the Met, is extremely interesting. The curatorial conceit of pairing garments with art objects across 5,000 years of history, of organising the dressed body into thematic categories, of placing Georgina Godley’s “Pregnancy” dress beside a Degas bronze, Glenn Martens’ Y/Project suit opposite a Roman marble, Rei Kawakubo’s Comme des Garçons alongside a Max Weber sculpture — that’s a real thought provoking concept. Someone really thought about that. You can feel it.

The carpet, mostly, only offered a small slice of that.

Here’s what upsets me. Art is not just painting. It is not just a gown that references a painting. It is ceramics, installation, architecture, film, costume — the kind of costume that Irene Sharaff was making for Cleopatra in 1963, the kind that took years and obsession and an entire world-building sensibility. Did anyone pay tribute to costume designers? Nobody thought outside the canvas, literally.

If Alexander McQueen were dressing someone for that carpet, it would not have been a gown. It would have been a statement, a wound, a provocation a entire experience. He understood best that fashion’s job is not to decorate the body but to say something about it. Something uncomfortable, if necessary. Something that keeps you up.

Take the pregnant body, since the exhibition raised it. We’ve been dressing baby bumps for decades and although that is beautiful, is it surface level when it comes to the theme. What could be explored is what the pregnant body is actually doing, the biological negotiation happening beneath the surface, the way a foetus takes from its mother, the nutrients, the iron, the sleep, the sense of self. That’s not just a bump. That’s an act of creating life dressed up as tenderness when it is so much more. An artist would explore this. A designer who is making art would find a way to put that on a body and walk it up the stairs of the Met. As a society, have we become scared to invoke provocative thought?

The same goes for the ageing body. A wrinkle is not the point. The point is what accumulated. What the skin has absorbed, what the bones remember, what decades of carrying things does to a person’s entire architecture. The ageing body and the pregnant body aren’t overlooked. If anything, they’re looked at too much, too literally, without any curiosity about what’s actually underneath.

An example of that curiosity was hanging inside the exhibition the whole time. Rei Kawakubo’s Comme des Garçons ensemble from spring/summer 1997 — the collection known as Body Meets Dress, Dress Meets Body. Kawakubo has never accepted the body as a given. Her work lives in the in-between: clothes and not-clothes, fashion and anti-fashion, comfort and its deliberate refusal. That 1997 collection was a direct dismantling of the decade before it. While the 1980s was an era of sculpted bodies, Kawakubo was constructing garments lined with kidney-shaped down pillows, rejecting that notion by creating entirely unfamiliar silhouettes that distorted and reshaped the body. The body was being remade by the clothes. It was an act of critique as much as creation — a commentary on what women were expected to look like and what happened when a designer simply refused that expectation entirely. She was saying that the relationship between a body and what covers it is not always beautiful. That it can be uncomfortable, confrontational, strange. That the body itself is all of those things, and that fashion has something to say about that too.

Art isn’t supposed to make you comfortable. Van Gogh’s sunflowers are almost unbearably beautiful and they came from a mind in absolute turmoil. The greatest work tends to hold both — the gorgeous surface and the dark interior. That tension is art. Where was the tension on that carpet?

The phrase Fashion Is Art — is not wrong at all. But I’m not sure anyone on that carpet really thought about why? Fashion is not just the garment. It’s the fabric and the hand that chose it. It’s the show, the casting, the mood of the room, the location and why that location. It’s the designer’s biography — their heritage, their obsessions, the city they grew up in, the heartbreak or the hunger that shaped how they see a body. It’s the stylist’s eye, the accessories, the photographer, the set. It’s the writers who contextualise all of it afterwards. Fashion pays homage to the past and quietly reinvents the future. It is a direct line to the current state of the world — to politics, to climate, to collective anxiety and collective joy. When you understand fashion that way, the claim that it is art becomes almost inarguable. The problem was that nobody on that carpet seemed to be standing inside the full weight of the word.

Fashion is art. Designers are artists. But the conditions in which fashion currently operates — the pace, the volume, the relentlessness of it — work directly against the thing that makes art art. Where is the artist’s statement? What personal experience of that designer or the celebrity wearing the gown, shaped the way they see a body, or a garment, or the relationship between the two? What made them choose that shoe — and if it wasn’t a conscious choice, what does the unconscious choice say?

These are the questions that would make a look on that carpet really interesting. Not who made the dress but why this dress, why now, why this person wearing it.

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And then there’s Anna. People underestimate what Anna Wintour is doing when she puts together that room. The seating chart at the Met Gala is, in its own way, a curatorial act. Arguably the most loaded one of the evening. Who sits next to whom. What conversations get sparked, which ones get deliberately avoided. What the room feels like when it’s full. There is an atmosphere being designed there, as intentionally as any collection. That, too, is a kind of art. The art of the room. The art of the arrangement.

