![]() The artist has collaborated with Swarovski on a jewellery line and designed an 18-piece men's collection for cult fashion emporium Opening Ceremony in 2012, based on a series of drawings entitled Fashions for Men she sketched as a gift for Lennon for their 1969 wedding. (Fur buyer Jack Cohen then had to lug them all over to their apartment on Christmas Eve). She wears the same outfit over and over, yet she is also known for her sporadic, voracious shopping sprees, one of which involved dropping $400,000 on 70 fur coats for herself and late husband John Lennon at Bergdorf Goodman. New York-based label Threeasfour, who borrowed her dot drawings for its Spring-Summer 2010 ready-to-wear collection, staged a recreation of Cut Piece during their show, while singer Peaches performed the work as part of Ono’s Meltdown this June. For some, Ono's 1964 Cut Piece performance marked the high point of her style, where, in an abstract commentary on discarding materialism, she invited members of the audience to snip off her clothes with a large pair of scissors. She is a woman who can pull off a sack or sheet with poise, as she proved in her Bagism and bed-in days. Ono is no fashion plate but instead projects an enigmatic, inscrutable aura that transcends mere clothes. She somehow manages to look extravagant without the use of colour or prints. Punctuation tends to come from those quirky hats and shades, whether Lennon-esque round glasses or bold, dark wraparound styles. She favours androgynous, tailored black silhouettes built on clean basics like waistcoats, with trousers, v-neck tops and men's jackets custom-cut to define her waist and frame her bosom: an alpha female wardrobe, of sorts. Indeed, like many artists her clothes are a form of blank canvas, her Japanese roots always apparent. Her sartorial taste may be distinctive, but for all her intentionally atonal, primal caterwauling as the frontwoman of the Plastic Ono Band, and zany antics as a conceptual filmmaker, Ono has never been that outrageous when it comes to fashion. (Some of the other 113 eclectic figures include Tilda Swinton, Vanessa Paradis and Edie Campbell). Sporting a black trilby and the ever-present shades, with a soupçon of cleavage on display, Ono is also among the sprinkling of Third Age icons featured in Karl Lagerfeld and Carine Roitfeld's coffee table tome, The Little Black Jacket: Chanel's Classic Revisited. The evergreen artist and activist, who released her 13th studio album in 2012, discussed her role as curator of this year's Meltdown festival, which is on at the Southbank Centre in London this June. Take, for example, her outfit on The Jonathan Ross Show on UK television in May, where she rocked a chocolate leather jacket with peplum and a wide brim black hat, tilted just so. For an 80-year-old, Yoko Ono is incredibly cool.
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