Here's your first look at 'In America: An Anthology of Fashion' exhibition, the second part of the Costume Institute's show. It will be presented across 13 of the American period rooms in the metmuseum.
Since the opening of the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s “In America: A Lexicon of Fashion,” visitors have taken to writing the museum with new ideas of words to add to the lexicon. “They’re really engaging with the concept for the exhibition, which is this sort of new language for American fashion. That’s been really exciting,” says Andrew Bolton, the Wendy Yu Curator in Charge of the Costume Institute.
The full list of names affirms Bolton’s hunch, with some you know and some you certainly do not: Bill Blass, Marguery Bolhagen, Brooks Brothers, Stephen Burrows, Fannie Criss Payne, Josephine H. Egan, Franziska Noll Gross, Anne Klein, Lloyd “Kiva” New… Six additional “case studies” as Bolton calls them, mostly by anonymous makers, will be presented as a way to inspire a deeper connection with artistry and craft via a single object.
Panoramic View of the Palace and Gardens of Versailles, 1818–19, John Vanderlyn , 1818–19; Gift of the Senate House Association, Kingston, N.Y., 1952 .Helping bring the exhibition to life are eight directors, who will create vignettes to accompany each period room’s theme.
The in-situ installations and inclusion of the short films is just the latest in Bolton’s reimagining of what a fashion exhibition can look like. “I’ve been thinking about this for a while: How do we shift the paradigm of fashion exhibitions? I think we’ve been very successful working on blockbuster shows in the past. It’s a paradigm that has been adopted by a lot of museums and I’ve been thinking about how we can shift the paradigm,” says the curator.