It’s one of those little-discussed ironies of fashion — a world that’s largely focused on catering to (or exploiting, depending on how you look at it) women’s dreams and identities is dominated by men.
The biggest luxury conglomerates are run by men; men make up the largest percentage of chief executives; and for years the most famous designers bowing at the end of the runway for the world’s biggest brands have been men.
In a way, the dynamic is finally starting to shift: In 2016, Dior appointed Maria Grazia Chiuri, its first female creative director for womenswear; in 2019, Chanel named Virginie Viard, its first female designer since Coco; Hermès (Hermès)’s womenswear and menswear collections are led by women, Nadège Vanhee-Cybulski and Véronique Nichanian; Phoebe Philo’s return this fall under her own name may be the most anticipated new collection of the year.
But LVMH, the world’s largest luxury conglomerate and owner of Dior, has just two female designers across its 14 fashion houses (plus a collaboration with Stella McCartney). Kering, the world’s second-largest luxury fashion group, has just one female designer in its six ready-to-wear brands: Alexander McQueen’s Sarah Burton. there’s still a long way to go.
That’s why the announcement that the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute will dedicate its fall exhibition to investigating the work of women designers is so compelling. Perhaps even more shocking, this is the first retrospective of its kind in the Costume Institute’s roughly 85-year history.
While the Costume Institute has staged a number of one-off shows dedicated to the work of women who changed the fashion world (Coco Chanel, Madame Grès, Rei Kawakubo, Elsa Schiaparelli and Miuccia Prada), it has never before undertaken a broad examination of the women’s fashion canon —or, in fact, suppose that there is a women’s fashion code, and that it should become a larger part of the general fashion code.
Even more notably, when the Met show opens on Dec. 7, it will serve as punctuation at the end of the museum’s month celebrating women’s exhibitions.
The corrections began in September with the “Ann Lowe: American couturier” exhibition in Winterthur, Delaware, the largest to date showcasing the visionary and couple behind Jacqueline Kennedy’s wedding dress. The work of a black designer who has been largely unknown for a decade.
Next, in October, the Jewish Museum in New York will host “Mood Now: Gaby Aghion and the House of Chloé,” the city’s first major exhibition dedicated to the brand and its founder. ‘Iris van Herpen’ will be available in November. “Sculptural Senses” at the Museum of Decorative Arts in Paris. All of this should be a powerful reminder of the breadth and contributions of female designers—not to mention spurs for the future.
“Having an exhibition based on identity can be complicated,” said Mellissa Huber, an associate curator at the Costume Institute, who, along with Karen Van Godtsenhoven, Co-curated the museum’s exhibit, “Women Dressing Women.” “We don’t want to lump all female designers into the same or the same category. Maybe that’s one thing that has kept people away in the past. But the real purpose of this exhibition is to celebrate and to recognize.”
As it happens, in 2019, the year before the 100th anniversary of women’s suffrage, Ms. Huber and Ms. Van Gotsenhoeven proposed to Andrew Bolton, the Costume Institute’s managing curator, a similar event featuring women. centered retrospective. They decided to collaborate, but the intervention of the Covid-19 pandemic delayed the show until this year.
The results showcase the work of some 70 designers from the Costume Institute’s collection, which stretches from the turn of the 20th century to the present day, including the famous (Jeanne Lanvin, Claire McCardell) and the lesser-known (Augusta Bernard , Madeleine and Madeleine). It reminds us that, once upon a time, the industry looked very different.
“The 1920s and 1930s were an extremely active and prolific period for female designers, and it was a moment in history when women actually slightly outnumbered men in leading the creative direction of fashion,” Ms Huber said. “But that moment never really happened again.”
As to why this shift happened, Ms Huber said it had to do with “gender and social changes and a lack of confidence in women investing in finance” after World War II. “When we launched the New Look with Dior in ’47, there was a major fashion change,” she continues. “We never fully recovered.”
To illustrate how we got here, the Costume Institute exhibition traces the work of female designers from their anonymous beginnings, when, Ms Huber said, “many women were working in a field that didn’t recognize the contributions of individual makers”, Dominated by Chanel, Schiaparelli, Vionnet and Grès, the French haute couture house dominates.
The conversation then turned to what Ms Huber calls the “boutique generation” of the 1960s — designers like Mary Quant and Bonnie Cashin who forged their own paths — culminating in the work of today’s designers, They “think collaboratively, considering the concepts of sustainability and sustainable development”. tolerance. “
In the process, the exhibition corrects some historical inaccuracies, such as the fact that the famous Fortuny Delphos gown is often wrongly attributed to Fortuny founder Mariano Fortuny rather than his wife Adèle Henriette Negrin Fortuny.
“The Delphos dress is a great example of it being so classic and so familiar, even to the non-professional,” Ms. Huber said. But the pleated patent filed for the gown includes a handwritten note from Mr. Fortuny, stating that “Henriette Negrin Fortuny is in fact the legitimate inventor, and in essence he used his own for expediency. on behalf of the applicant,” Ms Huber said.
“It was amazing to realize that there was actually another person behind this dress and that he had disappeared from the historical record for so long,” Ms Huber added.
The exhibition also enabled curators to add at least a dozen new names to the museum’s collection, including Marine Serre, Hanifa’s Anifah Mwimba (Anifa Mvuemba) and Collina Strada’s Hillary Taymour (Hillary Taymour), thus leaving a permanent space for them in the historical record, Ms. Huber said, make sure this is just The beginning of “a longer conversation.”
“I think it’s a really exciting time for female designers,” she added. What really matters is what happens next because “so many voices came together all of a sudden”.
