BODYWORKS

The Met’s Rei Kawakubo/Comme des Garcons retrospective is subtitiled Art of the In-Between, which is incorrect. This designer’s work is full-on, more uncompromised than that of any other contemporary fashion designer. There are other brands that subvert (Hood by Air, Namilia), but none with the clarity, assuredness, and innocence (toward media and market) of Kawakubo. More than navigating between polarities of gender, technique and identity, she operates outside these classifications. And her aim is not to to shock, but to make clothes that remain close to her vision.

These clothes are often costume-like, exaggerated versions of everyday pieces: a biker jacket with plum-sized grommets and thick leather laces, a ballet tutu fashioned from s sloping pile of crushed black tulle, a nun’s habit that covers the face completely, a kilt that crushes together four different tartans. And they are playful syntactially, accepting conventions of tailoring and taking them to exponential extremes. There is an A-line dress with the profile of another dress appliqued on top of it, a grey checked suit with an additional set of arms growing from its armpits, and a pleated white gown whose front panel has pleats printed on it.

However inventive these garments are in construction and image, it’s their relationship to the body that’s their boldest achievement. They have a crustacean quality, making an exoskeleton – another body – around the body to give it new form. They are less sewn than constructed, incorporating boning, wire, padding, and industrial materials like vinyl and plastic, to give them an powerful independent structure. They obscure the body and all its powerful identities: race, gender, age, stature, health, beauty, mobility, power.

It’s a tall order wearing the clothes, which require surrendering one’s figure along with one’s social status. At the Met Gala celebrating the show only a handful of celebrities, including Rihanna, Lady Gaga and Caroline Kennedy, wore Comme Des Garcons on the red carpet. They didn’t look merely pretty; they looked like warrior princesses from some other, altogether more sophisticated, planet.

Photograph by Nalina Moses.

May 14, 2017 by Nalina Moses

SUITING ONESELF

A small show at the Met’s Costume Institute highlights the wardrobe of designer Jacqueline de Ribes. De Ribes is a French Countess and socialite whose natural beauty and elevated taste endeared her to the couturiers she has patronized over the decades, including Valentino, Yves St. Laurent and Karl Lagerfeld. In the 1980′s she went on to form a couture house of her own.

The clothes she commissioned and the clothes she created are all of a piece: refined in proportion and structure, bold in color and detail. She tinkered with couture garments to suit her needs and her figure. She asked Yves St. Laurent to remake a shimmering fishscale-sequined sheath dress as a dinner gown. She asked Valentino to raise the waistline of a red silk blouson dress. And she asked Marc Bohan to remove a bow from the waist of a bodice and enlarge the one at its shoulder. In each case the designers followed directions and the garments, on display here, look entirely natural. The show is a testimony to the methods of these old-school couturiers, who sustained delicate relationships with wealthy, well-positioned women like de Ribes, their main clients. Today couture houses, led by contracted designers and managed by global conglomerates, seem focused on devising attention-grabbing outfits for starlets to borrow for red carpet events. For de Ribes couture dressing wasn’t media spectacle; it was a way of life.

The show is also an testimony to 80′s event dressing and its concomitant excesses. The fashions on display – dressy ankle-length gowns and pantsuits – brought back a nostalgia for that era, when it was socially acceptable to display personal wealth. The gowns are embellished with lace panels, ostrich feathers, metal palettes, cultured pearls, and cut crystals. The silhouettes are rouched, draped, pieced and ballooned. But the garments, as displayed, feel dramatic rather than excessive, luxurious rather than vulgar. Like her American contemporary, Jacqueline Kennedy, de Ribes’ rich personal style was tempered by a sense of the appropriate. She dressed to suit her life, and her life was lavish.

January 17, 2016 by Nalina Moses

THE MODEL IS PRESENT

Is a portrait, in the end, about the subject, the artist, or the fragile connection between the two? Walking through the Met’s expansive exhibit Sargent: Portraits of Artists and Friends, I saw works supporting every point of view. But my favorite portraits were those in the first gallery, of the men and women Sargent befriended when he was a student in Paris in the early 1880′s. These portraits are all about the subject.

They’re composed simply. In each one a handsomely-dressed man or woman sits at the center of the canvas, against a simple backdrop, and addresses the viewer directly. Sargent renders each of their faces with an extraordinary emotional acuity, showing just what the subject looks like, and also, right through this, who he or she really is. (The psychological depth does nothing to diminish the richness of the surface. Sargent’s brushstroke is virtuostic in capturing physical detail: a shadowed corner, a splash of sunlight, the finish of pink velvet, the glint of diamonds.)

From looking at these portraits we understand that the writer and translator Madame Allouard-Jouan is demanding, world-weary, and refined. We understand that playwright Edouard Pailleron is pragmatic, honest, and impatient. We understand, in Sargent’s most famous painting, that Madame X, (Amélie Gautreau) is self-conscious, petty and proud. And we understand, in the most magnificent painting in the exhibit, that Emile-Auguste Carolus-Duran, Sargent’s teacher, is intense, intelligent, and unorthodox. Though they follow formal conventions of Victorian portraiture, these works aren’t mannered. In their blunt expression of character, they are wild.

September 08, 2015 by Nalina Moses

SHAPE SHIFTING

John Galliano designed his 2003 Spring/Summer haute couture collection for Dior after a two-week trip through China, an experience that left him “electrified.” Five gowns from the collection are on display in China: Through the Looking Glass, this year’s fashion blockbuster at the Met, and they serve as its theatrical climax. In the quiet and chill of the museum’s China Courtyard, which has been transformed by sound and lighting effects into a rippling midnight pool, the dresses spring to life like wraiths.

Galliano’s work has always swerved between hedonism and fastidiousness, and his China runway show was heavy on hedonism. It included traditional Chinese circus entertainers: dancers leaping over swords, acrobats spinning plates, and a girl gymnast riding a unicycle around the top of an old man’s parasol. The models, coarsened by clown makeup, could barely see through their frizzy hairpieces, and barely walk in their gilded platforms shoes. The gowns themselves were as big as boulders, constructed from yards and yards of printed candy-colored silks, tucked and draped over asymmetrical crinolines that bumped out in unexpected places. There were continuous wardrobe malfunctions as wide bias-cut collars slipped to the waist, and fishtail hems bunched at the ankle. The models seemed to be carrying the clothes rather than wearing them.

But when seen today, at the Met, in this cordoned-off courtyard, on plain white mannequins set yards apart from one another, lit by small spotlights below, the gowns are ravishing in the complexity and clarity of their construction. They stand free from the body and then return quickly to it, shaping dramatic, exaggerated feminine silhouettes. A powdery pink robe clings at the waist and fans out from the face, projecting monarchic grandeur. A one-shouldered blue evening gown skims the bust and hips before exploding in ruffles just below the knees, fit for a cartoon femme fatale. These are dresses with a stormy, monstrous beauty.

June 29, 2015 by Nalina Moses