Film still from Aesthetics as a Way of Survival. Courtesy the artist.

Entering the Jil Sander boutique in SoHo, you might have interpreted it as a minimal stageset via a daytime A Clockwork Orange, or as a play with the typical, hierarchical way that consumers enter a boutique. You probably didn't think of yourself, skating on white marble toward rotating vertical mirrors that dissect the image of your body, as entering a nest. That type of "nest" aesthetic, you might remember, was carved out by the late Dash Snow and Dan Colen, and involved a whole lot of messed up hotel rooms and chopped up garbage (in a gallery not so far away).

Nonetheless, for Fashion's Night Out, Jil Sander screens a film by Germaine Kruip, the Dutch artist who designed the boutique's mirrors—and Kruip draws out such a metaphor. The film, "Aesthetics as a Way of Survival" is a single, steady shot of a shoot that took place between the Paluma Mountains and the city of Townsville in Australia. Kruip went on the expedition with Australian natural scientists Cliff and Dawn Frith, known for their extensive research and writings on the bowerbird. The bowerbird, Kruip describes, is not so different from a designer, "In its elaborately designed bowers the bird places fine, coloured touches using found materials." The bowerbird might even prefer menswear, she says, as "The bowers are supposed to attract female bowerbirds and form the centrepiece of a precisely choreographed courtship display."