SUITING ONESELF
A small show at the Met’s Costume Institute highlights the wardrobe of designer Jacqueline de Ribes. De Ribes is a French Countess and socialite whose natural beauty and elevated taste endeared her to the couturiers she has patronized over the decades, including Valentino, Yves St. Laurent and Karl Lagerfeld. In the 1980′s she went on to form a couture house of her own.
The clothes she commissioned and the clothes she created are all of a piece: refined in proportion and structure, bold in color and detail. She tinkered with couture garments to suit her needs and her figure. She asked Yves St. Laurent to remake a shimmering fishscale-sequined sheath dress as a dinner gown. She asked Valentino to raise the waistline of a red silk blouson dress. And she asked Marc Bohan to remove a bow from the waist of a bodice and enlarge the one at its shoulder. In each case the designers followed directions and the garments, on display here, look entirely natural. The show is a testimony to the methods of these old-school couturiers, who sustained delicate relationships with wealthy, well-positioned women like de Ribes, their main clients. Today couture houses, led by contracted designers and managed by global conglomerates, seem focused on devising attention-grabbing outfits for starlets to borrow for red carpet events. For de Ribes couture dressing wasn’t media spectacle; it was a way of life.
The show is also an testimony to 80′s event dressing and its concomitant excesses. The fashions on display – dressy ankle-length gowns and pantsuits – brought back a nostalgia for that era, when it was socially acceptable to display personal wealth. The gowns are embellished with lace panels, ostrich feathers, metal palettes, cultured pearls, and cut crystals. The silhouettes are rouched, draped, pieced and ballooned. But the garments, as displayed, feel dramatic rather than excessive, luxurious rather than vulgar. Like her American contemporary, Jacqueline Kennedy, de Ribes’ rich personal style was tempered by a sense of the appropriate. She dressed to suit her life, and her life was lavish.