What is it about?
This double review unpacks The Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art's two-part exploration of American Fashion from the Fall/Winter of 2021 and the Spring/Summer of 2022. The first part of the review delves into the CI's creation of a new lexicon for American fashion based on language that better reflects the feelings and movements associated with American fashion from the 20th and 21st centuries. The second part of the review reveals the the complex nature of American fashion as it is juxtaposed against the period rooms in the Met's American Wing. Here new narratives are given to 18th, 19th, and 20th century garments, expanding viewer's understanding of the rich, complicated, and significant history of fashion in America.
Featured Image
Photo by Samuel Branch on Unsplash
Why is it important?
This double review uses a critical lens by which to engage readers in an understanding of the CI's immense undertaking to unpack the history of American fashion in new ways that better reflect the nation's diversity, history, complexities, faults, and successes, and over identity.
Perspectives
This review gets at the heart of what the CI's is claiming American fashion is, or has been, or can be. It articulates the exhibitions strengths and short falls, all while keeping focused on the root of both parts of the exhibitions: America.
Prof Brian Centrone
SUNY Westchester Community College
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: In America: A Lexicon of Fashion & An Anthology of Fashion, Dress, July 2022, Taylor & Francis,
DOI: 10.1080/03612112.2022.2089480.
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