Blog – Page 3 – Mary Jane Denzer

December 13, 2023

Captions: Jacqueline Lee Bouvier, poised to toss her bouquet after her wedding to then-Sen. John F. Kennedy on Sept. 12, 1953, wears a dress created by Ann Lowe, the first African American designer of note. *Photograph by Tom Frissell. Courtesy the Library of Congress Photographs and Prints Division.*

When we think of great designers of couture for women, do we at first think of women designers?

Yes, we can rattle off names – Sarah Burton, who recently left the House of Alexander McQueen, Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel; Carolina Herrera; Jeanne Lanvin, Monique Lluillier, Donna Karan, Jenny Packham, Miuccia Prada, Elsa Schiaperelli, Vera Wang, Vivienne Westwood, to name a few. But don’t even more men designers come to mind? It doesn’t help that Burton was replaced by a man, Sean McGirr, creating an all-male leadership at Kering – the French luxury conglomerate, number two in the fashion world, that owns Alexander McQueen. It’s equally noteworthy that men were recently named to the top jobs at Moschino, Rochas and Tod’s.

“Delphos” gown, Adèle Henriette Elisabeth Nigrin Fortuny (French, 1877–1965) and Mariano Fortuny (Spanish, 1871–1949) for Fortuny (Italian, founded 1906), circa 1932. Gift of Robert Rubin, in memory of Doris Rubin, 2011. *Photograph by Anna-Marie Kellen. © The Metropolitan Museum of Art.*

And yet there are not only great women designers but scores who are unsung. No longer: Through March 3, The Costume Institute of The Metropolitan Museum of Art presents “Women Dressing Women,” featuring 80 pieces from its collection by more than 70 makers. They include a black cocktail dress with spaghetti straps and a plunging neckline by Jasmin Sae of Customiety, who designs for women with achondroplasia, a condition that inhibits bone growth. (Diversity and inclusion is also served by plus-size mannequins and one in a wheelchair.)

In considering these works – selected by Mellissa Huber, the Costume Institute’s associate curator, and guest curator Karen Van Godtsenhoven for a show that was supposed to coincide with the centennial of U.S. women’s suffrage in the Covid year of 2020 – two words immediately come to our mind, “goddess” and “bold.”

Evening dress, Madeleine Maltezos (French, 1900–1985) and Suzie Carpentier (French) for Mad Carpentier (French, 1939–1957), late 1940s. Gift of Eleanora Eaton Brooks, 1975. *Photograph by Anna-Marie Kellen. © The Metropolitan Museum of Art.*

The goddess begins really where the exhibit ends, “highlighting stories of absence or omission through the presentation of objects by designers whose work has only recently begun to receive widespread credit and recognition,” according to the press materials. These include the stories of Ann Lowe, the first African American to become a designer of note, who created Jacqueline Lee Bouvier’s ivory silk taffeta wedding dress for her marriage to then-Sen. John F. Kennedy on Sept. 12 1953; and Adèle Henriette Elizabeth Nigrin Fortuny, who was instrumental in the design of the silk, pleated “Delphos” gown, first introduced in 1909 after the chiton sported by “The Charioteer of Delphi,” an ancient Greek sculpture. (The chiton was worn by men and women alike.)

The 20^th-century’s dawn saw a fascination with the fluidity of ancient Greek design. (Think dancer-choreographer Isadora Duncan.) But that flowing goddess look is echoed not only in a 1932 belted, cap-sleeved Fortuny incarnation but in gowns by Marcelle Chaumont, Claire McCardell, Marcelle Chapsal, Mad Carpentier and NoSesso.

