From Museum to Runway: Art and the Fashioned Body

When the Met Gala carpet unfurls on the museum’s Fifth Avenue steps on May 4, it will mark, as usual, the unveiling of the Costume Institute’s annual blockbuster exhibition. But this year, it will also herald the opening of the Condé M. Nast Galleries, the Institute’s new home within the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Fittingly, the move to a 12,000-square-foot space adjacent to the Met’s Great Hall has occasioned an exhibition theme proportionally vast: Costume Art. Curator Andrew Bolton has cast his eye around the Met — its 1.5 to 2 million objects, spanning 5,000 years of human history — looking for the fashion in the art, and the influence of art on fashion.

Of course, this is a nigh-on limitless assignment. It could encompass everything from depictions of Hatshepsut circa 1500 BC to Rembrandt’s renderings of lace collars and cuffs; from Niki de Saint Phalle’s exuberant Nana sculptures (1964–90s), whose bold, monumental bodies have migrated into fashion’s language of color, pattern, and silhouette, to Richard Prince’s rephotographed advertisements. Bolton narrows the theme through the aperture of “the body” — the “Naked Body,” the “Classical Body,” the “Mortal Body,” the “Anatomical Body,” and so on. That emphasis gives Costume Art its contemporary charge. The exhibition’s mannequins have been cast from real bodies, a choice Bolton described to Vogue’s Nicole Phelps as a way to “challenge normative conventions and, in turn, offer more diverse displays of beauty.” The point, finally, is to “put the body back into discussions about art and fashion.”

“Fashion’s acceptance as an art form has really occurred on art’s terms,” Bolton observed in his Vogue interview. “It’s premised on the negation, on the renunciation of the body, and on the [fact that] aesthetics are about disembodied and disinterested contemplation.” Fashion, by contrast, remains inherently corporeal: it is made to be worn. Together, these ideas do more than organize the exhibition. They offer a lens through which to consider a longer history of exchange between art and fashion, one in which the body is continually reworked, stylized, and abstracted.

One of the exhibition’s clearest meditations on art, fashion, and the body appears in the juxtaposition of Fortuny’s “Delphos” gown, once owned by Lillian Gish, with a terracotta statuette of Nike from ancient Greece, paradigmatic of the classical sculpture that inspired the gown’s drape and detail. Elsewhere, Bolton pairs Hans Bellmer’s sculpture La Poupée (c. 1936) with a Rei Kawakubo ensemble from the Comme des Garçons Fall/Winter 2017–18 collection; the two pieces echo each other in their voluptuous abstraction of the human form. The Comme des Garçons look belongs in a long line of Kawakubo’s experiments with the body, perhaps most famously explored in her Spring/Summer 1997 collection, “Body Meets Dress, Dress Meets Body” — or, as it’s colloquially known, the “lumps and bumps” show. That season’s form-fitting dresses made fashion history, with alien, asymmetric down-filled distortions of the “natural” silhouette — distortions that forced its viewers to consider the body anew. “After extensive searching and thinking out for new ideas...I realized that the clothes could be the body and the body could be the clothes,” Kawakubo later said of the collection, as quoted in the book Unlimited: Comme des Garçons (2005).

Kawakubo’s deformations are surreal in effect. Other deformations have come to look “normal” to us: the balloon sleeve, the corset-cinched waist, shoulder pads. Art depicts the ways fashion has repeatedly reshaped the body. Sixteenth-century farthingales — structured petticoats of willow, whalebone, or wire, designed to produce conical or balloon-like skirt shapes — gave way to the panniers of the 17th and 18th centuries, which distended the hips of skirts to sometimes delirious dimensions. Originating at the Spanish court of Philip IV, pannier dresses are well documented in paintings by Diego Velázquez, including Las Meninas (1656). As fashions do, the preference for panniers spread and became a key element of the robes à la française popular at Versailles. Cumbersome as they were, they “tested a woman’s ‘natural’ grace...and ability to carry oneself elegantly and with the impression of ease,” per the Costume Institute’s definition of the pannier; one French example in the Met collection is adjustable in shape, fitted with hinges that allowed the wearer to maneuver through tight spaces.

Many grand pannier gowns were on view in the recent exhibition Marie Antoinette Style at London’s Victoria and Albert Museum, alongside modern looks inspired by Madame Déficit, as the free-spending queen was nicknamed. The “Mona Lisa of Versailles” also made an appearance at the V&A. Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun’s Marie Antoinette with a Rose (1783) has a fascinating fashion-related backstory: Vigée Le Brun, Marie Antoinette’s favorite portraitist, painted the queen numerous times, but her first effort set off a furor. The public was astounded to see, in Marie Antoinette in a Chemise Dress (1783), her royal highness in casual attire: a straw hat and loose muslin frock tied at the waist with a yellow sash. The uproar occasioned the execution of a replacement portrait, Marie Antoinette with a Rose, which is quite similar to its predecessor — in each, the subject holds the same pose — except that in the later work, Marie Antoinette is clad in a formal, lace-trimmed gown of French Lyonnais silk.

