NEW YORK –
Even for a legendary film director like Martin Scorsese, the task was daunting.
Take one of the famous American period rooms at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and essentially make a one-frame movie without a camera: a frame, not a film, but using your cinematic sensibilities. Your actors are mannequins and the costumes have been chosen by you.
“Creating a movie from a frame in a period room? A great opportunity and an intriguing challenge,” writes the director in a statement alongside his creation, an eerie mix of characters, emotions and fashion in the stunning Frank Lloyd Wright Room from the museum.
Eight other directors are also putting their stamp on period rooms, for “In America: An Anthology of Fashion,” the Met’s Costume Institute’s spring exhibit that launches with Monday’s Met Gala and opens to the public on June 7. may. The gala, which raises millions for the self-funded institute and has become a fashion and pop culture extravaganza, will be among the first to see the exhibits.
The exhibit is the second part of a larger show on American fashion to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the Costume Institute. Styled as usual by star curator Andrew Bolton, the new installment is both a sequel and a precursor to “In America: A Lexicon of Fashion,” which opened last September and focuses more on contemporary designers and establishes what Bolton calls a vocabulary for fashion. (The shows will run simultaneously and close together in September.)
If the new “Anthology” show is meant to provide crucial historical context, it also seeks to find untold stories and unsung heroes in early American fashion, especially designer fashion, and especially fashion of color. Many of their stories, Bolton said in announcing the show, “have been forgotten, overlooked or relegated to a footnote in the annals of fashion history.”
The nine directors were chosen to enliven the narrative with their own varying aesthetics. In addition to Scorsese, they include two of the hosts of the Met Gala on Monday night: actress-director Regina King and designer-director Tom Ford. Also contributing are last year’s Oscar winner Chloe Zhao, Radha Blank, Janicza Bravo, Sofia Coppola, Julie Dash and Autumn de Wilde.
For King, the Richmond Room, depicting early 19th-century domestic life for wealthy Virginians, provided an opportunity to spotlight black designer Fannie Criss Payne, who was born in the late 1860s to formerly enslaved parents and became became one of the best local dressmakers. She was known to sew a ribbon with her name on her garments to “sign” her work, part of an emerging sense of making clothes as a creative endeavor.
King says that he sought to “portray the power and strength that Fannie Criss Payne exudes through her impressive story and exquisite clothing,” placing her in a prosperous work situation, proudly wearing her own design, adjusting to a client, and employing another woman. black as a seamstress.
Filmmaker Radha Blank looks at Maria Hollander, a clothing business founder in mid-19th-century Massachusetts who used her commercial success to advocate for abolition and women’s rights. In the museum’s Shaker Retiring Room, director Zhao connects with the minimalist aesthetic of 1930s sportswear designer Claire McCardell.
De Wilde uses her setting in the Baltimore Dining Room to examine the influence of European fashion on American women, including some disapproving American attitudes about low-cut dresses in Paris. Dash focuses on black dressmaker Ann Lowe, who designed future first lady Jackie Kennedy’s wedding dress, but she was barely recognized for it. “The designer was shrouded in secrecy,” Dash writes. “Invisibility was the cloak he wore, and yet it persisted.”
In the wing’s Gothic Revival Library, Bravo browses the works of Elizabeth Hawes, a mid-20th-century fashion designer and writer. And Coppola, given the McKim, Mead & White Stair Hall and another room, writes that she was initially unsure what to do: “How do you put on a scene with no actors and no story?” She eventually teamed up with sculptor Rachel Feinstein to create distinctive faces for her “characters.”
Each filmmaker reached into their own bag of tricks. For Scorsese, the fashions he was given were designed by brilliant couturier Charles James, the subject of his own wardrobe show (and Met Gala) in 2014. Scorsese knew he needed to create a story “that could be felt throughout that room.” He drew on the Technicolor movies of the 1940s and used John Stah’s “Leave Her to Heaven,” which he calls “true Technicolor noir.” As for what happens before and after the scene we see, which includes a woman crying near a portrait of a man and a Martini glass nearby, “I hope people walk away with multiple possibilities playing out in their minds.”
Sure to get people talking is the exhibit in the museum’s Versailles room, best known for its circular panoramic view of Versailles painted by John Vanderlyn between 1818 and 1819.
Ford transforms the room into a re-enactment of the “Battle of Versailles” – not a military conflict, but the name given to an important night for American fashion in 1973, when five American sportswear designers (including Oscar de la Renta and Anne Klein) “took it up” against five French haute couture designers at a Versailles show and showed the world what American fashion was made of.
In his painting, Ford decided to turn it into a real battle with warring mannequins, many dressed in outfits from that pivotal show. “Weapons have changed,” Ford writes. “Instead of fans and feather boas, there are foils and front kicks.”
“In America: An Anthology of Fashion” opens to the public on May 7. The first part, “In America: A Lexicon of Fashion,” remains open at the Anna Wintour Costume Center. Both close in September.
Reference-www.ctvnews.ca