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Fashion Talks Back
A new show at the Met proves we are what we wear.
by Eve Tushnet
3/1/2008 12:04:00 AM, Volume 013, Issue 25
blog.mode: addressing fashion
Metropolitan Museum of Art
Through April 13
Eventually the Cockettes will use up the past and the future and have to rely on the present for their material.
--Clay Geerdes
"That's disgusting--that's just disgusting. It says it's a dress, but it isn't."
The three women behind me at the Metropolitan Museum of Art's "blog.mode: addressing fashion" show were reacting with outrage and betrayal to a John Galliano dress made for Christian Dior Couture--a dress made to look sort of like a dress form and sort of like a mutant. The "dress" seemed to have been stitched together with air quotes, displaying its weirdly placed padding and raveled seams. One of the disgusted ladies had thought, at first, that it was a display meant to educate viewers on how dresses are made, while another had assumed that some of the hanging fabric had simply fallen off the dress by accident.
But no: It was supposed to look like that. The Galliano dress showed one possible road (or cul-de-sac) that self-conscious fashion can take. Fortunately, most of the rest of the show used its self-consciousness to craft a language of fashion and a poetry of womanhood, technology, and even death, rather than the exhausted muttering of fashion that can only talk about itself. "blog.mode" is a strangely themeless show. It displays recent acquisitions of the Met's Costume Institute, covering four centuries. The show does indeed have a blog, and even a "blog bar" in the gallery where viewers can comment on the exhibit--"This is just ...
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