DISEMBODIED
MoMA’s new exhibit Items: Is Fashion Modern? might be the most elegant presentation I’ve seen there. The 111 items featured, “clothing and accessories that have had a strong impact on the world in the 20th and 21st centuries,”
are mounted with minimal fuss, on headless mannequins on low platforms, and pinned like dead butterflies on the blank walls of the sixth floor galleries, leaving oceanic expanses in between for wandering and reflection. There are simple printed text cards and some small video monitors at the displays, but the installation remains blissfully free of gimmickry. It’s also, sadly, free of drama, glamor and sex appeal. Is Fashion Modern? takes the fizz out of fashion.
Unlike the small, rich, thoughtfully-curated fashion shows at The Museum at FIT, this show feels thematically vague. It’s less about the items themselves, and how and why they’re worn, than about their intellectual associations. Most of the items are types of garments (LEOTARD, BRIEFS, MOTORCYCLE JACKET), but some aren’t “items” at all. They are materials (KENTE, GORE-TEX), brands (Y-3, WONDERBRA, SPANKS, FITBIT), and even ideas (SPACE AGE).
As they prepared the show – only the second fashion show in MoMA’s history – curators must have imagined the throngs visiting The Met's annual blocksbuster fashion show. But instead of presenting iconic garments, like Elizabeth Hurley’s Versace safety pin gown or Audrey Hepburn’s Givenchy cocktail dress (LITTLE BLACK DRESS), there are generic versions from the same designers. And instead of offering Michael Jordan’s hightops (AIR FORCE 1), there’s a sagging, scuffed pair that look like they were lifted from the sidewalk on garbage day. So many of the items are commonplace, overly familiar (SUIT, WHITE T SHIRT, TIGHTS), that they have little charge formally, and don’t hold the eye when set in vitrines or hung on the wall. These 111 items might have been better collected in a time capsule, marked How Everyone Dresses in 2017, and set aside for fifty years.
Most strangely, the show misses timely political connections. We see a replica of Colin Kaepernick’s 49ers shirt (SPORTS JERSEY) but we don’t see a replica of Mickey Mantle’s, though both wear, iconically, number 7. We see a Yankees hat but we don’t see a Make America Great Again hat. And a red Champion sweatshirt (HOODIE), displayed against a big black wall with its hood pointed upwards, has an spooky, unsettling presence. Rather than speaking to trends in athleisure and streetwear, it recalls Tayvon Martin, and the anonymous hooded prisoner in the grainy photographs from Abu Ghraib.
This show is so eager to decipher each of the 111 items semiotically that
it forgets that that they are also clothing, charged mythologically when worn on a body, by a person, in the world. These items make our identities and our dreams.
Photograph courtesy of MoMA.