"The inside of a couture dress, aka the guts, is by far the most beautiful and interesting part," writes Martina Cox (b. 1995, NYC), identified as a "fashion historian, fashion designer, artist, and all-round fantastic seer of sartorial history" in her review of the 2026 Met Gala exhibition, Fashion Is Art. (Hollywood Superstar Review, 2026).
Best-known for her beautifully executed drawings in colored pencil and watercolor of the boned interiors of nineteenth-century women’s corsets and bodices, Cox has recently become increasingly interested in portraying textiles. “The rendering of fabric by Renaissance artists is a huge inspiration for me,” says Cox, citing Anne Hollander, author of Seeing Through Clothes and Fabric of Vision: Dress and Drapery in Painting. Certain artists, of course, have always been attracted to fashion and fabrics. In his famous essay on “The Painter of Modern Life” (1863), Charles Baudelaire warned his contemporaries that “The draperies of Rubens or Veronese will not teach you how to depict moiré antique, satin à la mode, or any other fabric of our age.” Drawing drapery may not be fashionable for twenty-first century artists, but it can be, as Cox says, “very addicting.” And this is hardly surprising, since, although we usually think of art and fashion primarily in visual terms, it is also the case that paintings, dress, and drapery have tactile qualities – touch being associated with both sensations and emotions.
The French psychoanalyst Didier Anzieu first developed his concept of the “skin ego” as “a containing and unifying envelope for the Self” in the 1970s. Yet fashion and fabrics have long been perceived as a “second skin,” with all that implies about sensuous touching, reassuring hugs, and protective armor. If a person feels insecure or fragmented, Anzieu writes, it is sometimes necessary to reinforce the skin ego “with a symbolic maternal skin, analogous to the aegis [shield] of Zeus, or those stunning, showy rags in which young female models, often anorexic, drape themselves, the splendor of which re-narcissizes them temporarily…”
Cox’s work has also long addressed both the sensations and the emotions related to the way fashion and fabric hold the body. As she pursued her research into fashion history, she kept finding images of the interiors of garments with imprints of torsos from 100 years ago. Before the twentieth century, most dresses were made in two parts: bodice and skirt. Bodices, like corsets, were often boned, while skirts were often extended by crinolines, bustles, and paniers. These were historical garments that modify the female body, sometimes creating extreme silhouettes. Many people regard sartorial body modifications, especially corsets, as “instruments of torture” and female oppression. As an artist, Cox has often engaged with the political and performative aspects of clothing. Yet she is also aware that corsetry was a situated bodily practice that varied considerably from one person to another. Moreover, as she has observed, the “femme torso” continues to be malleable, as the fashionable ideal moves from Kate Moss to Kim Kardashian.
Her 2024 solo exhibition, Waist Management, at Alyssa Davis Gallery, featured drawings with names such as “Sowing to the Flesh,” “Striped Gut Flora,” and “Landscape with Buttons.” When she first began, Cox carefully drew all the stitching, but then she started to “suture right into the paper” with real thread and metal fastenings, such as hooks and eyes. As someone who has made clothes, Cox says she wanted “to honor the labor that went into the garment.” But she is also aware that her art appears to “reference” the romance novels popularly known as “bodice rippers.”
Her current exhibition, Heart Eyes, features drawings such as “Interior with plaid silk taffeta ca 1850” culminating with “Morning” after a faded black bodice jacket, once owned by the widowed Queen Victoria. Whereas many of the drawings depict brilliantly colored, glistening bodices, this one is rendered in charcoal in a variety of black and gray tones and values. It is also slightly larger than garments worn by the portly widow. Initially, I thought that Cox bought the garments that she drew. In fact, she deliberately searches auction house websites for photographic images, which document the appearance and condition of garments for sale. Cox then crops and manipulates a particular image prior to drawing it. Her own drawings are thus distanced from the original material objects via found internet images: “There is something beautiful about the gap between the actual garment and the internet image.
Cox also presents a series of new sculptures: Some are made from actual crinolines that she did buy at auction, as she had previously bought and transformed bustles. There are also a number of small bronze boxes containing the packaging of sewing notions, with only a few words of the text visible. Phrases, such as “Bless That Nub!,” “Rust?? Never!!” or “Heart Eyes,” seem amusing or odd. Heart Eyes, for example, refers to a patented style of design for the eye part of a hook-and-eye mechanism, Cox explains, but today it seems more like “the visual signifier of an emoticon or emoji.” Through these works, she begins “to meditate on the malleability of language, almost in ways parallel to the femme torso – the passage of time morphing the way we understand the world.” Cox has chosen to portray these works in museum-style vitrines, exploring the relationship viewers have with museum’s cultural authority.
Even as a student getting her BFA from Cooper Union, her studio practice increasingly focused on performative and sculptural garments, especially those that explored physical vulnerability or empowerment. One day she noticed a garment with cut-outs in a painting by Salvador Dali -- and thought “I need to make that to flash people.” Initially she felt anxious about bringing fashion into a fine arts institution, but she gradually realized that fashion, like fine art, could be analyzed and interpreted. When the owner of a downtown clothing boutique offered to buy her entire senior thesis, she started a fashion business “almost by accident.” Some of her designs sold hundreds of units, such as a cheeky pair of jeans with small windows, whose curtains could be raised and lowered.
As an artist, Cox continues to engage with the sculptural, performative, and political aspects of clothing. However, her focus now goes beyond contemporary clothes that reveal and/or conceal the body to explore the way that clothes themselves can be seen as a changeable, renewable second skin. Long dismissed as superficial, fashion is perhaps most fruitfully interpreted as a deep surface.