A Crash Course in Fashion

To the costume design students excitedly sketching their favorite mannequin, no more perfect exhibit could have arrived at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Carin Jacobs brought her 11 students from the Los Angeles County High School for the Arts to the just-opened “A Century of Fashion, 1900-2000.” There they saw for themselves how fashion and society changed together and created a new feminine ideal every decade.

“You get to see how society has influenced our figures,” said Regina Crandell, 16. “Hips!” she enthused about the look of the early century. “Anorexic,” she moaned about the 1990s.

To the young students, the exhibit may be an exciting eye-opener. But for any more discerning audience, the textbook-dry show is oversimplified and not particularly illuminating.

The costume and textile department’s tiny corner gallery barely holds the show’s 36 mannequins, which puts the squeeze on the depth and range of the exhibit. But so does the ambitious scope of the project. Like trying to summarize 100 years of social history in 36 paragraphs, the show could be subtitled: “The Century’s Greatest Fashion Hits” or “Fashion History 101.”

Across the nation, blockbuster fashion exhibits, such as the recent Giorgio Armani show at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, have proved to be increasingly popular with a style- obsessed public.

LACMA’s team of curators--Sharon Takeda, Dale Gluckman, Sandy Rosenbaum and Kaye Spilker--created the show to satisfy different objectives. First, they hoped to catch an audience still in the throes of millennial fever. And second, as the entire museum begins to computerize its inventory, the costume department needed to survey what’s under all that acid-free tissue paper in its 27,000-item archives. The show, which will run for two years until January 2003, will clear considerable calendar time for the curators as they start the labor-intensive computer project.

As a simple and quick overview, the exhibit succeeds. Stand in the center of the gallery and, with hardly a turn of the head, it’s possible to scan the changes that brought women from the corsets and be-ribboned bosoms of the 1900s to a new interpretation of wealth in 1980s pouf skirts. But take a closer look, and the show betrays its origins in an inventory-taking project. Each decade predictably includes the star designers or typical silhouette of its time: the boyish silhouette of a 1920s Jean Patou dress; Christian Dior’s hyper-feminization of the 1950s; Emilio Pucci’s bold 1960s prints; and Christian Lacroix and his 1980s poufs. Any 20th century retrospective must include most of those names, but stand in that gallery a little longer, and the costumes will begin to seem a little too familiar.

Perhaps the exhibit would have seemed more fresh last December, when the country was excitedly cataloging the accomplishments of the previous centuries. Yet this snapshot of the century also points out the weaknesses in traditional displays of museum costumes. Most costume departments compete for the same iconic ensembles that came to typify each era. Most museums neither collect nor have room to display the influences that inspired the garment and helped make each breakthrough interesting decades later. (Perhaps they don’t want grimy thermal undershirts of grunge and musky leather jackets of punk associating with the couture finery.) With an exhibit that allots just three costumes per decade--a constraint that caused the LACMA curators considerable grief--the focus inevitably shifts to the most obvious choices.

However, when the show finishes in two years, it may seem stronger in its entirety. Fabric’s tendency to fade when exposed to light and air means that the costumes will be displayed for a limited time. About every six months, the curators will dress the mannequins in new ensembles that illustrate the same principles; in the end, they will have featured 137 costumes--hardly a walk-in closet’s worth considering the size of the permanent collection. Those 27,000 items are both purchased and donated by groups and individuals.

“Nobody wants to wear the same dress for two years,” joked Takeda.

Repeat visits may well be worthwhile for the casual or rabid fashion fan. In subsequent displays, visitors may see certain influential designers outside their typical decade of influence. For example, Rei Kawakubo, Issey Miyake, Rudi Gernreich and Yves Saint Laurent continued to offer revolutionary perspectives on fabric and silhouette throughout their decade-crossing careers. And if the curators are as clever as the archives are vast, visitors may have the opportunity to see how fashion both zooms forward and circles backward, seemingly at the same time. Even in this display, a frilly Zandra Rhodes dress from the ‘70s shares a certain decorative sense with a 1908 ancestor standing opposite it.

Few museums have the space, budget or curatorial staff to place costumes--or in layman’s terms, fashion--into a wider social and cultural context. The traditional format in most costume displays contains featureless mannequins often devoid of makeup, hair or accessories that complete the picture. While the LACMA curators included carefully styled hair molded from clay, the only helpful context comes from the printed placards that describe each decade. As a result, the exhibit seems lethargic, particularly in comparison to the ongoing LACMA “Made in California” show that features clothing in a multimedia environment that connects the garments to their era.

The “Century of Fashion” exhibit, however, with its focus on silhouette, also suffers from the forced sameness in mannequin stature, even though the curators carefully selected poses. We get some sense of how the body was disguised by corsets, petticoats and poufs of fabric, but we don’t as easily observe how a century of good nutrition and exercise also altered women’s bodies. Museum staffers carefully padded each mannequin to properly fill out the garments. But most viewers are left to understand on their own the chicken-and-the-egg relationship of body size and garment shape that has both blessed and vexed designers.

The exhibit also suffers from no fault of its own. With the ‘90s retro-inspired runway fashion making the once-historic now overly familiar, the revolutionary impact of everything from Gernreich’s body-conscious shapes to Claire McCardell’s sportswear influences to the multiple incarnations of the shirtwaist dress becomes diluted.

At its best, fashion comes to life in the moment that it’s born, when its fresh proposals about silhouette and society make it seem slightly shocking and full of promise. Those moments can sometimes be recaptured. The curators invited donors to see their old clothes on display. As the students studied McCardell’s 1950 gray, pleated wool monastic dress, they were greeted by its original owner, Dr. Marva Spelman, who talked about the time she wore the outfit and the impact it had. If only that living, breathing sense of person and personality could be captured, framed and displayed along with the costumes, fashion exhibits might have a hope of resonating with a wider public, instead of seeming like infatuations frozen in time.