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The Art of Fashion

KARL is pleased to announce The Art of Fashion, opening October 3, 2025, with a live fashion show featuring Tony award winning and acclaimed designer Brandin Vaughn, known for dressing some of the biggest names in entertainment— such as Beyoncé in her historic Cowboy Carter and Renaissance Tours.

This collaborative exhibition continues KARL’s mission to dissolve the boundaries between disciplines, this time highlighting artists and designers working across mixed media, textiles, and fabric-based practices—materials and modes historically dismissed as craft but now decisively re-evaluated within the canon of contemporary fine art.

From quilting and garment construction to assemblage and soft sculpture, The Art of Fashion asks: what is fashion if not sculpture worn? What is fiber if not form? What happens when the seam becomes a gesture, the pattern a conceptual strategy?

Anchored by Brandin Vaughn’s presentation, the show will feature a curated group of artists who harness the language of material—thread, cloth, dye, repetition, touch—to explore identity, labor, and the gendered histories of making. Their work challenges the hierarchies that have long divided “art” from “craft,” and invites viewers to consider the aesthetic and political power embedded in the textile tradition.

This fall edition of KARL is both a celebration and a reclamation—of fashion as fine art, of fabric as theory, and of the artists whose practices bridge the tactile and the conceptual.

KARL is proud to be part of MoAD's Nexus: SF/Bay Area Black Art Week.

About

Participating Galleries and Organizations

The Bay Area has garnered significant media attention in recent years, often highlighting its challenges rather than its successes. With Karl, our goal is to celebrate the thriving arts ecosystem that persists and flourishes despite the headlines. Many of the participating organizations have championed artists for decades, while emerging galleries bring fresh energy to the local scene. Together, we aim to showcase the resilience and creativity that make this community so unique.

Photo of a gallery with polished concrete floors and white walls. There are six paintings on the back wall and two tall rectangular pedestals in front of the wall. One has an abstract, bronze polka dotted sculpture that is bulbous on the top and has three legs, the other sculpture is the exact same shape but is mint green rather than white.

COL Gallery

Photograph of a studio with tall ceilings. There are artists seated working at a long table on the right, and a person wearing a black mask stands next to one of them. The ceilings are tall, and many boxes and artworks are visible in the lofted area.

Creativity Explored

Oblique view of a gallery with long white wall featuring 6 paintings. The work in the foreground has layered abstract forms that are semi-transparent. There is soft warm light in the gallery and a window looking out to the street. Across the street, there is a car and a pride hanging from the building.

Glass Rice

View of a gallery with white walls and polished concrete floors. There are four paintings along walls in the background, they feature bright colors and Black and brown figures. There is a wooden abstract sculpture on the floor towards the lower lefthand side of the image.

Jonathan Carver Moore

People in a gallery looking at paintings hung salon style. These paintings featuring brightly colored animals: a black, blue and orange bird, a red and turquoise beetle, and three other insects. Further in the background there are many small, brightly colored works that are densely hung.

NIAD Art Center

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Exhibited.At

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Venus & Victory

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MAG Galleries

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TINT Gallery

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SLATE Contemporary

Photo of the part Levi's Plaza, a five-story brick building with large windows on each floor. The exterior of the building features abstract painted murals on different facets of the bricks, some sections look like simplified waves, some are half circles in bright orange and blue, others are outlines of triangles.

Levi's Plaza

Thank You to Our Sponsors

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Contact

+ 1 (214) 695 7047

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Location

1255 Battery St

San Francisco, CA 94111

In Levi's Plaza

© 2025 by Karl Art.

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