Costume Institute Gala Dedicates First Women's Exhibit

By PATRICE EWELL

For the first time in history,The Costume Institute of The Metropolitan Museum of Art dedicated it's first exhibit to American women this spring 2010. The exhibit was Inspired by Brooklyn Museum Costume Collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

The exhibit is on view from May 5 through August 15, 2010. The costume collection explores developing perceptions of the modern American woman from the 1890s to the 1940s. Costume designers also explored how perceptions have affected the way American women are seen today. Two of the main issues on the forefront of the exhibits were, how the American woman began feminine style revolutions that reflected her political or social freedom.

The way the mass-media represented American women in earlier centuries laid the foundation of American style, which was a theme explored in the final gallery.

“Models are not just faces and bodies,” Ms. Danatella Versace said. “They have brains.”

According to Eric Wilson of The New York Times,this has been a rough decade for models, with accusations that their industry has been encouraging unhealthy behavior by promoting a stick-thin figure and underrepresenting models of color. Beverly Johnson, the first black model to appear on the cover of Vogue, in 1974, said the exhibition, which traces fashion history from Richard Avedon’s portraits of Dovima and Sunny Harnett in the 1950s through the supermodels of the 1980s, was a great acknowledgement of the contributions of models to fashion.

To celebrate the opening of the exhibit, the Museum's Costume Institute Gala Benefit takes place on Monday, May 3, 2010. The evening's Co-Chairs are Oprah Winfrey, Patrick Robinson, Executive Vice President of Global Design for Gap and Anna Wintour, Editor-in-Chief of Vogue. This fundraising event is The Costume Institute's main source of annual funding for exhibitions, operations and capital improvements.

"The ideal of the American woman evolved from a dependence on European, Old World view of elegance into an independent New World sensibility that reflected freedoms still associated with American women today," said Andrew Bolton, Curator of The Costume Institute. "The show looks at fashion's role in defining how American women have been represented historically, and how fashion costumes women into archetypes that persist in varying degrees of relevance."



Click here to view VOGUE's Take on the Gala

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