Bravo’s text for this room centers on accomplishment and legacy. Few in fashion today cite Hawes or her brilliant work. A later textile work by Hawes, from the 1950s and knitted with letters and numbers along orange stripes, sits in the window. The 1939 “Little Moose” dress in black wool bouclé has a similar geometric-though less sexual-swoop. One of Hawes’s dresses has one arrow pointing to the derrière and another to the breasts-that’s “The Tarts” dress from 1937. Bravo has staged the library as an atelier abuzz with work, with dress forms, shears, and sketches about. Her central belief as a designer was to move away from trendiness and toward a pragmatic, festive uniform for day-to-day wear. Hawes’s 1938 written work “Fashion Is Spinach” is rich with send-ups of the fashion system, which even back then was mired in bureaucracy and grandeur. Autumn de Wilde took things even further in her rooms-1810–11’s Baltimore Room and 1811’s Benkard Room-adding spilled-over card tables, drunken suitors, faux pastries, and some classic American gossip, reprinting contemporary accounts about the sultry socialite Elizabeth Patterson Bonaparte as text bubbles among sneering mannequins.īravo’s other installation is in the Gothic Revival Library (1859), displaying the work of Elizabeth Hawes, a writer and fashion designer with an exacting wit. Take Coppola’s rooms-the McKim, Mead, and White Stair Hall (1882) and the Worsham-Rockefeller Dressing Room (1881–82)-where she had her friends, the artists Rachel Feinstein and John Currin, sculpt and paint her mannequins’ faces, lending a lurid allure to their elegant poses and Gilded Age clothing. In the 13 rooms staged by nine of America’s most influential directors-Ford, Radha Blank, Janicza Bravo, Sofia Coppola, Autumn de Wilde, Julie Dash, Regina King, Martin Scorsese, and Chloé Zhao-levity and humbleness come together in a uniquely American way. It’s that tendency toward comedy that makes American fashion truly American-in no other country does irony, wit, or joy play so well on and off the catwalks. It certainly isn’t a sweeping survey of American fashion.” Instead, Regan says, the second part of the museum’s American exhibitions-September 2021 saw the opening of “In America: A Lexicon of Fashion”-is more like a series of short stories about overlooked periods that impacted the American fashion industry. So many of the spaces are dedicated to a single designer or dressmaker. “Because the period rooms feel very intimate, I think they inherently have led us to more intimate, focused narratives. “‘Lexicon’ is more sweeping, about the broad qualities of American fashion, past and present,” says associate curator Jessica Regan, who worked on the exhibition with the Wendy Yu Curator in Charge of the Costume Institute Andrew Bolton. Without kowtowing to obvious touchpoints like Levi’s jeans or Nike sneakers, “Anthology” chronicles the anonymous hands, hearts, and minds that shaped the look and feel of what today would be called quintessentially American style. What the exhibition does throughout 13 period rooms is exalt the unsung heroes and the less-than-always-glamorous backbone of American style.
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