Costume as art exhibitions showcasing the adventurous, sometimes wild, always ahead-of-the-curve creations of Vivienne Westwood, Jean Paul Gaultier, Yves Saint Laurent, Balenciaga, Isabelle de Borchgrave and other fashion icons have collectively pulled in over a million visitors to the Fine Arts Museums, so the arrival at the Legion of Honor of the latest extravaganza, tastefully titled "High Style: The Brooklyn Museum Costume Collection," is a much-anticipated event.
Handsomely installed with a minimalist aesthetic, it traces the changing face of fashion from 1910 to 1980, a period that pre-dates the numbing corporatization that has since overtaken much of the industry. On view are elegant ball gowns and designs by French couturiers such as Dior, Lanvin, Elsa Schiaparelli and her rival, Chanel, whose scrumptious little black, cinched-waist, chiffon and satin-ribbon dress is included here. Special attention is also paid to the ascension of groundbreaking American women designers who rose to stardom in the 1940s and 50s. Less focused on concocting fantasies of the "ideal" than on addressing how women really lived and the importance of comfort, the latter group created liberating, versatile fashions in easy-to-wear fabrics, free of corsets and padding. Their male counterparts Geoffrey Beene, Halston, Gilbert Adrian, et al., also get their due.
This is a connoisseur's exhibition with an impeccable pedigree, the most recent product of a mutually beneficial, collection-sharing partnership established in 2009, between the Brooklyn Museum and the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Costume Institute. Though not as flashy as some of its predecessors, the current show has plenty to recommend it, not the least of which is the inclusion of upscale accessories and beaucoup de shoes for you foot fetishists and shoeholics out there -- you know who you are. An entire gallery is given over to avant-garde, sometimes bizarre and wondrous prototypes and shoes in a variety of faboo styles and materials -- like Steven Arpad's tiered, black silk satin, gold metallic kidskin number with a loopy wood platform sole -- that seem fashion forward even from a 21st-century vantage point.
But for sheer audacity and unvarnished confidence, no one could compete with Pietro Yantorny, the ultra-exclusive Parisian shoemaker who served the elite, the very rich and those willing to sell their souls. The sign that hung in his atelier window read "the most expensive shoes in the world," and he wasn't exaggerating. In 1913, the starting price for a single pair was the equivalent of $10,000 today. The attitude and steep prices might have deterred some customers, but Yantorny met his match in the daring Rita de Acosta Lydig, his most obsessed and lucrative client. (Lydig is reputed to have been the first to wear a backless gown, sans underpinnings, to the opera. Quel scandale!) She commissioned several hundred pairs, about two dozen of which survive, and supplied antique lace from her own collection that the designer used to cover them. Yantorny also crafted hollow wooden shoe-trees tailored to fit each shoe, as well as custom-made, lace-lined trunks like the one on display here that holds a dozen pairs of the pointy-toed, stack-heeled amazements, each decorated with a single jeweled buckle. Eat your heart out.
Two of the exhibition's most fascinating, unconventional figures considered themselves artists first and dressmakers second. Both the renegade, Italian-born Elsa Schiaparelli and Charles James, a mercurial, nearly forgotten British genius, a terror notorious for his personality problems - the Costume Institute's refined Curator in Charge Harold Koda has described him as a "piece of work" - were unorthodox in cast of mind and process. But being well-adjusted and playing well with others are not prerequisites for exceptional fashion - in fact, those very qualities might be contraindicated.
A pair of rooms devoted to the sculptural head-turning dresses of James, who was raised in London and worked in the U.S. from 1939 onward, is the apex of "High Style." After his death in 1978, James drifted into obscurity and would have remained there if his legacy hadn't been resurrected by the Met, whose hit retrospective last year was the fifth most attended Costume Institute exhibition at the museum.
Revered for his virtuosic cutting, body-conscious seaming and dresses that conformed to the shape of the woman wearing them, fabric (and its relationship to the body) was his medium and the essence of his art; engineering skills and architectural patterning, his singular gift. Digital animation boxes rotate and deconstruct elements of his multi-layered designs, illustrating how they were cut and constructed. His achievement is especially impressive when one considers that he visualized these complex schematics in the round without the aid of computers.
James' signature Clover Leaf ball gown, his most famous creation and the one he regarded as his masterpiece, is strapless, and seems to float on air despite weighing 10 lbs. No running for the bus - or running away - in this one. Made from copper shantung, peach faille and black lace applique, with a silhouette reminiscent of the cage crinoline of the 1860s, the gown has a tight waist and a graceful, flared skirt that needs a wide berth; getting in and out of the bathroom could pose a problem, but beauty requires sacrifice. No one would go unnoticed in his kerpow! loosely pleated, rose taffeta ball gown, which required exactly the right tension in all the right places. Its rigidly boned bodice is complemented by sumptuous white, red and pink satin, and layers of tulle underneath its bouffant skirt. "La Sirene" (1941), a "lobster" tube dress with numerous tucks, clung to the voluptuous contours of its uninhibited former owner, Gypsy Rose Lee.
When the iconoclastic Schiaparelli applied for her first job at a fashion house in Paris, she was told she'd be better off planting potatoes. If she had heeded that advice, we might not have been introduced to the otter-fur bathing suit, a hat inspired by a lamb chop, halter necklines, and colorfully dyed furs. A rebel who palled around with the Surrealists and pleased her own sweet self, Schiaparelli was partial to shocking pink, fabrics in weird whimsical combinations like suede, lace and latex, and exposed zippers like those on the sleeves and side seams of a svelte emerald-green evening gown here. Her uncle Giovanni, an astronomer credited with discovering canals on Mars in 1877, inspired her love affair with heavenly bodies in the night skies and astrology, themes reflected in a beaded midnight-blue, silk velvet evening jacket with star-shaped paillettes. Who needs a planetarium when one has the 12 signs of the zodiac embroidered in gold, and, on the left shoulder, the glittering presence of the Big Dipper, the constellation Schiaparelli adopted as a child as her personal emblem? Every girl should have her own constellation.
Through July 19