Ensemble, Maria Grazia Chiuri (Italian, born 1964) and Grace Wales Bonner (British, born 1992) for House of Dior (French, founded 1947), cruise 2020, edition 2022. Gift of Christian Dior Couture, 2023. *Photograph by Anna-Marie Kellen. © The Metropolitan Museum of Art*

These watery designs are the yin to the bold, angular creations that vie for your attention as well. The robe de style by Jeanne Lanvin, a sleeveless cocktail dress with a shimmering, ballet-slipper pattern cascading down the plunging neckline, belt and front of the skirt. A red and plaid dolman-sleeved, fringed coat by Bonnie Cashin. A long red T-shirt by Katharine Hammett that exhorts you to “Stay Alive in 1985.” A fitted black jacket and bell-shaped skirt in bands of floral, red, brown and black patterns by Maria Grazia Chiuri and Grace Wales Bonner for Dior’s cruise-wear that echoes the “New Look” Christian Dior created at the end of World War II to celebrate the female silhouette and the return to romance. Jamie Okuma’s architectural, Art Deco-style “Parfleche Dress,” a black and tan fantasy. And Marine Serra’s fitted, scaly patchwork gown with extra-long sleeves.

All of these proclaim designers who have made a statement in creating for women who are unafraid to do the same.

Take note of their names. The Met has curated a show to make sure you don’t forget them.

Tags: “Women Dressing Women,” The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Costume Institute, Jacqueline Lee Bouvier, Ann Lowe, John F. Kennedy, Sarah Burton, Alexander McQueen, Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel; Carolina Herrera; Monique Lluillier, Donna Karan, Jenny Peckham, Miuccia Prada, Vera Wang, Vivienne Westwood, Delphos gown, Marine Serra, Jamie Okuma, the “New Look,” Christian Dior, Maria Grazia Chiuri, Grace Wales Bonner, Jeanne Lanvin, Bonnie Cashin, Marcelle Chaumont, Claire McCardell, Marcelle Chapsal, Mad Carpentier, NoSesso, “The Charioteer of Delphi,” Adèle Henriette Elizabeth Nigrin Fortuny, Elsa Schiaparelli, Kering, Mellisa Huber, Karen Van Godtsenhoven, Sean McGirr, Rochas, Tod’s, Moschino

June 15, 2023

Image courtesy The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Photograph by Annie Leibovitz / Vogue /Trunk Archive.

“Karl Lagerfeld: A Line of Beauty” – at The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute in Manhattan through July 16 – celebrates the designer who transformed the houses of Fendi and Chanel and, with them, himself and the idea of the designer-impressario.

The German-born Lagerfeld (1933-2019) was an exacting, somewhat controversial figure known for his rigorous work ethic.

“Please don’t say I work hard,” he famously – and amusingly – once told Susannah Frankel of The Independent. “Nobody is forced to do this job, and if they don’t like it they should do another one. People buy dresses to be happy, not to hear about somebody who suffered over a piece of taffeta.”

The Met perhaps wisely eschews psychobiography for an exhibit that plumbs Lagerfeld’s gifts as a bewitching linesman – he saw sketching not as a means to a fashion end but an end in itself – and the connection among drawing, designing and presenting his creations in shows that became theatrical extravaganzas.

A fabulous example of this is a spring-summer 2019 haute couture strapless, appliqué cocktail dress from the House of Chanel that looks like a garden come to life. In the show we see the sketch, the dress and an image of the dress on a runway model.

That dress encapsulates Lagerfeld and the exhibit’s dual aesthetic, in which the straight line of the fitted bodice gives way to the serpentine line of the bell-shaped skirt. The straight line represents the Lagerfeld who was a classicist and modernist, the man known for angular black and white outfits that were not only a hallmark of Chanel but of his own personal appearance, which would become as iconic as any bouclé Chanel suit.

But there was also Lagerfeld, the romantic, as the garden-infused cocktail dress illustrates, the art history buff whose goddess gowns evoked ancient Greek and Rome; patterned dresses, the works of the medieval period and Renaissance; and pink, rose-appliqué creations, the Rococo of the 18^th century. (In this, he was creating “a better future with enlarged elements of the past,” a phrase from the poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe that he liked to quote.) The exhibit captures this duality with complements of its own – high and low pedestals in black-and-white galleries of angular and curving spaces.

Dress, House of Chanel, spring-summer 2019 haute couture. *Courtesy Patrimoine de Chanel, Paris. Image courtesy The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Photograph © Julia Hetta.*

The son of a businessman and a mother who encouraged their son to get about the business of being brilliant, Lagerfeld took himself off to Paris as a teenager, honing the drawing skills that were as natural as breathing in fashion illustration classes taught by Andrée Norero Petitjean at her school, Cours Norero.

