Fashion and History: A Dialogue

Fashion and History: A Dialogue was a 1992 exhibition of the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (The Met). The exhibit featured European and American clothing and accessories from a variety of time periods. The curator was Katell le Bourhis.[1]

Background

Le Bourhis' aim for the exhibition was to portray fashion as "a dialogue between the ideas of the moment and those of the past; ... a discourse between the values and creativity of present-day society and those of history."[2]

Each of the various galleries within the exhibit focused on a particular genre of garment form (e.g. gloves, shoes, petticoats, dresses, hats, coats, corsets, stays, stomachers) or on a particular material (e.g. tweed, lace).[2] Further, one gallery was dedicated to the theme of black and white color contrast. Of this le Bourhis wrote that "black and white, especially in dynamic opposition, can symbolize for darkness and light, sinfulness and purity, or death and life." [2]

Together, the galleries focused on what Bourhis called the "surcharged atmosphere of pleasure, luxury, sensuality, and fantasy" of fashion, which "borrows voraciously from all sorts of distant cultures and different eras [choosing] sources of inspiration according to the desires of the period [while] translating them into a taste that reflects the contemporary images of "culture.""[2]

References
  1. "Katell le Bourhis by Elizabeth Cannon - BOMB Magazine". bombmagazine.org.
  2. Costume Institute (New York, N.Y.), ed. (1992). Fashion and history: [installation photographs, wall text] a dialogue, December 7, 1992-March 21, 1993.
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