Beauty in the Extreme

“My dream is to save women from nature,” Christian Dior once said, arguing for fashion’s ability to improve upon the human body itself. Dior’s bon mot is the epigraph for “Extreme Beauty: The Body Transformed,” a flashy new show in the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art that looks at how clothing designers have amended and extended various parts of the body to conform to ever-shifting ideals of beauty. Clothes can either shrink or exaggerate bosoms, build up shoulders or disappear them, nip in waists or erase them altogether--all depending on the current style.

“Extreme Beauty” wheels out some extraordinary examples of the transformative qualities of fashion, but what it doesn’t do--and it’s a terrible shame, since the topic is so rich with possibilities--is examine why. Why do ideals of the body’s beauty shift in the first place, and does fashion take the lead in initiating such changes or simply help people adjust to the new status quo?

The show is divided into six categories corresponding to the body parts most subject--through the ages and across cultures--to changing paradigms. Neck, shoulders, chest, waist, hips and feet each have borne the scars of fashion’s caprice, sometimes quite literally. Shoes have made lasting impressions on the feet of their wearers, and the show has a formidable selection ranging from 17th century Venice to 19th century China to the 21st century runway. The tiny, embroidered Chinese lotus slippers are particularly horrifying, as we try to envision the shrunken, deformed feet of their owners, women who suffered the cruelties of ritual foot-binding.

Most of the modern alternatives presented here seem similarly uncomfortable and impractical. When supermodel Naomi Campbell tripped wearing designer Vivienne Westwood’s 8-inch platforms in a 1993 fashion show, it garnered international media attention and precipitated the sense that perhaps things had gone too far. In Japan, municipal authorities have been forced to institute a ban on wearing such shoes while driving.

The bulk of the show is devoted to the sorts of outrageous fashions we’re unlikely to see anyone wear in the street. There is Thierry Mugler’s 1997 “Chimere” evening ensemble, a multi-colored monstrosity that turns its wearer into a scaly, feathered mutant--part fowl, part fish, with the tough exoskeleton of an insect.

The interests of Met curator Harold Koda clearly lie in the feats and foibles of contemporary fashion. There are occasional nods to history, but the ancien regime gowns and Victorian corsets serve primarily as foils for modern interpretations. Thus, a trio of chemisettes, circa 1900, devised to transform two breasts into a billowing monobosom, fade into the background next to Tom Ford’s molded black plastic bodice for Yves Saint Laurent (2001), complete with its own pierced nipple. Or Jean Paul Gaultier’s pink satin bustier with menacing, conical breasts, worn by Madonna in her 1990 “Blond Ambition” tour.

Gaultier reconfigured an item long stigmatized by feminists as a form of imprisonment into a symbol of female sexual empowerment. Instead of confining the body, Madonna’s corset turns it into a weapon, signaling interested partners to advance at their own risk. Madonna’s underwear, and the political questions it raises, figured prominently a couple of years ago in another much more gripping exhibit called “The Corset: Fashioning the Body,” which delved into the social meaning of lingerie. Some of that show’s depth might have benefited this one.

Part of the problem is the exhibit’s organization. A chronological approach might have offered a sense of fashion’s ability to respond to and even to shape events. Instead, the thematic divisions float in a historical limbo. The show never suggests why, for instance, the bustle--that freakish exaggeration of a woman’s buttocks--came to prominence in the 1870s. Or why did the bustline vanish altogether from the woman’s silhouette in the 1920s, only to come back with a vengeance in the 1950s? Such questions are beside the point in this exhibit.

There are times that the rules of fashion dictate more than a bit of padding here or cinching there. In many cultures, including our own, the reconfiguration of the human form includes such practices as tattooing, piercing, reshaping and scarring the flesh. Viewing “Extreme Beauty,” one might suppose that such radical alterations are limited to “exotic” rituals like Chinese foot-binding or the piling up of brass neck coils among the Padaung women of Burma to deviate a growing girl’s collarbone downward. But what about the growing popularity of plastic surgery in this country as a quick way to flatten the tummy?

Surely there’s a kinship between Hollywood starlets who get their breasts enlarged and the Naga men from Southeast Asia who painfully bind their waists with long strips of cloth. Fashion goes well beyond the whims of any one designer, however creative and outre. It reflects a society’s more profound attitudes about itself. It would have been nice if the Metropolitan Museum of Art, a thinking institution, after all, had bestirred itself to consider these questions rather than merely produce a fashion show without models or music.

Ariella Budick writes for Newsday, a Tribune company.