The Tamesis
This time it’s personal. . . .
As a dispassionate observer, it’s nearly impossible to visit the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s blockbuster fashion exhibition “The Art of Costume.” Active looking is not only encouraged but required, as one’s own face appears on the flat, reflective surface of the head of a faceless mannequin created by sculptor Samar Hejazi. Curator Andrew Bolton said the idea was to “reflect on one’s own life experiences in the hope of building connections, empathy and compassion with one another.”
This interactive element not only transforms a museum visit into a mini-journey of self-discovery, but a physical experience that cannot be replicated digitally. This is in an era when humans are being replaced by machines and anxiety about artificial intelligence is widespread.
Bolton, who conceived “Manus x Machina,” an exhibition about the blissful coexistence of humans and technology, a decade ago, is once again ahead of the rest of us in focusing on physicality and dimensionality in a flattened visual world. After all, what could be more materially based than the human form?
“The whole show [is] Bolton explains: “The exhibition is structured around the typologies of bodies that you see in the museum when you encounter the artwork. The simple theme of the exhibition is really that the clothed body is the connecting thread throughout the museum.” Elsewhere at the Met you won’t see mannequins of different body types named after individuals, like those commissioned for Costume Art. This is transformative in many ways. As scholar Llewellyn Negrin points out in her introduction to the catalog, mannequins not only embodied aesthetic standards, but their “size often determined the dimensions of the garments displayed, which corresponded to the ideal proportions of the preferred mannequin, creating a mutually reinforcing process that perpetuated the privileging of culturally revered body types.”
Before starting to organize the exhibition, it is important to address some of the framework surrounding the exhibition, particularly regarding fashion’s changing relationship with art. In this age of personalization, where image is the universal currency, maintaining appearances (often through clothing) is a passionate sport, and interest in fashion is growing and increasingly integrated into all aspects of culture. This affects its status in the art world as a whole, as well as in museums, as the subject has great appeal for visitors. Three of the Met’s most visited exhibitions ever were organized by the Costume Institute, with 2018’s “Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination” ranking first.
Same date, new location
With the opening of the new permanent Condé Nast Gallery near the Great Hall, the Costume Institute’s exhibitions have a beautiful new home. (One of the many benefits of this space is that it allows for longer display times.) You might even say that Cinderella finally went to the ball—even though the message of acceptance and diversity conveyed by “The Art of Costume” goes against the fairy tale idea of requiring a perfect fit to get to the ball.
Fashion’s association with femininity, even frivolity, distances it far from high art. “There’s always been something inherently sexist about fashion as a discipline,” Bolton said, “but I think… fashion has actually been excluded from the history of aesthetics.” [is] Because the physical distance is too close. He points out that another view of clothing as “something decorative, illustrative or complementary” also contributes to its step-sister status. Furthermore, there is an innate sense of irreverence about clothes, they are highly tactile and are made of (and are meant to be) the human form, whereas paintings and sculptures are more self-contained and “exciting”. The mind/body divide is another truism that Bolton wanted to reverse.
