To understand fashion, we must move beyond the static object and consider its life in the world; its intimacy with the body, its role in shaping subjectivity,” said Andrew Bolton, Curator in Charge of The Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art during the press preview for its latest exhibition, simply titled “Costume Art.” Officially opening on May 10, the exhibition brings together garments and objects from the institution’s many curatorial departments, and is in many ways a celebration of what it means to be human. Bolton continued, “In wearing clothes, we don’t simply express who we are, we become who we are. This is what makes fashion different from any other art form. It collapses the boundary between the subject and object; the wearer is of canvas and collaborator, observer, and participant. Fashion in this sense generates a form of knowledge that's embodied, sensorial, and deeply human.”
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The second section, “Bodily Being in its Universality,” really digs into the “human” part of being a human; with categories like the Inscribed Body, which explores the historical and modern practice of tattooing (expect lots of Jean Paul Gaultier), but also scarification (with perhaps my favorite pairing in the whole show, a photograph by Richard Avedon’s of Andy Warhol’s torso following his many medical procedures next to a black dress by New York designer Susan Cianciolo with similar crude stitching); the Anatomical Body which looks at representations of what lies beneath our skin from medical journals and the work of designers like Thom Browne and Robert Wun; the Vital Body which looks at how “life has been defined by pulsation and circulation of blood,” best illustrated perhaps by a fully beade Vivienne Westwood and Mr. Pearl jacket with a trompe l’oeil design of a man’s muscles with oozing wounds paired with a 1500 engraving by Dürer; the Aging Body, with its sagging, lumpy silhouettes (the work of Sarah Lucas and Joan Semmel surrounding a mannequin wearing a shroud featuring an image of an elderly woman by the Dutch designer Imme Van Der Haak, who prints to-scale photos of people onto silk so that one can “wear” a person); and finally the Mortal Body, which includes both mourning garments, paired with representations of death (lots of skulls!)
