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ALL DRESSED UP

"American Woman: Fashioning a National Identity", an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum, is sponsored by Gap, with support from Condé Nast and features an audio guide narrated by Sarah Jessica Parker. Such clues should alert visitors that this is a somewhat frothy departure from Tutankhamen's funereal artefacts and Picasso's raging bulls. But that is not to underestimate the show's pleasures. Taking as its subject the varying ideals of the modern American Woman that emerged from the 1890s to the 1930s, the exhibition is divided into a series circular viewing galleries, each of which outlines a different archetype, all of them connected by tunnels. ("This is like Halloween and art combined," observed one viewer upon entering a tunnel.)

Archetype number one is the Heiress, a woman whose modes and manners are "associated with the European aristocracy" and whose aesthetic references include Henry James and John Singer Sargent. Modelled after the Astors' Beechwood Mansion in Newport (think French doors and cherubs), the Heiress gallery features mannequins with complicated hairdo piles and corseted ballgowns.

Next up is the Gibson Girl. Named after a LIFE magazine creation by Charles Dana Gibson, an illustrator, this archetype is confident, commanding and sporty. Her gallery is a pleasing throwback to a time when high-necked blouses and floor-length skirts constituted athletic outerwear—a far cry from Venus Williams' s eye-popping undershorts at this year's French Open.

The Bohemian follows, a woman whose involvement in art admittedly "revolved
less around its production than its consumption," as the programme notes. Still, the Bohemian dressed well, in flowy beaded gear that draped most flatteringly in positions of repose. She is succeeded by the Suffragist of the 1910s, a woman who designed her fashions as a form of feminine protest and preferred walking suits to empire waists. "This stuff is boring," one girl commented. Presumably she was far more taken with the duds of the Flapper era that followed, full of short skirts, dangerous necklines and gauzy fabrics. The final archetype of the exhibit, the Screen Siren, cut a womanly figure in bias-cut gowns that accentuated her curves.

"American Woman" may leave viewers startled at the speed with which fashion evolves. Yet it is gratifying to note that the modern American woman, regardless of the nuances of her era, has always required clothes that convey (and do not in themselves impede) a certain power and capability.

"American Woman: Fashioning a National Identity" is on at the Metropolitan Museum of Art through August 1st

~ MOLLY YOUNG

Picture credit: Alex Hills for the Metropolitan Museum of Art (via Flickr)