The Met’s “Costume Art” Makes a Case for Fashion

Some of the pairings can be quite on the nose. In the “Classical Body” section, a golden Issey Miyake breastplate and bodice, molded to the curvature of the chest, is paired with a golden Etruscan cuirass. A row of Grecian-inspired draped gowns is paired with a row of Grecian urns featuring berobed ancients. These couplings are so literal that they seem to undercut Bolton’s thesis, suggesting that fashion raids art history rather than illuminating it anew. The following section, “Abstract Body,” does a more persuasive job highlighting fashion’s innovations, showing an array of corsets, panniers, and hoop skirts that designers used to manipulate the body into unnatural forms. Looking at a nineteenth-century corset that cinched the wearer’s waist into the circumference of a paper-towel roll, I felt, for the first time during the show, conscious of being in my own body (which squirmed at the thought of such sartorial constraints). The collection of elaborately engineered bustles and crinolines certainly advances the idea that clothing, even at its most punishing, can be a form of living sculpture. I felt a similar jolt in the “Reclaimed Body” section, which focusses on more avant-garde modifications, such as Rei Kawakubo’s bulbous creations with Comme des Garçons, three of which are paired with abstract sculptures that echo the garments’ austere curves. Each of the sculptures—by Max Weber, Henry Moore, and Jean Arp—was created prior to Kawakubo’s fashion experiments, but one gets a disorienting sense that, rather than Kawakubo reaching backward for touchstones, the sculptors were somehow anticipating her singular inventions.

Most of the mannequins have mirrored faces, a flourish that, according to the catalogue, is meant to create “a moment of communal visibility,” though the heads are tilted at awkward angles that discourage selfie snapping. Eighteen unique mannequins were created for the show, modelled off real and imagined people whose bodies don’t conform to conventional fashion-world ideals. The “Corpulent Body” section features a mannequin, cast from the body of the French model and singer Yseult, looking formidable in a scaled-up Dior “Bar” suit. “Disabled Body” includes a mannequin cast from the activist Sinéad Burke, who has dwarfism, wearing a Burberry trenchcoat that’s been cut short; it’s accessorized, winningly, with a hat made from one of the coat’s lopped-off sleeves. (Why, one wonders, couldn’t there have been such mannequins in “Classical Body”? Were no designers inspired by Greek statuary with belly rolls?) “Pregnant Body” displays a Gucci dress, by Alessandro Michele, with a pair of beaded fallopian tubes across the belly—a design that is meant as a nod to women’s rights but risks reducing the wearer to a walking reproductive system. I preferred a long gown made by the Greek designer Dimitra Petsa using her signature “wet look” technique, so that its mesh fabric clings like seaweed to the mannequin’s pregnant form.

The back half of the exhibit is smaller and more intimate, and it finally brings the clothing down off the pedestals, to ground level. “Costume Art” has no clear foot-traffic pattern. I learned only later that I was supposed to end at “Epidermal Body” (showcasing garments that mimic the look of skin), rather than at “Mortal Body,” which seemed like a more natural conclusion. Regardless, the latter portion of the show was by far the more affecting, not only because of its visceral themes—including tattoos, blood, and aging—but also because it offered a chance to admire exquisite garments up close. There’s a crimson Yohji Yamamoto dress made of silk crêpe de Chine, painstakingly manipulated into folds; a Yuima Nakazato piece that looks like bloody entrails dripping down the body; a Daniel Roseberry creation for Schiaparelli embellished with buttons in the style of Victorian mourning jewelry; and a Thom Browne dress featuring a pearly skeleton, made of seed-size beads, emerging out of the garment’s black surface like a spectre.