MANUS X MACHINA AT THE MET
by Eugene Rabkin
by Eugene Rabkin
This week the new fashion exhibition “Manus x Machina: Fashion in an Age of Technology” opens at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
It aims to challenge the notion, usually found in the popular imagination, that handwork and machine work somehow exist in the state of opposition.
No such divide exists, if one really thinks about it, since pretty much all fashion at the end is made by someone’s hands, whether you are making hand-stitched buttonholes, or sewing pieces of fabric together using the sewing machine, which is still hand-operated by a human, or smoothing a 3D printed piece, also by hand. Until we see robots displacing workers en masse, the dichotomy seems moot. Maybe that’s the point that needs to be proven to the museum going masses?
The overall takeaway from the exhibition was mostly one of confusion and lost opportunity. First, I am still uncertain as to the number of pieces I saw – the press release states 170, the exhibition’s website 120, and only 90 pieces were photographed for the catalogue (the entire book – which is fantastic – was shot by Nicholas Alan Cope, whose image graces the cover of our print volume 5). To add further to the confusion, not all garments that were shot for the catalogue were on display.
The exhibit seemed rather tame, especially as a follow-up to the spectacular “China: Through The Looking Glass” show of last year. It could be the result of the Met being in financial trouble (it’s on track to lose $10 million this year), but with the exhibit being sponsored by Apple, you’d think that would be a non-issue.
In any case, they had enough money to hire Rem Koolhaus’s OMA, which must have cost a pretty penny. All that OMA did, undoubtedly in the unbridled fit of fantasy, was to cover the underused passage in the back of the museum in white fabric over scaffolding. The proverbial my child could do that. The OMA architects told Dezeen that the point was to highlight the clothes. I don’t buy it. And even if it was really the point, then it was a definite mistake. Because while the selection of the pieces itself was quite comprehensive, the lack of backdrop materials that create an environment and an atmosphere would have made it infinitely more enjoyable.
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