While studying there, Lagerfeld submitted sketches with fabric swatches to the 1954 International Woolmark Prize, a fashion illustration competition organized by the International Wool Secretariat in which he took first place in the coat category. (Yves Saint Laurent won the dress division while Colette Bracchi triumphed in the suit section.)

This led to Pierre Balmain offering him his first official full-time position in 1955 as design assistant for Balmain’s “Florilège” boutique line. It was at Balmain and at the house of Jean Patou, where he became artistic director three years later, that he refined his style of sketching, which married technical drawing to the more playful fashion illustration.

But it was at Fendi, where he became creative director in 1965, and Chanel, where he became creative director in 1983, that his gift for transformation blossomed. At Fendi, he anticipated the trend to faux fur by using reclaimed pieces as fabric. As he once said, “You cannot fake chic, but you can be chic and fake fur.”

Dress, Fendi, spring/summer 1997. *Courtesy Fendi.Image courtesy The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Photograph © Julia Hetta.*

At Chanel, Lagerfeld reinvented the classic stateliness of the legendary but at that time moribund house, founded by Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel in 1910 – turning the interlocking Cs into a logo; revamping ready to wear, accenting accessories and giving the signature tweed suit a brighter palette and shorter hemline that has extended its life to everyone from Catherine, Princess of Wales to singer Olivia Rodrigo.

Along the way, Lagerfeld created an eponymous brand (in 1984) and transformed himself – dropping 90 pounds; writing a book about it, “The Karl Lagerfeld Diet” (2002); dressing in white Hilditch & Key shirts, offset by black – suits, fingerless gloves and glasses; and creating a private haven for himself and Choupette, his beloved Birman and an Instagram star with her own maids and diamonds, in a Paris apartment said to have contained 300,000 books.

Indeed, as The Met Store demonstrates, so iconic are Lagerfeld and Choupette that they are known through a line of T-shirts and accessories that have nothing to do with his couture.

Proving that among Lagerfeld’s greatest creations was himself.

Tags: Karl Lagerfeld, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Fendi, Chanel, Pierre Balmain, Yves Saint Laurent, Catherine, Princess of Wales, Olivia Rodrigo, Choupette, Jean Patou

January 5, 2023

Thierry Mugler (Strasbourg, France, 1948–2022, Vincennes, France). Chrysler Building, New York, 1988. Claude Heidemeyer in “Vertigo” by Mugler, 1988. Photographic print, 35 11/16 × 23 7/8 in. (90.6 × 60.6 cm). Courtesy of Mugler Archives. © Thierry Mugler.

From the stage to the screen, the runway to the red carpet, there has always been an element of the theatrical in fashion. But French designer Thierry Mugler (Dec. 21, 1948-Jan. 23,2022) really imagined fashion as theater. His cutout creations, incorporating such unusual materials as plastic, metal, horse hair and feathers, offered viewers an erotic, sci-fi otherworldliness. At the same time, his broad-shouldered, cinch-waist “everyday” looks – drawing on the 1940s some 30 years later – ushered in the “glamazon,” the woman whose feminine silhouette presented sex as power.

Like actors who despise lifetime achievement awards, Mugler, who died of natural causes at his home in Paris at age 73, was not one for retrospectives. But you have to imagine he approved of “Thierry Mugler: Courturissime” (through May 7 at the Brooklyn Museum), a touring exhibit organized by the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts that has been seen by more than a million people since its launch in 2019. With more than 100 outfits, most of which have not been viewed before, the show encompasses videos, photographs, sketches and – a treat for noses – a heady special gallery dedicated to such Mugler fragrances as Angel (think praline crossed with patchouli), which was launched in 1992, introducing a new category of perfume, gourmand, even as it spawned many iterations over the late-20^th and early-21^st centuries.

