Do you have your chocolate egg ready for tomorrow, so you can celebrate Easter in style with your friends or maybe simply drench your sorrows in chocolate if you're alone?
If you do have your egg, perfect. But, if you didn't get any chocolate egg or you don't like chocs, you can still get inspired by perfectly ordinary eggs and maybe spend some time rediscovering egg inspirations in art and fashion.
Eggs are considered as a precious ingredient in art: egg tempera (adding egg as a binding element for pigment) goes back a long way and was even found in the mural paintings of the Palace of Nestor in Pylos, dating to 1200BC. In that case, egg yolk was used as the binder and helped creating a quick-drying and long-lasting wash.
Yet, at the end of March, scientists at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany, found out that, while 15th century European painters started using oil as a binder, artists such as Sandro Botticelli and Leonardo Da Vinci still employed eggs but for other reasons.
The yolk protected indeed the paints from unwanted changes that occurred when moisture was absorbed from the environment, because the water was captured in the protein layer around the pigments.
So, yolk was a sort of antioxidant and allowed painters to prevent the wrinkling and yellowing that may have been caused by humidity. Researchers found traces of egg, for example, in Sandro Botticelli's Lamentation over the Dead Christ.
But, while Old Master artists used egg to stop the paint from degrading, therefore giving us the opportunity to admire their masterpieces today, in modern art eggs have been used in different ways.
The shape of an egg is extremely sensual, but broken or cracked eggs are great metaphors as they evoke our Humpty Dumpty-like human fragilities or our exhausted minds, maybe cracking up under extreme stressful moments, besides using crushed eggshell in an artwork can add an intriguing texture.
For Neo Pop Surrealist artist Philip Colbert, eggs are fun and he interprets them in a Pop Art key, like a child would, using bright colours, and replicating fried eggs on prints, but also on his suits and on the sneakers that he designed a while back in collaboration with Adidas.
Yet, eggs can also represent an irreverent provocation: in Sarah Lucas' "Self Portrait With Fried Eggs" (1996), the artist looks back at the viewer with a confrontational stare while posing with two fried eggs placed over her breasts.
Food here represents a sexual body part and the eggs are used to hint at the degrading objectification of the female body and used to subvert it.
A couple of decades after that iconic self-portrait Lucas, came up with other works referencing eggs, including an itinerant performance - "1000 Eggs: For Women" - that consisted in her female friends and collaborators throwing 1000 eggs at white gallery walls.
Interpreted as a take on the Pagan fertility rite of egg throwing in Spring, the performance also engaged with ideas of femininity, established a sense of community and solidarity and opposed pretensions. It was therefore to be interpreted like an act of rebellion and resistance (think about the gesture of throwing an egg at a politician).
This sense of ebullient rebellion also appeared in the sets that provided the backgrounds for Michael Clark's choreographies in Charles Atlas' "Hail the New Puritan" (1986).
This fictionalized documentary about the Scottish dancer and choreographer and his troupe featured a sequence to The Fall’s music in a brightly coloured space with monumental fried-egg flowers and a pair of giant Y-fronts, elements borrowed from Trojan's painting "Female Trouble" (1984), but also reminiscent of Salvador Dalí.
Dalí was fascinated by the duality of the egg with its hard exterior and soft interior and often used the egg as a symbol in his works (an egg sculpture is also precariously balanced on the roof of his house in the town of Cadaqués, Catalonia, View this photo, and integrated in the bronze sculpture "Space Venus" to hint at renewal and the future, View this photo).
Dalí's painting "Eggs on the Plate Without a Plate" (1932) features a plate of fried eggs and a fried egg suspended by a string: here the egg evokes intra-uterine images and memories that he experienced in the womb before birth, it is therefore conceived as a symbol of both hope and love.
Yet there are times when fried eggs also lose their symbolism: in the video for Björk's single "Venus as a Boy" (1993) directed by Sophie Muller, the singer is in a kitchen, fondling and cooking eggs.
In the video eggs were inspired by the singer's favorite book, "Story of the Eye" by Georges Bataille, a novella which deals with the sexual perversions of a pair of teenagers.
At one point in the book, a girl, Simone, uses boiled eggs for sexual stimulation, but in the video the egg is eventually fried, an idea of the director who didn't have the time to read the book Björk had given her and insisted on having a fried rather than a boiled egg.
