I haven't posted in a long time, since working three part-time jobs has seemed to leave me little time for writing-- OR for visiting exhibits! Today I wanted to make note of one at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art that I really wish I could see! It will be closing in a couple of weeks and is on the opposite coast from me, so that's unlikely, but luckily they have a pretty good website here. It's called "Fashioning Fashion: European Dress in Detail, 1700-1915." While I'm not crazy about the title, the show itself should be interesting; it is displaying much of a large, recent acquisition and seems to be a sort of "survey" exhibit, without any specific narrative besides the evolution of European dress from the eighteenth through the early twentieth centuries. I find that fashion exhibits surrounding themes or ideas tend to be most compelling, but as long as the show is well-put-together it can be fun to just bask in a variety of fabulous pieces.

It seems as though this collection ranges from court dress to early haute couture to children's clothing, so it probably includes objects that are important for different reasons (craftsmanship, design quality, textile quality, historical significance, etc.). The key with a show like this is for it to be thoughtfully organized and for the didactics to clearly lead the visitor through each section so that it does not become disjointed. I have faith in LACMA-- they have a great collection and celebrated curators (Sharon Takeda and Kaye Spilker), so it is probably a wonderful exhibition.

Speaking of the curators, there is a great little interview with them here that shows what they do and how they put together an exhibit. They have my dream job! It is making me terribly nostalgic for my time at the Museum at FIT. I also like that the videos show the conservators and mannequin dressers, who are truly crucial to the exhibition and who often go overlooked.

Finally, here is a link to the cute children's game that accompanies the exhibit online. What a great idea!

Have any of you seen the exhibit? What did you think of the video? The children's game?
Tune in before too long when I report back from the Virginia Association of Museums' Annual Conference!

Image, "Mlle. Madeleine Dolley modeling a pale gray ornately embroidered and beaded (with gold) robe du bal, or ball gown made of salome silk designed by Paquin, photographed by Bert, from French periodical Les Modes," 1909, Life magazine.

Summer recap and last chance to see "Art by the Yard" at the Textile Museum

Photo of myself and a friend at the Mod Madness event, checking out some Lucienne Day tea towels. Photo courtesy of the Textile Museum.

After an extremely eventful summer, I am back and hoping to start posting more regularly again! I have just started work as the new part-time Collections Assistant at Dumbarton House, a Federal-period historic house museum in Georgetown with a great collection of decorative arts. This summer I was cataloging and rehousing Sewall-Belmont House and Museum's phenomenal collection of textiles related to the fight for women's suffrage and the Equal Rights Amendment, including a number of significant banners used for picketing the White House in the nineteen-teens which may be on display before long!

Some of this summer's most interesting textile events have surrounded an exhibit at the Textile Museum on S Street in Washington, D.C. called "Art by the Yard: Women Design Mid-Century Britain." The exhibit closes this Sunday, September 12th, so if you have not yet been to see it I highly recommend that you go! The show focuses on textile designs by Lucienne Day, a pioneering British textile designer in the mid-century Modern style. Beginning with her groundbreakingly abstract "Calyx," the galleries showcase her imaginative, appealing, and sometimes humorous designs with ample yardage. I particularly like the back gallery, which has a room featuring textiles in situ with furniture designed by her equally famous husband, Robin Day and also shows some of her delightful tea towels. Too bad the repros cost such a fortune in the gift shop! The final room also includes the work of two of Mrs. Day's contemporaries, Jacqueline Groag and Marian Mahler.

My only complaint with the exhibit was that I felt there was far too much text-- many of the didactics elicited the dreaded TLDR (too long, didn't read) response, even from me (and I am a big reader of didactics). Still, the pieces were extraordinary, the exhibit arrangement flowed well, and the mounts were fantastic as always (with a salute to my friends in the conservation lab, Anne Ennes and Esther Methe).

The first event I attended this summer that was associated with the exhibit was a lecture by the esteemed Titi Halle, director of Cora Ginsburg LLC (possibly the best dealer of historic costumes and textiles in the country). Her talk, entitled "Cutting Edge: Textile Artists of the 20th Century," was a primer on 20th-century textile design from Raoul Dufy's work for Paul Poiret to the Bauhaus and the Weiner Werkstatte to designers of the fifties and sixties, including Mrs. Day and showed some wonderful images of examples from the Cora Ginsburg collection. It was a great refresher for me and a good basic introduction to the subject for anyone interested.