“Courturissime” captures the Mugler idea of fashion as gesamtkunstwerk – a total work of art. And it does so in a thematic rather than chronological manner, exploring passions that ranged from the natural world to the erotic, fantasy, glamour and science fiction – although the show also has a timeline, because a little bit of history helps. Born in Strasbourg, France, Manfred Thierry Mugler’s childhood was defined not by fabric and scissors but ballet slippers. Dance would instill in him a love of costume and set design: In addition to a stint in the corps de ballet of the Opèra national du Rhin, he also studied interior design at the Strasbourg School of Decorative Arts.

Soon, however, he was creating clothes in London and then Paris, opening his first boutique in 1978. It was a moment when the more flowing, androgynous styles of that decade where giving way to the high glam, structured but also punk looks of the 1980s, the “Dynasty” decade, which dovetailed with Mugler’s sensibility. Having created a cinematic tour de force with its 2021 Dior show, the Brooklyn Museum goes all in with a designer who was far more theatrical – offering, for example, a life-size, 3-D hologram made by Quebec artist Michel Lemieux (Lemieux Pilon 4D Art) that embodies Mugler’s designs for a production of “La Tragédie de Macbeth,” presented by the Comédie-Française at the 1985 Festival d’Avignon.

Indüstria: Brad Branson (born 1963, Los Angeles) and Fritz Kok (born 1960, Amsterdam). Comet Lady. Blitz, September 1990. Prêt-à-porter Fall/Winter 1990–91 collection (“Music-hall”). Velvet suit with embroidered fluorescent web design.

“The actors were all in magnificent armor and breastplates, doublets, that were musculature, leather and metal,” Mugler said at the time, “while underneath they were vulnerable.”

This idea of armoring and stripping away plays out in sections on his collaboration with photographer Helmut Newton and the designer’s own Latexed fembots with their peekaboo bosoms and “derrièrre décolleté.” Installations of power suits (shoulder pads and peblum) and what appear to be mermaids or butterflies in bustiers also reveal and conceal.

Mugler would himself photograph and clothe some of the most famous female models and performers of his day, everyone from Cyd Charisse to Lady Gaga. But he didn’t neglect the masculine – designing for Michael Jackson and David Bowie and directing George Michael’s 1991 music video “Too Funky” – or anything in between or neither. (Mugler had a fluid sense of gender, sexuality and race long before such fluidity became a cause cèlébre.)

Helmut Newton (Berlin, 1920–2004, West Hollywood). “Jerry Hall and Thierry Mugler, Paris, 1996.” Inkjet print, 21 5/8 × 23 1/4 in. (55 × 59 cm), framed. Courtesy and © Helmut Newton Foundation, Berlin.

As “Too Funky” intimated, fashion was not enough. In 1997, the Clarins Group acquired a controlling interest in the House of Thierry Mugler. He left the house in 2002 to write, produce, direct and design.

“My only true vocation is the stage,” said the man who used actors as models, turned collection launches into arena extravaganzas and designed for Cirque du Soleil. As the exhibit demonstrates, that theatricality was not lost on the highest echelons of power. When he died, French President Emmanuel Macron observed, “Mugler had revolutionized French fashion and elegance at the end of the 20^th century. His fashion shows were more than a show. They were grand performances, mixing fashion with theater and dance. We will miss his look and his audacity.”

For more, visit https://www.brooklynmuseum.org/exhibitions/thierry_mugler.

Tags: Thierry Mugler, Clarins, Brooklyn Museum, “Thierry Mugler: Courturissime,” David Bowie, Michael Jackson, Jerry Hall, George Michael, Cyd Charisse, Lady Gaga

July 26, 2022

As on the red carpet and the runway, the equestrian world is as much about being seen as seeing, inspiring everyone from Cartier to Chanel, Gucci and Hèrmes. This is particularly true of polo, an ancient Central Asian game that the Persians used to keep the imperial cavalry on its tippy toes (and tippy hooves).

Today the so-called “sport of kings” continues to draw actual princes as well as those who rule the sporting, entertainment and fashion worlds. Perhaps no fashion designer has been more associated with polo than Ralph Lauren, whose “mounted polo player logo adorns everything from his popular ‘Polo’ shirts to all manner of clothing and accessories for men, women and children,” writes Vicky Moon in “The Stylish Life: Equestrian,” part of teNeues’ “Stylish Life” series of books.

