Interesting article and commandable effort by Ms. Menkes. I'm afraid it falls short, I'd like to see more hard examples, but it's an excellent subject. Museums are supposed to be the bastions of culture - it's bad, but conceivable, that magazine editors accept bribes - museums are another story.http://iht.com/articles/2007/02/25/news/rmuse26.php
PARIS: Paul Poiret, the early 20th century designer
who liberated women from corsets and entertained with Orientalist
extravagance, will be brought to life Thursday when the Metropolitan
Museum of Art in New York displays during the French fashion season
some pristine recreations of garments that will go on exhibit there in
May.
With Balenciaga as a sponsor, but not as a fashion participant,
"Poiret, King of Fashion," from May 9 to Aug. 5, promises to be one of
those rare fashion exhibitions not perceived as a marketing tool or
celebrating an anniversary of a living designer.
There are plenty of those, from the Met show last year for Chanel,
with Karl Lagerfeld as design partner, to the Giorgio Armani exhibition
that opened in Milan last week, ending seven years of globe-trotting
since it took over the famous spiral at the Solomon R. Guggenhiem
Museum in October 2000. Thomas Krens, the museum's director at the
time, was accused of selling out to crass commerce.
Some of these exhibitions are historic, rather than laudatory, like
the Balenciaga show last year at the Musée de la Mode et du Textile in
Paris. Nicolas Ghesquière, the house's current designer, inspired the
imaginative presentation and his own designs had some presence, but the
focus was on the Cristóbal Balenciaga years.
Jean Paul Gaultier will be next up in Paris, on March 22. But it
will not be a hagiography of 30 years in fashion, but Gaultier's
effervescent imagination seen through his costumes in collaboration
with the dancer Régine Chopinot.
Yet there is a general feeling that museums across the world are
buckling under the pressure of hugely rich designers offering clothes,
cash and marketing expertise.
And if those pesky museums are too difficult to convince (as
Philippe de Montebello, the Met's director, was when a Chanel
exhibition was first proposed), designers often find an exhibition
space to rent and a tame curator to give it a cultural gloss. Then the
show becomes a vanity production, self-sponsored and self-selected,
even with "archive" clothes remade.
The big problem with this approach is that the designer is never put
in any context that might give publicity, or credit, to his or her
peers. It is just a dream for fashion to match the fascinating
juxtapositions found in art shows, like "Matisse Picasso" in London at
the Tate Modern in 2002 or "Picasso and Braque: Pioneering Cubism" at
the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1988. Yet a Giorgio Armani
exhibition that showed him sparring first with Gianni Versace and then
with Tom Ford's Gucci would be a fascinating subject.
Poiret and Chanel were also arch- rivals, with the former, already
in eclipse, asking Coco in her little black dress: "For whom do you
mourn, Madame?" To which Chanel replied: "For you, Monsieur."
The wall separating art and fashion was breached almost 25 years ago
when the iconic editor Diana Vreeland directed an Yves Saint Laurent
show at the Met.
The Costume Institute, where it was shown, is now offering a witty
and interesting display of the wardrobe of the socialite Nan Kempner,
which will travel to the Pierre Bergé Yves Saint Laurent Foundation in
Paris in May.
Although the Met has more fashion- themed shows than other museums,
it takes the moral high road and makes a major effort to retain
curatorial responsibility. "I think we are as strong as it gets, and we
have a director who draws a line in the sand," said Harold Koda,
curator in charge of the Costume Institute. He and Andrew Bolton are
co-curators of the Poiret show.
"The problem has been one of perception," Koda said. "Unfortunately,
institutions are always looking for sponsors and need to find one that
is one step removed from self-interest. It's always going to be a
problem, unless you have the ability to fund raise from outside."
The aim of the new show, with the help of a cache of clothing
auctioned in 2005, is to prove that Poiret was the true instigator of
20th-century modernity. Even if half the society crowd at the May gala
evening will not actually see the exhibit, the Met will keep its
integrity as a guardian of fashion's history.
But was it like that with "Chanel," which was criticized, even by a
bewildered public, for not doing justice to one of fashion's greatest
figures?
"Andrew and I cultivated Karl's cooperation because Chanel, for all
its modernity, would have become an inert exhibition, with technical
virtuosity but very plain dresses," Koda said. "What happened was that
in spite of the fact that we curated it, the perception was that it was
a commercial franchise."
But the problem was not about the outfits from Lagerfeld, a designer
who deplores looking back at his own history. It was the lack of
context to explain why Coco was a revolutionary. And why not a
reference to her famous spats with her fellow designer Elsa
Schiaparelli? Surely the point of Chanel, and now Poiret, is where they
stood in relation to fashion's fussy, fancy restraining past and how
their powerful statements ultimately configured the future?
To look at almost any designer exhibition of recent years ? Yohji
Yamamoto's "Just Clothes" exhibit in Paris in 2005, for example ? no
one who did not know about the dramatic and enduring influence of the
Japanese aesthetic on European fashion would ever have sensed that from
the show, fascinating and visually striking as it was.
Maybe it is time to go back to the historical approach and dare to
be didactic, so that museum fashion is less of a designer love fest and
more of a learning curve.
Comment