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

FANTASYLAND

The curators of China: Through the Looking Glass, this years fashion blockbuster at the Met, know that the modern garments they’ve set out among historic Chinese artifacts in the museum aren’t really Chinese. One wall text quotes scholar Edward Said’s savage critique of Orientalism. Another explains, “This exhibition is not about China per se but about a collective fantasy of China.” In the end this collective fantasy – and its attendant racist cliches – are undone, not by the scholarship of the show, but by two extraordinary personal fantasies of China, those of Yves Saint Laurent and John Galliano.

Yves Saint Laurent’s 19977-1978 couture collection was inspired by China, a country he had never visited, and knew only through history, photography and film. The ensembles he sent down the runway were built from luxurious layered separates: quilted peasant jackets in embroidered silks, tilted and tasseled coolie hats, billowing jewel-toned trousers tapering to the ankle, and calf-high suede boots with wide cuffs and fur trim. These clothes spin one man’s dream of China. And it’s such a potent dream – proportionally refined, aesthetically complex, emotionally evocative – that it’s difficult to dispel. I’ve never been to China, but I believe that these clothes (their tempestuous hues, their liquid silks, their hammered gold fasteners, their whirling silhouettes) capture something of the sensuality and mystery of the culture. The small gallery at the Met where the clothes are displayed, on mannequins set in front of a long gold screen, is the heart of the exhibit.

Other modern garments on display reference China, playfully and elegantly, but not deeply. Karl Lagerfeld has, brilliantly, embellished gowns with motifs from traditional blue-and-white porcelain patterns, and tailored dresses in silks printed with traditional floral motifs. And Vivienne Tan has emblazoned smart, striking separates with paintings of the Buddha and portraits of Mao Zedong. These clothes reference China but they don’t give us China. Saint Laurent does, and his fantasy, while simply untrue, is so deeply realized that it makes us believe too. His clothes don’t represent China but, in their imaginative richness, they honor it.

Photography courtesy of Platon and Metropolitan Museum of Art.

June 28, 2015 by Nalina Moses

DOMESTIC TRANQUILITY

The house Frank Lloyd Wright built for Roland Reisley in 1959 in Pleasantiville, NY, might be more affecting than his better-known houses in Chicago. It was the third and final house he built in the 26-house Usonian community there, a spread of one-and-a-half-acre circular plots. Each house is unique, designed in a brazen modern language by Wright or one of his disciples. And each house is modest – by contemporary standards, at least – with a living area, dining room, three or four small bedrooms, patio, and carport. Most are one level, and are located at the tops of the small hills that run through the site, offering lovely views.

The Reisley House is built on a grid of equilateral triangles, so that all its walls meet at 120-degree or 60-degree angles. This creates dramatic roof and wall lines that exaggerate perspective views. While the geometries seem eccentric and impractical, they shape dynamic, graceful interior spaces. The house has an open plan, and only the bedrooms, bathrooms and closets are closed with doors. The major rooms slide seamlessly into one another: vestibule into living room into dining room into hallway, and – when the doors are thrown open, as they were on the summer afternoon I visited – into patio and lawn.

The house is anchored by heavy retaining walls and chimneys, which are finished with local stones set in a rough horizontal ashlar. Interior walls are finished with gold-stained cypress panels that unfold into bedboards, bookcases, banquettes, and tables, all constructed from the same wood. There’s drama in the low thresholds and narrow halls one passes through moving from one room to the next. And then, as one steps inside, there is uncommon repose.

Photography by Roland Reisley, from his book Usonia, New York: Building a Community with Frank Lloyd Wright.

June 14, 2015 by Nalina Moses

BODY LANGUAGE

The heroine of Joanna Hogg’s Exhibition is deeply connected to her London house. She settles into its corners and ledges, lost in reverie. These gestures might have been inspired by the work of performance artist Valie Export. In a 1976 series called Body Configurations, Export photographed herself, wearing plain dark clothes, nestled within elements of public buildings throughout Vienna. We see her spread face-down in a corner of paving, wound around the base of a fluted column, draped over a steel basement hatch, bent kneeling across a curb, lying down a run of steps, seated inside a window box, squatting spread-legged at the outside corner of a building, and stretched corpse-like in the gutter along the base of a wall. Each position is simple and expressive, as if distilled from a dance.

Export is always at the center of the photograph, and always alone. Enough context is given to understand the scale of the architecture, which is typically grandiose, at odds with the humility and vulnerability of her position. In the most powerful photographs her face remains hidden and her figure slack; she’s entirely surrendered to her surroundings. The radical passivity carries tremendous sadness, as if she’s abandoned all will. It suggests that, in order to survive, we hide.

Photograph courtesy of Valie Export.

May 26, 2015 by Nalina Moses