So associated is Lauren with the sport that Argentine player Nacho Figueras serves as a model for the brand’s Polo labels and fragrance. Figueras often teams on the playing field with good friend Prince Harry, the Duke of Sussex, in support of the prince’s Sentebale charity to fight HIV/AIDS and poverty among the children of the African nation of Lesotho.

In 2013, the two squared off as their teams battled for the Sentebale Royal Salute Polo Cup at Greenwich Polo Club, a taut match that saw the prince’s team triumph 4-3 amid a fashionable crowd that included Connecticut-reared entrepreneur and fashion influencer Olivia Palermo and supermodel Stephanie Seymour, wife of Peter M. Brant, the businessman, art collector and philanthropist who established the high-goal club in 1981.

But every Sunday is a stylish one at Greenwich Polo, located amid the undulating verdure of the town’s tony Backcountry. When the gates open at 1 p.m. for 3 p.m. matches, the public pours in, decked out in sports coats, white jeans and straw fedoras, garden dresses, picture hats, floral shawls and wedge sandals and espadrilles, never spiky heels. (Think Julia Roberts in “Pretty Woman.”) As the throng is invited at half-time to stomp the divots, those pieces of turf kicked up as the Thoroughbreds thunder down an expanse the size of nine football fields, heels are useless.

One of the biggest trends we’ve seen at the club this year is eyelet dresses, so elegantly cool for summer. They’re the yin to the dashing yang of all those form-fitting white pants – a nod to the cavalries of yore – boots, polo shirts and helmets on the field.

Matches continue at Greenwich Polo Club through Sept. 11. For more, visit greenwichpoloclub.com.

Tags: polo, Central Asia, Persia, Nacho Figueras, Ralph Lauren, Carier, Chanel, Gucci, Hèrmes, “The Stylish Life: Equestrian,” teNeues, “The Stylish Life: Equestrian,” Vicky Moon, Peter M. Brant, Stephanie Seymour, Olivia Palermo, Julia Roberts, “Pretty Woman,” Greenwich Polo Club, Sentebale, Prince Harry, Lesotho

May 26, 2022

Tom Ford reimagines the battle between American ready-to-wear designers and French couturiers that took place in Versailles in 1973 as a “Matrix”-flying encounter in The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Vanderlyn Panorama Room as the centerpiece of The Costume Institute’s “In America: An Anthology of Fashion” (through Sept. 5).

The second part of The Met Costume Institute’s two-part exhibit on American fashion history is more American fashion than it is history.

The good news is that “In America: An Anthology of Fashion” (through Sept. 5) is better than part one, “In America: A Lexicon of Fashion.” The bad news is that its staging often sabotages its flights of inspired fancy. Forget designers and directors. The show could’ve used a choreographer and a traffic cop.

“Lexicon” gave us vitrines of clothing with words that matched the ensembles – or not – crammed into The Costume Institute in The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s lower level next to the Egyptian Wing. “Anthology” opens things up a bit, staging vignettes by edgy movie directors featuring mannequins clothed in various styles in The Met’s American Wing period rooms. The Costume Institute has done this brilliantly in the past with French fashion in European period rooms and a Vatican-inspired show that took us from The Met’s medieval galleries in the main museum on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan to The Cloisters, its medieval wing in Fort Tryon Park in northern Manhattan.

Here come the brides: A room of bridal fashions contains a photograph of Jacqueline Lee Bouvier (far left) in the ivory, portrait-neckline gown designed by Ann Lowe, one of the unsung Black designers highlighted in the show.

The problem with the current exhibit is that the rooms are generally too small to accommodate the fashion faithful thronging the show. (We saw it at a members’ preview that was already uncomfortable, given the museum’s masking and social distancing requirements.) The low lighting necessary for the preservation of the textiles in these rooms also makes it difficult to read the accompanying text. Unless you are intimately acquainted with film and fashion history, you’re going to give up in frustration.

