The year 1996 witnessed the birth of Dolly the sheep, the release of It Was Written, Nas’s sophomore album, the Oscar for Best Actor being awarded to Nicolas Cage (for Leaving Las Vegas, no less), and the divorce of Prince Charles and Lady Di. That same year, Liz Goldwyn met Susan Cianciolo, while both were visiting London. The filmmaker, author, and collector was a student at the School of Visual Arts at the time, commuting uptown to intern at Sotheby’s fashion department. Cianciolo had already graduated from Parsons School of Design, worked as an illustrator for Geoffrey Beene, and quit her job at Badgley Mischka to launch Run, her Gesamtkunstwerk of a fashion line. Goldwyn immediately fell under Cianciolo’s spell. And because destiny is a hell of a mapmaker, it turned out that the two New Yorkers lived across from each other on Canal and Broadway.
“It was quite a time to be living down there, New York was so different,” says Goldwyn over the phone. “It wasn’t Disneyfied the way it is now. There was no social media, which was amazing. If you said you were gonna meet someone at 7 o'clock at Film Forum, you just showed up.” With that erstwhile Gotham as a backdrop, Cianciolo knit together a universe of collaborators—which in addition to Goldwyn included Bernadette Corporation, Rita Ackermann, and Julianne Nicholson—and designed 11 collections of the cult de/re-constructed garments that sealed her place in fashion history.
A slice of that legacy is, as of today, a little more accessible. In partnership with Bridget Donahue, the gallery that represents Cianciolo, and the creative tech company Special Offer, Inc., Goldwyn is hosting a live auction of her collection of Cianciolo’s archive. Bids for custom Run pieces—in human and Barbie size—start at $111, and the special auction will be digitally broadcast for the next two weeks on www.liz.run. Goldwyn describes the website, which will live on past the auction, as “a video game meets a digital archive meets a love letter to New York in the ‘90s.” Users can toggle back and forth between contemporary and archival views of the clothes while listening to commentary by Cianciolo, Goldwyn, and curator and cultural critic Jeppe Ugelvig.
Goldwyn has collected vintage clothing since she was 13 and going dollar-a-pound thrifting in LA. “My thing was, Will I wear this when I’m 40?” she remembers. Why let go of this historical collection today? On a personal level, Goldwyn says she “spent the last year really reflecting on different periods of [her] life and letting go of certain things.” The publication of her latest, and most personal, book, Sex, Health, and Consciousness, last fall was part of that cycle. In a broader sense, the timing just felt right. “Everybody is obsessed with the ‘90s … And [Susan’s] stuff has not been available at all.”
Run Restaurant, the living art installation cum functioning restaurant that Cianciolo set up in Alleged Galleries’s Meatpacking District space for nine days in March 2001, marked the end of Run as a fashion line. That iconic experiment, which was reinvented by Cianciolo for the 2017 Whitney Biennial, was a testament to the spirit behind Run—a space of punk scrappiness, creative freedom, intimate collaboration, and making art as a way of life. With the Run archive auction and digital art project, Goldwyn pens a contemporary ode to that era.
