Punk: Chaos to Couture is smaller sized and scaled than previous Met Costume Institute exhibits like Anglomania and Savage Beauty, and also less richly contextualized than those shows, which positioned punk as an eruption of eccentric personal vision through the elaborate stratifications of British culture. Instead Chaos to Couture shows us exactly what it promises, how fashion rises in the street and works its way onto the runways. The first gallery holds racks of t-shirts and trousers from Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood’s legendary 1970’s London boutique Sex, all obliterated (“deconstructed” is too gentle a word) with rips, cuts, safety pins, and comically tasteless sexual and anti-royalist graphics. The following galleries show proper fashion, including a tweed Chanel suit embellished with hand-trimmed holes, a Versace gown whose whiplash panels are held together by over-sized gold safety pins, and a sagging, striped, open-weave, knit dress from Rodarte. The “chaos” to “couture” comparison doesn’t serve the couture well. Next to the real things – unwashed, ill-fitting, falling-to-threads, off-the-rack clothing – the legitimate fashions feel lifeless.
Part of this might be the displays, which show all the clothes on the Met’s standard, white, Cristy-Turlington-faced mannequins, in ladylike poses lifted high on platforms. One of the galleries is decorated to resemble the bowels of a Lower East Side club, with simulated cracked cement block walls painted matte black. Why didn’t the curators blow holes through the walls? Or dismember the mannequins? Or pump stale cigarette smoke through the rooms? Another part of it is curatorial. Most of high fashions have been selected for punk motifs rather than aesthetic kinship. Of the "couture" on display, only the Junya Watanabe and Commes des Garcons garments feel authentically punk, undoing the body’s natural graces with monstrous appendages and asymmetries that are just as arresting and convulsive as multiple piercings, black-and-white face makeup, gravity-defying hairdos, and all-over tattoos. The trio of black Alexander McQueen dresses on display, tailored, exquisitely, from synthetics that emulate bubble wrap and garbage bags, are not punk; they are classical in their proportions and repose. Why didn’t the Met include dresses from McQueen’s Highland Rape collection, which obscured the face with feathers and veils while uncovering the stomach, breast and thigh, giving the women wearing them a disfiguring, disquieting power? It’s this unease that’s deeply punk.