Bernadette Corporation is an art collective based in New York City consisting of Bernadette Van-Huy, John Kelsey and Jim Fletcher. During the summer of 1994, Van-Huy was approached to host a night at Club USA, for which she assembled a group of friends and collaborators. Although the party itself was short-lived, the collective endured — expanding into fashion, magazine publishing, film, writing and fine art. From its outset, Bernadette Corporation sought to both incorporate and subvert the commercial aesthetics and strategies emerging in mid-90s art and fashion spaces. Simply calling themselves a corporation was both a joke and a critical position. "It was an anti-art stance, to embrace this kind of crass commercialism,” Van-Huy has said. “Doing something in a gallery seemed so rarefied and serious. Exclusive, too. We just preferred to speak in a common language and in a form that was more stupid." Between 1995 and 1997, Bernadette Corporation developed a fashion label. Conceptually, the line was a vehicle to prod at the industry from the inside. Recognizing the fashion system’s appropriation of subcultures, Bernadette Corporation responded with a language that made these codes of class and ethnicity explicit. They cast models they found in the