The second event I attended that was linked to the exhibit was purely for fun-- it was an evening event called "Mod Madness" that linked the mid-century theme of the exhibit to the popular fixation with Mad Men and included a bar, food for sale, a DJ and jazz combo, a silkscreen-your-own T-shirt station, and a "best mid-century dressed" contest (I was a runner-up but not a winner... next time!) It was very heavily attended, by professionals, hipsters, and museum dorks (that's my category) young and older (mostly women, but that seems to be the usual situation with museums!). Tickets were only $10 and included one ticket for a non-premium drink. A great time was had by all and I think it was a great event for the TM, although I have not heard any details from their staff. Hope to see more like it! I have noticed that young professionals are the new hot market for museums, so I expect there will be many such events in the future.

Enjoy the exhibit at the TM this weekend- and remember, they're open 10-5 on Saturday and 1-5 on Sunday and have a suggested donation of $5 (but pay what you can/want).

Did you attend either of these events? Any other great textile or museum-related events this summer? Did you enjoy this exhibit?

Review: American Woman at the Met

The Met now has a great feature where you can access the collections database records (including images) for all the pieces shown in the exhibition from their website, here (the second link). While it's out of order, it's a good virtual visit to the show!

This weekend's museum visits were very fruitful! We went to American Woman first thing, so we were not swamped by other visitors (although the Picasso exhibit was packed to the gills). Overall, I was very happy with the show. It was extremely different from The Model as Muse in many ways. Model as Muse was a highly academic show, with a lot of text and a lot of garments. I really felt that it contributed to the scholarship of the field-- read my full review here. American Woman at least seemed to be a much smaller exhibit, with fewer garments overall, and much, much less text. Outside of an introductory didactic and an approximately 200-word didactic for each room, there was no instructional text, just "tombstone" labels for each garment. Any additional information was included in the audio guide, which I got just to see how it was. Thankfully, Sarah Jessica Parker's narration was not distracting-- it just sounded like she was reading an audiobook. I'm assuming curator Andrew Bolton wrote the audio guide text, but I didn't see any credits for its author anywhere. The audio guide was pretty nice-- not particularly deep, but offering additional insights and notes on the pieces, and drawing particular attention to certain objects. I wasn't left wondering about the objects, and it was obvious how they all fit into the particular archetype demonstrated in each room (as a reminder, the archetypes were The Heiress, The Gibson Girl, The Bohemian, The Suffragist, The Patriot, The Flapper, and The Screen Siren).

I did want to know more about some of the accessories, including shoes and hats, most of which were not identified. It's possible that they came from the museum's prop collection, of antique but not particularly valuable pieces that are used for display purposes but not accessioned into the permanent collection. Something that totally stymied me was the presence of at least three Fortuny pleated "Delphos" dresses in the Bohemian section that were entirely ignored by the text. They were worn underneath wrappers, by Liberty of London for the most part, which were credited in the labels. The Fortuny tea gown/evening dress, both historicizing and strikingly modern and meant to be worn over an uncorseted body in a time when corsets were generally worn by all proper ladies, would have fit perfectly into the discussion of The Bohemian. It's possible that the Fortunys shown were reproductions, but I doubt that, considering that the Met has at least ten Delphos dresses and that the luminosity and uniqueness of the gowns' colors were characteristic of true Fortuny pieces. My only other guess is that the Fortuny gowns were from the Met's own collection, and as they wanted to feature only pieces that had come from the Brooklyn collection, they didn't mention them. I'm stumped!

The set design (by Nathan Crowley, a Hollywood Production Designer for films such as The Dark Knight) was unbelievable. Each room was painted in an appropriate backdrop for the archetype (for instance, the Heiress section had curved walls-- like most of the rooms-- and was painted to look like Mrs. Astor's ballroom in Newport). As in Model as Muse, some of the sets incorporated pieces from the Met's Decorative Arts collection, such as chairs and chandeliers. I think this is a great idea and assists both in appreciating the garments somewhat in situ and getting a chance to view pieces that might otherwise be stuck in storage. It is a real treat that they have the resources to create such elaborate sets! My only complaint with each room was that the lighting made it very difficult to see some aspects of the costumes. I'm not talking about the overall light levels; although they were low, that is necessary to preserve the pieces. It's that the lighting was spotty, with patches of dark and light, so that there was a subtle mottling to the illumination. This made it hard for me to discern details on some pieces-- although it may have been intentional, as low lighting hides a multitude of problems in damaged or fading garments!

I felt that the sections on The Suffragist and The Patriot, put together in one room, were sadly lacking. The Suffragist section featured about three or four suits from the teens, accessorized with a suffragette banner and some sashes-- not much of a sartorial statement. The Patriot section featured only two ensembles, both of them uniforms. These are interesting pieces and great early examples of women's military service-- but even combined with the Suffragist suits and the large screens showing contemporary video footage, I didn't feel that they really filled their own section. I also don't feel as though these are particularly strong American female archetypes (and I feel somewhat the same way about The Bohemian), although I understand that their depiction of strong, independent working women fits in well with the overarching ideas of American female identity that Bolton is getting at.