Which is a shame, because “Anthology” has much to offer if you have the time and patience. Chinese filmmaker Chloé Zhao sets Claire McCardell sportswear in the light-dappled Shaker Retiring Room (Mount Lebanon, New York, 1835) in a scene that will evoke everything from Martha Graham’s “Appalachian Spring” to Margaret Atwood’s “A Handmaid’s Tale.” An operatic, Empire-style cocktail party turns chaotic as photographer-director Autumn de Wilde meets Jane Austen. Sofia Coppola goes all Henry James’ “Turn of the Screw” with Gilded Age-clad mannequins in the shadowy McKim Mead and White Stair Hall (Buffalo, New York, 1882-84). (Just forget about reading any of the text here. It’s not going to happen.)

Martin Scorsese pays tribute to mid-20th century film noir with this 1950s’ cocktail party in the Frank Lloyd Wright Room.

In the show’s centerpiece, Tom Ford, designer and director, reimagines the battle between American ready-to-wear designers and French couturiers that took place in Versailles in 1973 as a “Matrix”-flying encounter, with swords brandished and clothing swirling in the Vanderlyn Panorama Room, a stately 360-degree view of Louis XIV’s pleasure palace. It’s a tour de force but again unless you have a deep knowledge of fashion, it’s going to be hard to match the text beneath the panorama with the soaring, El Greco-like apotheosis of outfits.

Nor do the show’s organizers necessarily help themselves with the mix of periods. A room of businesslike 1940s fashions is inextricably linked with music of the freewheeling 1920s. A fabulous strapless, floral-brocade cocktail dress placed in the Rococo Revival Parlor (Astoria, Queens, circa 1850) so confused one viewer that his wife had to explain five times that though the dress was from the 1960s, the room was mid-19^th century. (He still didn’t get it.)

Chloé Zhao captures the “Simple Gifts” of the Shakers by setting Claire McCardell sportswear in the light-dappled Shaker Retiring Room, although viewers nowadays will be forgiven if it evokes Margaret Atwood’s “A Handmaid’s Tale” as much as Martha Graham’s “Appalachian Spring.”

Along the way, the exhibit considers the unsung role that Black designers, tailors and seamstresses played in American fashion. There’s the well-known striped dress that first lady Mary Todd Lincoln wore with a Tiffany seed-pearl suite her indulgent husband, President Abraham Lincoln, gave her. The dress was presumably created by former slave Elizabeth Keckly, who stood in relationship to the first lady much as Angela Kelly stands in relationship to Queen Elizabeth II today – dressmaker turned confidante. (Though Mary Todd Lincoln appears stout in photographs, particularly standing next to her gangly husband, the exquisite, wasp-waisted day dress looks like it could be worn only by a child today.)

You wonder if the extraordinary Keckly, who would go on to become a civil rights activist, inspired Ann Lowe, the Black designer who created Jacqueline Lee Bouvier’s ivory, portrait- neckline gown for her Sept. 12, 1953 marriage to then-Sen. John F. Kennedy. (That moment is recalled in a photograph in a room about famous bridal gowns.)

The patient will be rewarded with such golden nuggets. The impatient will find themselves straining to see Martin Scorsese’s Hitchcockian homage in the Frank Lloyd Wright Room (Wayzata. Minnesota, 1912-14), complete with 1950s gowns, and recognize a familiar New York experience – eager to be part of a scene if f only they could get into it.

Tags: The Costume Institute, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, “In America: An Anthology of Fashion,” Chloé Zhao, Claire McCardell, Tom Ford, Versailles, The American Wing, Elizabeth Keckly, Mary Todd Lincoln, Jacqueline Lee Bouvier, Ann Lowe, Martin Scorsese, Frank Lloyd Wright, Henry James, Jane Austen, John F. Kennedy, Abraham Lincoln, Black designers, McKim Mead and White, Sofia Coppola, Alfred Hitchcock

Women’s day: The Met’s ‘Women Dressing Women’ celebrates women designers, sung and unsung

Couturier of duality and bewitching line: Karl Lagerfeld feted in Met show

The man who saw fashion as theater

Horsing around stylishly at Greenwich Polo Club

Fashion “In America”