Adelle Lutz

Adelle Lutz (born November 13, 1948) is an American artist, designer and actress, most known for work using unconventional materials and strategies to explore clothing as a communicative medium. She first gained attention for the surreal "Urban Camouflage" costumes featured in David Byrne's film True Stories (1986). She has designed costumes for film director Susan Seidelman, theater directors Robert Wilson and JoAnne Akalaitis, and musicians including Byrne, Bono and Michael Stipe. In the 1990s, she began to shift from costume to sculpture, installation art and eventually, performance. Lutz's art and design have been exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT) (New York), the Victoria and Albert Museum and Barbican Art Centre (London), the Montreal Museum of Decorative Arts and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame (Cleveland), among many venues. In 2002, the Judith Clark Costume Gallery in London presented a career survey. Her work has also been featured in The New York Times, Harper's Magazine, Newsweek, Village Voice, Vanity Fair and Paper and in books on fashion, costume and public art, including Fashion and Surrealism (1987), Designed for Delight (1997), Twenty Years of Style: The World According to Paper (2004), and Because Dreaming is Best Done in Public: Creative Time in Public Spaces (2012). Her work Ponytail Boot (2002) is part of the Metropolitan Museum of Art collection. Life Lutz was born in Lakewood, Ohio, in 1948. Her parents were Mona Miwako Furuki, a native of Japan who studied couture and Walter Lutz, an American businessman in international trade; they met in occupied Japan on Christmas Day 1945, while Walter served with the United States Army. Their collection of over 4,000 Asian bamboo works and objects is part of the Denver Art Museum's collection and was exhibited in the museum's Walter + Mona Lutz Gallery, which Adelle co-designed. As a teenager, Lutz moved with her family to Tokyo, where she attended International Christian University and with her sister, jewelry designer Tina Chow, modeled for the cosmetics company Shiseido, among other firms, between 1967–1972. Lutz was working with theater director Robert Wilson, when she met David Byrne in 1982; the three collaborated on The Knee Plays section of Wilson's opera, the CIVIL warS. She and Byrne married in 1987 and their daughter, Malu Abeni Valentine Lutz Byrne, was born in 1989.