ANIMAL ATTRACTION
For someone who devoted his life to the female form, making dresses that slithered over their hips and caressed the back of their necks, and dipped down around the valleys of their collarbones, the Met’s exhibit honoring Charles James is curiously bodiless. We see some archival photographs of women in the dresses. But we don’t see film or video of women in the dresses as they enter the room on an escort’s arm, curtsy before a dance partner, or collapse into a chaise lounge, as we imagine women wearing them would.
The garments are draped stiffly on headless, limbless dress forms that are lifted off the ground on platforms, and lit sparingly with pinpoint LED lights. Undoubtedly this is to highlight their sculptural richness, and their elaborate draping and construction. Displayed this way, in the dimly lit basement gallery, James’ day dresses and coats are gorgeous relics. The lights have a cool bluish cast that drains the reds and yellows, and all of the softness, from the fabrics. These clothes look like they’re carved out of stone.
But something different happens in the ground floor gallery, where the ball gowns are displayed. These garments have rigid vertical symmetries and profiles that, typically, pull tight at the waist and swell extravagantly at the hips and hem. They look like living things. Not like women, really, but like fragile and exotic creatures who live short, brilliant lives. From a distance, when seen all at once, the array of dresses feels like an exhibit at a natural history museum . These lustrous shells could be prehistoric insects recovered from a dig, blossoms brought back from an Amazonian expedition, or deep sea crustaceans that cannot survive the light of day. The dresses have a strong biological charge. Not in the way that they reshape women into what will make them attractive to men, although they might do that, subtly. Rather they transform the women who wear them into another species altogether, giving them a fantastic, superhuman armature to put on over her own. That transformation would be wondrous to see.
Image of Beyond Fashion courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum.