A couple of weeks ago we wrote about a big fashion event the 2009 Met Costume Institute Gala hosted by Kate Moss, Marc Jacobs, Justin Timberlake and a fashion industry legend Anna Wintour. Today we wanted to share with you Bronwyn Cosgrave’s article showing the backstage of the event and ideas behind the exhibition at The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Harold Koda, co-curator of the Costume Institute at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, usually has a laconic demeanour. Last week, though, his adrenalin was pumping. “There is nothing like a room filled with models,” he enthused. “You see [them] dressed to the nines with proportions like nothing you’ve seen in your daily life.”
Koda was anticipating the arrival of the legion of supermodels at the Costume Institute for the opening party of its summer show. Entitled The Model as Muse: Embodying Fashion, it is a lavish tribute to iconic models who have worked at the forefront of the industry since 1947 – widely acknowledged as the year the profession took flight because top agency Ford Models was founded then.
The pre-opening gala is renowned for its star-studded red carpet – and this year’s party, on Monday night, did Koda proud. Kate Moss dutifully served as the event’s co-chair along with Koda, Anna Wintour, American Vogue’s editor-in-chief, designer Marc Jacobs and pop star Justin Timberlake. But it was the “High Priestesses of the Body Beautiful”, as the exhibition notes refer to iconic supermodels such as Cindy Crawford and Claudia Schiffer, that proved the main attraction.
Aside from the gala’s glamorous attendees, equally momentous is the talk generated in the run-up. Since the late Nineties, Hollywood stars such as Nicole Kidman have dominated the industry via multi-million dollar salaries in advertising campaigns for major luxury brands. Fashion experts believe that now is the time for models to assume their former roles.
“Celebrity culture is tired. Who wants to read the 93rd profile of Madonna?” says Michael Gross, author of Model: The Ugly Business of Beautiful Women. According to Gross, magazine covers fronted by actors are “not selling” as effectively as they did back in the late Nineties when Hollywood became the focal point of fashion. “When something becomes fashion, it is not fashion any more.”
The Model as Muse thus opens at an opportune time. In the past, exhibitions have proved significant in shaping the fashion landscape. The effect has been described as the “Met buzz”. (In 2003, the Costume Institute’s Goddess exhibition featured Greco-Roman-inspired dresses that gave rise to similarly draped, jersey looks on the catwalks as well as on the high street. Dries Van Noten, Prada, Yves Saint Laurent and Marc Jacobs included turbans, tunics and harem pants in their spring/summer 2007 collections which were inspired by the exotica exhibited in Poiret: King of Fashion in May 2007.)
“I think there is a return to an interest in modelling happening right now,” acknowledges Koda. The classic look of current fashion is begging for a troupe of expressive beauties to bring it to life on the catwalks, which is how supermodels achieved renown at the tail-end of the Eighties recession.
What’s needed for a comeback is “a group of interesting models”, says Gross. “At the moment, there are only two – Kate Moss and Gisele Bündchen.”
The idea for the show came from Kohle Yohannan, the exhibition’s co-curator. A cultural historian, Yohannan amassed an encyclopaedic knowledge of the modelling world while recently compiling a history of Vogue models.
The project led him to suggest the retrospective to Koda. Although countless museum exhibitions have showcased the work of great designers and photographers, he thought, “nobody has paid any attention to models – the women who have [portrayed] the great looks of the era”.
“The idea that they just stand there and take a pretty picture is nonsense. It takes focus. It takes work [often performed] in the most inconvenient of circumstances and inclement climates and they still look like that 'moment in time’ that will freeze as 'now’ forever.”
John Myhre, the Academy Award-winning set designer and the exhibition’s creative consultant, has applied cinematic flourishes that make this comprehensive decade-by-decade photographic journey a dazzling spectacle. Dramatic stage sets have been built around each photograph.
For example, the Charles James gowns worn by some of the world’s first supermodels and replicas of the Louis XV furniture used in Cecil Beaton’s famous image for Vogue in 1948 are displayed around the photograph. Myhre painted another gallery gold and styled it to resemble a nightclub’s VIP enclave because it showcases the “Halstonettes”, the statuesque tribe who walked Halston’s runway in the Seventies and accompanied him to Studio 54.
Clarifying the definition of muse, the co-curators claim that the 51 beauties who feature predominantly did far more than inspire the designers and photographers with whom they collaborated. “There are certain women in certain periods with whom you identify with the fashion of the time,” explains Koda. “What we are saying is that she becomes the embodiment of fashion. So everybody absorbing her image uses her as a muse.
“Think about Twiggy and just the fact that she stands with her knees knocked and then you see all of these young girls standing like that. Every so often, somebody comes along who is a lightning rod. She is someone who is living the life of the times. She galvanises people. They all want a part of what she brings to fashion.”
A pair of vintage Calvin Klein jeans on exhibit is testimony to this potency. Back in January, Brooke Shields donated the designer denims in which, as a 15-year-old, she leaned toward the camera with windswept hair, whispering: “You know what comes between me and my Calvins? Nothing.” The scene, captured in Richard Avedon’s 1983 television commercial, shifted 15 million pairs of Calvin Klein jeans.
Kate Moss’s collection for Topshop New York demonstrates her power as a modern muse for the masses (since opening last month, three limited-edition dresses have been sell-outs).
The exhibition concludes in 1997, the year, says Yohannan, that “models lost their cachet. Designers felt the need to re-invigorate the power of the industry by suppressing the supermodel.”
But Koda believes everything in the fashion industry is a “continuum”. In other words, what goes around comes around. And if the Met buzz proves effective this year, The Model as Muse might, indeed, spark another generation of supermodels.
Source: Bronwyn Cosgrave / The Daily Telegraph