Fashion Returns to the Museum
The New York Times
With “In America” at the Met and “Christian Dior” at the Brooklyn Museum, our critics debate the nuances of showing fashion in art institutions, and find a depth of influence among young American designers.
It may be a simple coincidence that the Brooklyn Museum unveiled a major Dior extravaganza, “Christian Dior: Designer of Dreams,” the week before the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute opens its fall show, “In America: A Lexicon of Fashion.” But after two years of lockdowns and sweatpants, it seemed like fate. A fashion horn of plenty!
In many ways the two shows are like opposite sides of a coin. One is an epic — 22,000-square-foot — and very glamorous ode to a single European brand, often considered the epitome of French fashion, which has passed through the hands of seven different designers. The other is a tight — 5,000-square-foot — and somewhat unexpected argument for reassessing the stereotypes around this country’s style legacy, crammed with names most attendees will probably never have heard of, and almost determinedly diverse.
But together they raised some interesting questions for Vanessa Friedman, the chief fashion critic for The New York Times, and Zachary Woolfe, The Times’s classical music editor, about what kinds of garments belong in a museum, and the nature of a fashion exhibition compared to a runway show. Parsing the answers became an extended conversation.
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