The main reason I went to New York last month was to go to this exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art about how American women and fashion have evolved. Each room in the exhibit was designed to show a different era of fashion. It began in 1890 with American fashion moving from the ultra-formal French style toward a more “sporty” style (still with corsets though).
This moved into the 1910s “bohemian” era, when women finally lost their corsets & wore loose kimono-ish dresses.
By the 1920s fashion had started to reflect modern architecture (tall, thin, skyscrapers) with the androgynous flapper ideal.
The last set of clothing reflected the Hollywood stars slinky gowns. That room was cool because behind all of the gowns there were clips of films showing the dresses on display.
The exhibit ended in a room full of constantly changing images of various American women with Lenny Kravitz yelling “American Woman” in the background. The curator wanted to show how at the beginning America was getting its fashion from Europe & by the end Europe was looking to American starlets for fashion. (I can kinda see how that happened by the end, but almost all the dresses in the exhibit were still made in France)
Two things struck me going through the exhibit. First, how cyclical fashion is – for example, puffy sleeves. Modern puff sleeves are not quite as huge as the ones we saw, but they aren’t far off. And the flapper era had those long waistlines that hit almost below the hips – those were all over last summer. Second, how narrow the scope of the exhibit was. I was hoping it would get to more modern fashion. But even as it was, the exhibit only contained dresses (including a wool bathing dress), and most of those dresses were extremely formal dresses. It did not really show the daily fashion of women. More importantly though, it only showed the fashions of the wealthy white elite. The omission of more pedestrian fashion kinda annoys me (what were black women wearing during these times? even if they were poor, they had fashion too). But, I suppose our fashion is still just trickling down from Bryant Park so I don't know why I was expecting anything different. (Except for the hipsters. They are above mainstream fashion.)
