Having worked for glossies from Paris Vogue and Harper's Bazaar to Self Service and V, David Armstrong is no stranger to fashion. But, considered part of the "Boston School" of photographers that also includes Nan Goldin, Mark Morrisroe, Philip-Lorca diCorcia and Jack Pierson, he's staked his art world ground, too. Armstrong's current show at Matthew Marks gallery includes landscapes and interiors awash in the moody haziness that's become his trademark, as well as equally seductive portraits of boys (and Vincent Gallo) in which—like fashion itself—clothes are often not an issue.

Divine, Edith Massey (a.k.a The Egg Lady) and the entire crew are out in force at the New Museum's John Waters retrospective. Focusing mostly on photographs the iconoclastic "Pope of Trash" has taken since the early 90s, the exhibition features images borrowed from the tidily mustachioed director's films as well as cult classics like Elizabeth Taylor's Boom!. Most are photographed off of a television screen and then cinematically collaged together in mini narratives with characteristic outlandishness and irreverence. Take the self-explanatory Edith Tells off Katherine Hepburn, for example, or Farrah, a series of eight prints that apply the iconic Charlie's Angel's hairdo onto the likes of Cary Grant. Along with objects, scrapbooks, movie props and ephemera, the show also includes three never-publicly-seen early films from the mid to late-60s—Hag in a Black Leather Jacket, Roman Candles and Eat Your Make-up—by the director who, for over four decades, has brought lowbrow to new heights.

In his first American show, emerging Czech artist Ján Mancuška provides an object lesson with an installation at Andrew Kreps gallery. Mancuška created a room at the back of the gallery with a chair, picture frame, chest of drawers and cabinet that are only viewable through text cut out from an impassable particleboard wall. With the help of a light source, the text describes the scene in words projected across the setting itself. Along with the ghostly outline of another chair that was sprayed by a BB gun, Mancuška's installation might remind one of Joseph Kosuth's well-known 1965 One and Three Chairs, which represented a chair as an image, dictionary definition and object. Like Kosuth, Mancuška hovers around that dividing line between the physicality of objects and the immaterial idea of them.

Andrea Zittel's fashion dilemmas are on full view at Andrea Rosen gallery, with an installation of over two dozen dresses the artist designed for herself between 1991 and 2002. Best known for her explorations of domesticity, Zittel famously defied social convention while keeping to fashion's system of seasons when she started making single dresses that she'd wear every day for six months. Apparently, the monotony got to her, as the show also includes many subsequent frocks, from those inspired by the simple geometries of Russian Constructivism to dresses made from torn-from-the-bolt fabrics, "Single Strand" (otherwise known as crocheted) ensembles and, finally, felt garments devolved to their original fibrous state. Together, they represent a chronology of Zittel's investigation into clothing that brings new thoughtfulness to that nagging problem of what to wear.

Photographer Collier Schorr has made a habit of snapping portraits of strapping young men, from schoolboys to soldiers. And for her current show at 303 Gallery—which coincides with another show at Modern Art in London—she's pumped up her portrayals of masculinity and innocence with photographs of high school wrestlers. Part heroic, and more than a tad fetishistic, these images capture the athletes in various states of preparation, pensiveness and bodily contact. Their high-contrast chiaroscuro lighting is reminiscent of Renaissance painting, lending a near-religious intensity that might initially seem incongruous with the subject matter. But these works are both romantic and weighty expressions of the ascetic nature of boyish athleticism and the relationship between youth and ecstatic struggle.