Per Costume Institute taxonomy, these two works could be categorized under the heading of the “Scandalous Body” — the epitome of which is the Met’s very own Madame X (1883–84) by John Singer Sargent. The subject, Madame Pierre Gautreau, still looks arresting in her décolletage-baring black gown; critics at the time were appalled. “We are shocked by...the vulgar character of the figure,” sputtered one writer, in the French newspaper L’Évenement. Another, in L’Artiste, pointed to the “indecency of her dress that looks like it is about to fall off.” Sargent decamped for London soon after the painting’s unveiling. Twenty years later, he would harken back to Madame X in his portrait Lady Helen Vincent, Viscountess D’Abernon (1904). 

The decades between Madame X and Lady Helen Vincent saw the death of Queen Victoria and the ascension of her ribald son, King Edward VII; as the Belle Époque ebbed, the louche and the decadent became fashionable. Against the controlled silhouettes and structured public rituals of late-19th-century painting — Georges Seurat’s A Sunday Afternoon on La Grande Jatte (1884–86) chief among them — the high-society portraiture of Giovanni Boldini, the “Master of Swish,” feels pointedly unbuttoned. Out with stiff postures, bustles, and calibrated decorum; in with wild brushstrokes, cleavage, and a come-hither attitude. Within a generation, the sculptural silhouettes depicted by Sargent, Seurat, Boldini, and others would be cast aside entirely, making way for the modern.

Enter Pablo Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. Fashion took cues from the Cubist revolution set in motion by the painting’s 1907 debut, with the “Belle Époque silhouette...collapsed into a cylinder of insubstantial cotton,” in the words of Richard Martin in his 1998 book Cubism and Fashion. Form became unfixed, and virtually every aspect of design reoriented around angularity. Paris’s Callot Soeurs pioneered dresses “flat as a pancake,” working “ornament to the plane,” as Martin puts it. Collaged materials, geometric prints, and pleats echoed Cubism’s refractions. Chanel, Lanvin, Poiret, Patou, and Vionnet all emerged in the wake of Picasso and Braque, reshaping the silhouette through a new emphasis on line, structure, and planar form.

If Cubism fractured the body, Surrealism pushed it further still. In the 1930s, Elsa Schiaparelli’s collaborations with Salvador Dalí hemmed distortion, illusion, and the uncanny into the language of dress. (See, for example, Schiap’s immortal — and much referenced — “Skeleton Dress.”) That legacy remains alive at the house today under Daniel Roseberry, while its broader logic resurfaces, in another register, in Kawakubo’s distorted anatomies, and in prints of lips, bananas and vintage cars, for example, in collections by Prada.

By the mid-20th century, art quotation had become one of fashion’s most recognizable strategies — one that would later expand into the pastiche, remix, and camp of postmodern design. Yves Saint Laurent’s 1965 Mondrian dresses remain the classic example: Piet Mondrian’s planar, graphic color-blocking translated almost seamlessly into the lean, A-line geometry of the mod silhouette — another instance of fashion flattening the body following the reign of Dior’s wasp-waist, bouffant-skirted “New Look.” The same decade produced more ironic collisions between art, commerce, and dress, from Campbell’s “Souper Dress” to Andy Warhol’s own paper dresses, where the body becomes a walking advertisement, collapsing fashion, consumerism, and Pop’s fascination with mass media.

If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, later designers would also make it a vehicle for transformation: Thierry Mugler’s cheeky “Birth of Venus” dress (1995) recast Botticelli’s idealized composition into a sculpted, hyper-artificial silhouette, while Marc Jacobs’s Spring/Summer 2008 collection for Louis Vuitton drew on Richard Prince’s Nurse paintings, collapsing the boundary between art and fashion still further. More recently, collections at LOEWE have turned to the “elemental colors” of Ellsworth Kelly and the structured abstractions of Josef and Anni Albers, treating color, surface, and composition not as decoration but as the very architecture of the body.

Vivienne Westwood was another art-mad designer. A regular at the Wallace Collection in London, her work frequently referenced the Rococo, and for her 1990 Spring/Summer “Portrait” collection, she went so far as to slap a print of François Boucher’s 1743 painting Daphnis and Chloe, Shepherd Watching a Sleeping Shepherdess onto the corset of one of her frocks. It is a fitting endpoint for a story that begins at the Met: if Costume Art frames the body as the meeting point between art and fashion, Westwood shows how fully that exchange can enter the mechanics of dress. Art is not merely admired or cited, but cut, fitted, worn, and remade. We’ll leave Dame Westwood with the last word here, taken from the documentary Why I Love the Wallace: “I couldn’t design a thing if I didn’t look at art.”