DRESSED TO IMPRESS

A small exhibit at FIT, Proust’s Muse, The Countess Greffulhe, celebrates the wardrobe of this famous turn-of-the-century Parisian socialite. She captivated the most accomplished artists, writers and musicians of the day, including Proust, with her natural beauty and audacious style. There isn’t a single garment here that, in its extravagant construction and execution, doesn’t feel like a costume. These are clothes that serve personal drama, that heighten that moment when a woman rises from her chair, exits a carriage, or collapses onto a settee.

There are shimmering, floor-skimming Oriental-themed robes, inspired by Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, that the Countess wore to receive visitors at her home on Rue d’Astorg. There is an an ankle-length Russian cape embroidered in gold and trimmed with ermine, papal in splendor, that she wore to her daughter’s wedding. There is a Worth ballgown in a brilliant, bracingly modern, emerald green. And there is an off-the-shoulder 1937 Lanvin evening gown of liquid black silk whose enormous ruffles seem to be floating out in front of it.

One senses, beyond the high level of museum curatorship, a strong personal voice. The Countess was discriminating about what she wore, and must have driven her tailors, milliner and jeweler to distraction with modifications and customizations. She fought hard to be fabulous. For women of her time there were few avenues to exercise creativity and forge a unique social identity. Here, with her wardrobe, the Countess did.

House of Worth, tea gown, blue cut velvet on a green satin ground, Valenciennes lace, circa 1897. © Stéphane Piera/Galliera/Roger-Viollet.

January 07, 2017 by Nalina Moses

PARALLEL TRACKS

There’s an exhibit at FIT called Black Fashion Designers that is, simply, a collection of clothes designed by men and women of African descent. The show includes designers like Anne Lowe, who worked in the 50′s and 60′s in relative anonymity, pioneers like Stephen Burrows, Willi Smith and Patrick Kelly, icons like Azzedine Alaïa, and contemporary tastemakers like Duro Olowu and Public School NYC.

The garments on display are, almost without exception, finely proportioned, stunningly crafted, and smartly conceived. But they do not embody ideas or trends that are earth-shattering, or that would suggest that Black Fashion is anything contrary to, or out-of-step with, Regular (which is to say, White) Fashion. While walking through the gallery, it becomes clear that the fashion world has been, for decades, almost entirely segregated, with talented black designers working on a parallel track, separate to their contemporary white counterparts, addressing the same trends, technologies and movements.

There’s an Eric Gaskins evening gown here that’s a swathe of liquid ivory silk with bands of shimmering black bugle beads running around it like monumental brushstrokes, in the manner of a Robert Motherwell canvas. It might be the most elegant gown I’ve ever seen. (I can’t look at photos of this dress without fantasizing about what it would feel like to wear it while walking into a ballroom, approaching a podium, climbing into a black car…) It’s a functional evening gown so meticulously conceived and executed that it rises to the level of fantasy, abstract expressionism stitched into a dress. That Gaskins, a contemporary of Michael Kors and Isaac Mizrahi, remains relatively unknown, suggests that there’s a way to go until the industry becomes entirely open, and exhibits like this serve no purpose.

Image courtesy of FIT. Eric Gaskins, Dress, 2014, USA. Gift of Eric Gaskins.

December 31, 2016 by Nalina Moses

ONE FOR ALL

A new exhibit at FIT, Uniformity, assembles notable work, athletic, and military uniforms, and the high fashions they’ve inspired. There are beautiful uniforms here: a 1942 US Womens naval reserve skirtsuit by Mainbocher, an embellished nineteenth-century British mess jacket, and a dark 1920′s Marymount school dress with a sky blue collar and bow. And there are beautiful couture garments, including a twisting, one-shouldered, princess-seamed corset dress by John Galliano for Dior, in silk camouflage. The most joyful garments on display are TWA flight attendant outfits from 1975 designed by Stan Herman, polyester separates in cherry red, mustard yellow, cobalt blue, and flecked oatmeal, that can be mixed, crazily, at will. They hardly seem like uniforms.

But when happens when uniforms are intended to, and do, foster conformity? Thom Browne’s 2009 Mens show gets at the potentially sinister underpinnings. Browne dresses 41 models in identical grey flannel suits, raincoats, brogues and briefcases, and sends 40 of them to sit in neat rows of desks. They enter in file, hang their coats on stands, pull on sweaters, sit down, and type. Their leader, seated in front, facing them, at an identical desk, remains half a step ahead, dictating their rhythms. The set piece is hypnotic, and not without charm. As the leader rings a bell to mark the lunch break, each man opens his attache and pulls out a sandwich and an apple from a brown paper bag.

Browne’s suits are a skillful reinvention, and caricature, of the prep school uniform and the white collar suit. The trousers are famously short, and the jackets fit tight around the torso and under the arms, giving the men who wear them an innocent, adolescent appeal. But all the men in the 2009 show are young, tall, slender, and, except for one, white. Their striped white sweater armbands, brylecreemed hair, vacant stares, and unchallenged submission call to mind Nazi youth. A uniform, without freedom, quickly becomes hegemony.

Photo courtesy of Thom Browne.

August 01, 2016 by Nalina Moses