For some contemporary artists the shells and the membranes of eggs are more inspiring: Marcela Calderón Andrade's works are inspired by an observation of the complexity of relationships in nature and are often composed of organic elements such as seeds, leaves and the inner membrane of eggshells. This material allows the Colombian artist to create sculptures of unsustainable lightness.
Her works "Círculo-Infinito", "Churo-Espiral", and "Vibración-Onda" are all made with the internal membranes of eggshells - a protective structure of life - which, after breaking, are capable of reassembling thanks to the memory that matter can retain, implementing a process of destruction and recomposition.
But the fragility of eggshells and internal membranes can also point at other symbols and metaphors: in the '90s Helena Sandström designed her "Eggshell" necklace that featured delicate flowers made with hens' egg shells linked together with a 24 carat gold cord.
With this piece the Swedish artist and jewelry designer wanted to prompt the wearer to think about special occasions and the value of things as wearing the piece meant immediately destroying it since it was incredibly fragile.
BUt what about eggs and fashion? You could write an essay about the food and fashion connection, dedicating an entire chapter to eggs: Turkish designer Tanju Babacan's A/W 13 collection was an egg-xtravaganza à la Agatha Ruiz de la Prada (remember her A/W 09 collection? View this photo) with dresses, blouses, coats and accessories covered in prints or appliqued motifs of fried eggs.
Babacan's egg-tastic black fur coat with fried eggs found a more wearable interpretation in Anya Hindmarch's A/W 16 collection that featured coats with fried egg-shaped fur patches that looked a bit like flowers.
Accessories had their egg-tastic moments with JW Anderson who included in his S/S 22 Loewe collection goatskin sandals with a heel that gave the surreal impression the wearer had just stepped on an egg, irredeemably crushing it.
Among the youngest generations of designers completely obsessed with eggs there are contemporary artist Carly Mark and her former assistant, Ayla Argentina. The duo formed the indie label Puppets and Puppets, launched in 2019.
Their S/S 20 collection moved from Fabergé eggs, the Grand Duchess Anastasia of Russia and American Psycho, three very unlikely inspirations, and featured shoes fashioned from egg cartons and nipple coverings with fried eggs.
The duo revised the egg inspiration in their A/W 23 collection that featured fried eggs applied on shoes, bags and incorporated in their beaded bustiers.
Puppets and Puppets usually balance wearability with playfulness in their collections, something that calls to mind the work of another egg fan, Cinzia Ruggeri.
The late Italian artist, fashion and interior designer was an egg-stimator and often used eggs in her collections or installations: among her egg designs there is an apron covered with appliqued fried eggs that reveals her rich vein of kitchen sink surrealism, but also an hilarious earring for a quail (obviously featuring an egg pendant).
When she came up with her menswear line (Cinzio Ruggeri), the designer highlighted in the press notes that the man she had in mind for this line had "an unbearable personality", but was "marvellous to put up with" and that he loved "adventure, music halls, the night and Fabergé eggs".
Yet, rather than getting inspired by Fabergé eggs, Ruggeri remained impartial to the humble egg that also appeared on humorous silk blouses from the early '80s that she designed for ready-to-wear Italian brand Bloom (one featured for example a broken egg appliqued over a pocket and a fried egg underneath, as if the yolk was being poured into the pocket that magically expelled it fried and ready to be eaten).
Once, during an interview, Ruggeri told me about the funniest designs she created, among the others she mentioned shirts inspired by habits she hated like people who played with the pendants on their necklaces, pulling them back and forth.
This gesture inspired her blouses with appliqued motifs of a dog house on one side and a tree on the other and a little chain with a movable dog in between, or a hen and a fried egg with a movable egg suspended between them. In this way, the wearer would find a purpose in an otherwise meaningless and annoying repetitive gesture.
In the mid-'80s Ruggeri created also a white mini-dress covered in appliqued motifs of three-dimensional snakes and eggs: well, a snake is an oviparous animal, after all, so the idea worked pretty well.
Just don’t look for deep meanings, because Ruggeri probably wasn't looking for any in-depth conceptual story behind this motif, but she definitely liked its shape and the simplicity and fun possibilities offered by the humble fried egg.
Hilarious, irreverent, punk and defiant, her designs with sunny side-up yolks were a way to raise two fingers to serious and boring fashion, because you must break a few eggs to make an omelette.
So, on this long Easter weekend, enjoy your eggs whichever way they come, be they fried, scrambled, poached or boiled, or, if you're lucky enough, chocolate ones, always bearing in mind that art and fashion's egg-licious obsession goes way beyond Easter.
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