A Word from a Fair Weather Fashionista
Or, what do the Somme and a little red dress have in common?
The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s fashion exhibitions lie way outside my comfort zone. I’m still not sure what taffeta is. When I do attend one of these shows I’m with my wife Susan, whose knowledge of the subject qualifies her as docent. We’ve attended more than a few together and for me it is always an education. And much of the fun we have is generated by our notably different reactions to the provocations garment designers tend to indulge in.
For instance, in the current Met offering, Sleeping Beauties, there is a section dedicated to the work of the French design house Lanvin. And in the Lanvin display is a gown made largely of a clear plastic material decorated with replicated insects. Here it was Susan who found herself outside her comfort zone. For her, an insect merely lurking within the sound of an unguarded gasp is intolerable. It was inexplicable to her that anyone would wear a gown covered in bugs, real or fake.
I found the Lanvin gown hilariously creepy. I’ll chalk up most of the Fashion world’s transgressions to a self-deprecating attitude that I think endears its participants to the public. Their humor, even their aggressive humor, often works because fashion is an inherently lite arena. Fashion floats. Consider how the undulating walls of Sleeping Beauties are lit from underneath, a sensible substitution perhaps for a fog machine in such close quarters.
Moving at at a snail’s pace through the show’s crowded maze, we arrived at a subsection of the Painted Flower area dedicated to Poppies where the fun stopped, as both Susan and I became confused. Was the red on many of the garments to remind us of the poppies in Claude Monet’s sunny landscapes? Or were we to understand it as a reference to Memorial Day and the poppy’s symbolism for the horrendous human slaughter we know as the First World War? That fog lifted when we encountered Isaac Mizrahi’s “Exploded Poppy” party dress, next to a copy of John McCrae’s 1915 poem “In Flanders Fields”. The poem gives voice to the forever interrupted determination of soldiers who died in the devastated fields between each side’s rat infested trenches.
The war was the theme. The entire Poppy section of the exhibition was contextualized by McCrae’s poem. Here’s an excerpt from the museum’s weirdly ingenuous description of the curator’s thinking on this matter:
“Ana de Pombo’s dress evokes McCrae’s verses through its print: poppies in a field of wheat stain the dress like drops of blood that coagulate into appliqués over the chest and around the feet. Created just two years before the outbreak of World War II, the garment’s imagery is not only poignant but also prophetic. Isaac Mizrahi’s dress makes explicit the poppy’s associations with blood and death.”
The brochure’s author seems to reach for justification by clinging to the prescience in de Pombo’s design, which I’ll admit has some merit. It reminds me of the first time I heard “Nacht”, a song in Arnold Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire cycle. It conjured for me, and apparently for many before me, images of the aerial bombing raids that took place in Europe thirty years after the piece was written. Schoenberg could not have intended so literal a meaning in 1912. But the circumstances are not relevant to the issue. Whether accidentally or by design, using an item of art with a distinctly celebratory function—a party gown—to comment on a tragedy of unspeakable scale is to say the least a lapse in taste.
Light hearted fun is a hallmark of the fashion world. I enjoy its often superficial, and impishly weird exercises. Parties are a good place for irreverence. And I should note, in case readers think I’m disrespecting clothing designers as artists, that the level of craftsmanship in the work I saw in Sleeping Beauties puts much of what I see in art galleries to shame. But a party dress is just not the best vehicle for expressing anti-war sentiment. I wouldn’t say it’s offensive. Let’s call it a faux pas too far. A misstep. A bad idea. As a painter and a critic I’m familiar with artists engaging with bad ideas. Multi-media artist Bruce Nauman made a career of it.
Propriety is the issue. Lanvin’s bug dress was just icky. The exploding party dress came across as heartless. It was certainly not intended that way. But if any moment in history can remind us that the road to hell is paved with good intentions, it would be the moment in August 1914 when young men answered their respective country’s call and the delicate non-aligned poppy began earning its sinister reputation. McCrae’s poem addresses that sentiment perfectly and should be read by all of us in these morally challenging times. But as we hear often, context is everything. Think of how much the poem would lose in truth and in dignity if it were printed on a beach towel and sold at Target.
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