Visit: Charles James, Beyond Fashion

Courtesy Metropolitan Museum of Art

Of all the spectacular pieces in the current Metropolitan Museum of Art exhibition Charles James: Beyond Fashion, my favorite was a bottle-green dress, its skirt and part of its fitted bodice made from a single, triangular piece of cloth worked around and up. In this dress, as in so many others, from cocoon-like coats to dressing-gowns stitched from slinky ribbons, James used the nature and structure of different types of fabric to achieve his desired effect. Some softly puff, some stiffly flare, some pucker for emphasis.

No photos allowed. If I could, I would have taken snapshots of where one material met another, like the dark velvet and pearly silk on the show’s marquee clover dress. This dress, like all the other ballgowns in the upstairs gallery, was mounted on a circular smoked-glass pedestal, installed in a room with mirrored walls and sepulchral lighting. Upon each gown, a robotic arm and digital screen danced attendance. These screens offered collateral, including digital recreations of the flat pieces of fabric assembling themselves into the dress you saw before you. It was interesting to see how the parts made the whole, but on screen all cloth looks alike. As one gown rose and crimped, all I could see in the pixel sheen was the crinkle-coating on so many contemporary buildings. It seemed strange to remove the designer from the frame in a show all about one-off dresses. Those structures are indeed made in the computer, but these were now. How does it benefit fashion to be reprocessed as architecture, here by Diller Scofidio + Renfro as exhibit designers? Would any of this have been necessary had the lighting not been quite so dim?

Downstairs, a few monitors showed close-ups of faille v. satin, where you could see the difference in warp and weft. But what did we gain over actual fabric swatches? Why not upend a real dress rather than having a camera take us underneath. I wanted more photos, seen as a field, rather than sequentially on screen, of dresses in use and under construction. The most illuminating cabinets might be the first upstairs display of monochrome muslins, cut and sewn before James touched more expensive satin, in all their collapsed glamor.

The no photo policy seemed odd, because the galleries’ mirrored walls called out for selfies, with ballgowns behind, as if sending yourself into the Cecil Beaton ballgown photograph on the poster. The James quotes on the wall, very Vreeland, also seemed ready for Instagram immortality. Yes, it would have been totally annoying with all the iPhones out, but strange to set such a table and deny people the pleasure.

As for our robot overlords, which as Roberta Smith wrote, “suggest that each dress is being stalked by an ugly duckling,” I decided they were best regarded as present-day walkers, intended to help show off the goods. Who needs a man when you have got a cameraman? Though their presence might have been more to the point if they were imitating paparazzi rather than scanners. In recent years architecture has often tried to borrow glamor from fashion, seeing greater public appeal. (Zaha’s Chanel bauble, the Skin + Bones exhibition.) The crumpling digital dresses onscreen suggested obvious Gehry-satin connections. But James had to work much more carefully to get from flat to form, and to digitize is in fact to diminish the mental manipulations required for traditional pattern-making. Why is fashion trying to borrow from architecture in turn? To be taken seriously, one suspects. (The headline on Martin Filler’s James essay in the New York Review of Books is “Engineering Elegance”). But this hardly seems necessary when you can see the goods up close. The Met’s display choices abstract when they should be drawing us closer. James never needed to be an archetype to be admired.

For more background on Charles James: Judith Thurman in the New Yorker.