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Museum exhibit shows 18th-century fashion is still in style
Monday, November 23, 1998 By Rhonda B. Sewell, Block News Alliance
NEW YORK CITY -- To peer through a Metropolitan Museum of Art barred office window along Fifth Avenue, one might think the employee inside was a mad collector of numerous books on ancient art or German historical periodicals.
"The books of a fuddy-duddy old curator," said Richard Martin, actual inhabitor of The Met's Costume Institute lower-level office.
"[Passers-by] would be shocked to find out that the books are actually Elle and Vanity Fair," said Martin, laughing, surrounded by thousands of stacked or shelved fashion publications.
Step into Martin's world and you've entered a historical fashion and costume utopia.
The former Fashion Institute of Technology exhibitions and collections expert has spent six years as curator of the Costume Institute. Martin is a walking diction-ary on the subject of style.
He can tell you about the idiosyncrasies of Charles James, the lifetime work of Gianni Versace, and wax eloquent on one of his current favorite topics: how Jeanne Lanvin defied the slender look of the 1920s to mimic the wide-hip look of the 18th century, when women tied on panniers, basket-like undergarments, to lift huge skirts up and out.
Eighteenth-century fashions and their 300 years of influence is the subject of the Costume Institute's latest exhibition, "The Ceaseless Century: Three Hundred Years of Eighteenth-Century Fashion."
The exhibit, which opened in September and runs through Sunday, is on view in five galleries.
"The first gallery is that of the masked ball, [titled 'Bal Masque'], and that is meant for the viewer to [play] a guessing game of what was genuinely 18th- century and what was not 18th-century outfits," said Martin. He points to an 18th-century-influenced 1953 Christian Dior ball gown, which is displayed beside a circa-1760s pink and white bodice with brocaded floral pattern.
The curator said he believes the 18th century, with its ostentation and ornamentation, still serves as a model for artifice and exuberance in dress.
Featured designers in the exhibition include Christian Dior, Coco Chanel, Jean-Paul Gaultier, Lanvin, Christian LaCroix, Stella McCartney for Chloe, Karl Lagerfeld for Chanel, and Vivienne Westwood.
These and other designers continue to look back to the 18th century for style and design inspiration, Martin said.
The second gallery, L'Encyclopedie, includes an unfinished 18th-century embroidered dress, never cut into its pattern pieces, juxtaposed with the boning and construction of a 1940s Dior.
Of the unfinished pieces, the curator said, "An aristocrat would have bought this, but who knows, maybe that aristocrat might have gone to the guillotine a little early and never got around to it."
The institute purchased most of the fabric pieces on exhibit this year from a dealer. Martin said the dealer most likely found the elaborate embroidered fabric in an old estate somewhere in France.
The third gallery, Fete Galante, offers a pageant of garments, dating from 1690 through 1799, all from the gallery's extensive collection. Women of the fashion elite sought clothes that shaped their bodies extravagantly with small waist, reinforced bust and expansive hips.
A more moderate profile emerged around the 1780s, with cotton dresses, a flattened silhouette and the introduction of the rear bustle. "Style evolved slowly but steadily in aristocratic times," said Martin, adding that style was governed by artifice.
The most stunning exhibition piece is that of an English court dress, circa 1760, done in blue silk taffeta brocaded in wrapped and flat silver thread. Its hem, over bustles and hoops, stands out 55-inches wide.
"You could only get through an 18th-century doorway sideways in this," said Martin.
Dresses from the 1880s-1890s are in the fourth gallery, Nineteenth Century Remembrances.
"In some ways the 19th century was being competitive with ... dressing in the 18th century," Martin said, pointing to a detailed open robe design with corset, lace at the cuff, lace at the décolletage and extensive fringe - reminiscent of 18th-century extravagance.
In Twentieth-Century Historicism, the exhibit concludes with 20th-century dresses influenced by 18th-century styles. Here is the deconstructed evening dress of 21-year-old Paris-based Belgian designer, Olivier Theyskens.
Theyskens is compared to Versace and Lagerfeld for their realization of the constant sexuality latent in 18th-century fashion.
"It was that sense of a rococo style, the building of Versailles, the sense of large grand spaces. They really were a living-large culture. They just wanted everything grand, everything silk, extensive beadwork and patterns going all over the place," he said.
Martin said the idea for this exhibition developed while he was preparing last December's Gianni Versace memorial exhibition, shortly after the Italian designer was murdered.
The institute's next exhibition, "Cubism and Fashion," will show the influence of the turn-of-the-century Cubist art movement on fashion. It opens Dec. 10.
Rhonda B. Sewell is fashion writer for The Blade in Toledo, Ohio.
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