I don’t think the guests don’t care. I think most of them care very much. But I’ve been watching the Met Gala gradually become something else over the last few years, and I find it sad. There used to be a sense that being invited meant something more. That it came with a responsibility to the idea, to the institution, to the months of thought and collaboration that could make a single look feel genuinely extraordinary. Now I wonder if most guests and designers are simply happy to put on another fashion show instead of allowing their creativity to take on a challenge which is the theme.

The Met gave them a real provoking theme this year. 5,000 years of the dressed body. The naked body, the classical body, the pregnant body, the ageing body. All of it sitting inside one of the greatest museums in the world, waiting to be in conversation with what walked through the door for years to come.

Most of what walked through the door didn’t have as much (as an artist should) to say back.

Welcome!

Disclaimer: apologies for this first issue being super scratchy. I had previously drafted the first issue of The Pull to perfection. When I was ready to post, i went searching for my draft and it had vanished. To say i was devastated would be an under statement.

Despite this set back, i learnt a valuable lesson. To stop being such a perfectionist! So i bit the bullet and posted Volume 1. I realised my need for perfection was the ultimate procrastination. I’m never going to start if i don’t know how to finish.

So i hope you enjoy the finds although they now don’t include a storyline or caption. But hey! They’re the HOTTEST vintage pieces on The RealReal for under $300 and there’s plenty more where that came from. Come along for the ride.

Kiss Kiss

Tom Ford Wide Leg Pants

Roberto Cavalli Vintage 2005 Blouse

La Perla Silk Mesh Accents Robe

Chanel Vintage 2001 Boots

Chanel Vintage 2001 Top

Marlowe Wool Fringe Trim Accent Pantsuit

Christian Louboutin Suede Fringe Trim Accent Slides

Cinq à Sept Wide Leg Pants

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There’s a photograph of Francis Bacon sitting in his studio on Reece Mews that I keep coming back to. The floor is barely visible beneath decades of accumulation — torn newspaper, paint tins, brushes stiffened beyond use, photographs of bodies he was in the process of destroying and remaking on canvas. The chaos is total. And yet Bacon sits in the middle of it with his hands loosely clasped, looking directly at the camera, completely unbothered. The striped shirt is almost jaunty.

I find this more revealing than any of his paintings. The studio wasn’t incidental to the work — it was the work. He needed that density around him, that layered wreckage of images and objects and accidents. It was how his mind operated made physical. To clean it would have been to silence something.

Art is meant to make you feel something. Sometimes uncomfortable is that feeling. Bacon understood this better than almost anyone — his work was an act of exposure, the inner workings of a dark and precise mind made visible on canvas. To look at it properly is to want to devour it. To understand the source rather than just the surface.

I think about this when I think about what it means to have a space — or a wardrobe, or a life — that actually reflects how you see. Not curated for an audience. Just true.

The Edit

Gucci F/W 1999 Black Jersey Keyhole Top — $373

Tom Ford understood that the most dangerous thing a garment can do is reveal very little. This top has been doing that since 1999 and hasn't stopped.

1996 FW Richard Tyler Velvet Coat

Richard Tyler's velvet coat is the kind of piece that makes everything else in your wardrobe suddenly make sense. One of those finds that doesn't come twice.

Lace Bias Dress

Sheer, asymmetrical, completely itself. While everyone else is buying the doily dress du jour, this one predates the trend by decades and doesn't know it exists. Slick hair back, find a terrace somewhere warm, let it do everything.

1970s Italian Cowhide and Chrome Chair — AU$592

Cowhide and chrome, 1970s Italy. A chair that walks into the room before you do. The kind of thing that makes people forget what they were about to say.

Brutalist Kinetic Balancing Sculpture — AU$344

Perfectly balanced and slightly threatening. The best objects in a room are the ones that make guests stop mid-sentence — this is one of them. Put it on a stack of books and watch what happens.

Dark Brown Looped Ceramic Vessel — AU$108

The shape does something to you before you've decided what it is. Rich brown, body-like, completely ambiguous. Vase or sculpture — it doesn't matter. It belongs somewhere it can be looked at.

Silver Studded Cylinder — AU$216

Unpolished silver, slightly industrial, completely unplaceable. Use it for anything — the object doesn't care and that's exactly what makes it interesting.

Abstract Figurative Sketches — AU$94

Two sketches, not one. The black pulls you closer before you've decided to move. Warm enough to live with, strange enough to keep looking at. That balance is very hard to find.

The Reference

The Brutality of Fact — David Sylvester

If you want to understand why the studio looked the way it did, start here. Bacon in conversation with David Sylvester — The Brutality of Fact. An artist explaining himself without quite meaning to.

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