The Flapper, and her taboo-breaking sexual and behavioral freedom, is perhaps the best known of the archetypes and certainly had the fullest exhibit room. There were a couple of nice day ensembles, highlighted as appropriate for the career woman (read: working class person) that the Flapper typically was, although I didn't really think they were appropriate work clothes-- more like sportswear. The evening dresses were stunning. This was one room in which Julien d'Ys' hair dressings were NOT distracting-- in others, they were very irritating, particularly in The Heiress and The Gibson Girl, where the pompadours were multiple feet high and wide. I understand wanting to stylize, but I felt that in many cases it took away from the display of the objects.

The exhibit ended with The Screen Siren, which featured some video footage and a number of slinky '30s gowns. I was expecting to see more American designs in this section-- Adrian, perhaps, or some more American film designers. There was a notable piece by Travis Banton, but it was a film costume, and while striking, I wasn't certain it really fit in since it wasn't really "fashion." The other thing that irked me about this section was something that I saw in a few other places in the exhibit: less-than-stellar mannequin dressing. Many of the mannequins were dressed extremely well, but a few caught my eye in a bad way-- a Worth gown or two from The Heiress didn't have smooth, filled-out torsos, and there was a cluster of James gowns in The Screen Siren that made me shudder. James gowns are particularly difficult to dress because they are so sculptural. These gowns were not the most architectural of his pieces-- they were examples of the "Sirene" gown (aka the shrimp dress, see here)-- but they are still meant to fit exceptionally well and, as they are all custom-made, require appropriate mannequin modifications to look right. These appeared as though they had just been placed on the mannequins, which I'm sure is not true, but they were ill-fitting and gapped in a number of places, and I thought it made it difficult to really appreciate their intended look. Perhaps I am biased because FIT has custom mounts for all their James gowns-- but I think that is really the appropriate way to display them. See the difference here.

There is one more point I want to mention. I will not go into detail about Robin Givhan's review of this exhibit, a) because this post is already epic and b) because I don't want my blog to turn into a collection of reviews of Robin Givhan articles, BUT in her review (here), she says, "...based on this exhibition, the beauty ideal has always been slender. Those athletic Gibson Girls were practically waifs. The Flappers -- at least the ones who naturally fit the clothes and did not have to bind their bosoms so they would be fashionably flat -- were small-boned and almost fragile. Even the Screen Sirens, celebrated for their womanly curves, are tiny compared to a contemporary actress.... In our upset with the present, we have re-imagined a past of buxom beauties that mostly did not exist."

She is both right and wrong. While the ideal body of the American female archetypes discussed in the exhibit has frequently been fit and athletic, it is not true that "buxom beauties" were never actual ideal body tpes of the past. The Heiress, while fragile, was probably able to be heavier than today's models thanks to the aid of her corset. The Gibson girl was seen as tall and healthy, if still svelte. The Bohemian, Suffragist and Patriot had some more room to fit in their dresses-- they were ideally busty and shaped like an inverse teardrop, wearing empire-waisted dresses and peg-top skirts. Flappers were boyish and frequently thin, although the emphasis was on a lack of definition of curves and not necessarily on waifishness. The Screen Siren ideal is perhaps the most difficult to fit-- tall and thin but just curvy enough to make a bias-cut dress interesting. The thing is, the pin-up girl of the 40s was certainly voluptuous-- and what about Marilyn Monroe? "Buxom beauties" existed-- just outside of the 1890-1940 time frame.

That aside, Givhan's point is that the ideal bodies seen in the exhibit were no fairer to the everyday woman than is the oft-discussed stick-thin ideal of today. That is true. Fashion isn't fair-- fashion just likes novelty. Ideal bodies will come and go, but if they get any healthier it will not be because fashion has decided that that's the best thing for everybody-- it will be because we're bored.

The final room in the exhibit was an oval with video and still photo projections of well-known "American women," from Katharine Hepburn to Michelle Obama. There was a particularly fabulous juxtaposition of Josephine Baker in her banana skirt with Beyoncé in her "Single Ladies" video. I felt it helped challenge the visitor to think about the characteristics of today's American woman. It also fit well with the concluding didactic, which emphasized that while these archetypes never represented a majority of real women at any point, they all combine to help name the characteristics we associate with American womanhood: vitality, boldness, and sexual, social, and artistic freedom. While I am not sure that this was a significant contribution to research in the field, it was a digestible exhibit that will teach its visitors some interesting social and fashion history and perhaps leave them with the sense it left me-- that American women are, above all, independent.

What did you think of the exhibit? What were your favorite pieces? What thoughts did you depart with?

Photo: Actresses Marlene Dietrich and Anna May Wong w. filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl at Pierre Ball, Berlin, Alfred Eisenstaedt, Life, 1928.