Exhibit explores extremes of fashion
By Katherine Roth
Associated Press
NEW YORK — The quest for beauty can be extreme.
"My dream is to save women from nature," Christian Dior once said. That statement introduces "Extreme Beauty: The Body Transformed," a provocative and sometimes humorous show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Costume Institute.
Through almost 200 examples of extreme clothing and accessories from around the world, the show examines the extraordinary manipulations of the body, past and present.
Curator Harold Koda said one of the things viewers will take with them "is a sense that when we look to the past or to other cultures and take a sort of condescending chauvinistic perspective that 'we're now rational, we're now pragmatic and those people are so weird and so backward,' that this is not the case."
Although the show won't be seen outside New York, its very existence is a statement about the complicated and often twisted evolution of fashion. The exhibit, on view through March 17, is about what happens when designers take an ideal and run with it.
"Once an aesthetic is introduced people take it further and further and further," Koda said. "The quest for beauty through fashion has repeatedly been attended by an impulse to exaggeration. ... There's a kind of joy in really extreme fashion."
Examining the ways in which women — and men — have suffered willingly to attain changing ideals, the exhibit features African neck rings and dangling fuzz-tipped penis gourds from New Guinea alongside contemporary Western designs. There are enormous feathery cocktail dresses from Alexander McQueen's 2001 collection that transform the wearer into a giant pastel chicken, a 1999 Yohji Yamamoto inflatable dress (to be worn with pump), a tightly fitted 1997 Thierry Mugler cocktail dress made of car tires and Madonna's famous cone-shaped bustier.
"Clothing isn't only about keeping us warm, protecting us from the elements. It has other narratives, like projecting a sense of ourselves, whether it's status or sexuality, expressing dreams about who we are," Koda said.
The exhibit explores the changing notions of beauty surrounding five areas of the body: neck and shoulders, bust, waist, hips and feet.
Perhaps the only constant ideal of female beauty has been the long neck, Koda said. Brass neck rings worn by the Ndebele and Padoung peoples to elongate the neck are shown side by side with interpretations by designers John Galliano, Issey Miyake and Hussein Chalayan.
Next come examples of the myriad ways designers have sought to enhance or diminish the chest.
"I think it's going to be a surprise to people, especially men, that the breast, the big bosom, for most of Western fashion history was seen as unattractive. It was associated with working or lower-class women, or age," Koda said. "It's only in the 20th century that it becomes a zone of erotic focus."
Moving to the waist, the show reveals midriff manipulations ranging from suffocating corsets to the perfectly cylindrical effect seen in Japanese kimonos and later flapper styles of the 1920s.
"There are even times where a very bulbous, full-bellied waistline is preferred," Koda said.
No less extreme are the two displays devoted to menswear.
The final gallery is devoted to feet, with shoes ranging from Japanese clogs to outrageous rainbow platform sandals by Salvatore Ferragamo. A collage of X-rays compares a foot bound in the Chinese fashion to the foot of a ballerina in toe shoes and the foot of a museum staff member wearing trendy stilettos.
