The problem with the exhibition is that it’s simultaneously too self-aware and too clueless to capture the essence of camp.
Costume Institute
Posted inArt
Is Camp Still Camp if the Met Gala Makes It a Theme?
This year’s Met Gala is named Notes on Fashion, in tribute to a Susan Sontag essay. But Sontag also wrote that “To talk about Camp is to betray it.”
Posted inOpinion
Early Christians Would Have Found the Met Gala Gaudy
A historian of early Christianity with a specialty in religious dress considers how the Metropolitan Museum’s recent gala and new Costume Institute exhibition might align with or offend early Christian sensibilities.
Posted inArt
The Outlandish and Beautiful Juxtapositions of Rei Kawakubo
The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute dedicates its second solo show of a living designer to Rei Kawakubo, who started her daring clothing label Comme des Garçons in 1973.
Posted inArt
Disinterring the Lost Glamor of Grief
Grief hit what may be its peak of glamor between 1815 and 1915. The devastating losses of the Civil War, suppression of women’s rights, and Victorian and Edwardian affinity for the macabre resulted in generations of widows spending years in their dour “weeds.”
Posted inNews
Good Mourning: Metropolitan Museum Announces Fall Funerary Costume Show
The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute is hosting a fall exhibition for the first time in seven years, and it will be a decidedly somber affair. Announced today, the show focuses on Victorian and Edwardian mourning fashions.
Posted inArt
God Save the Met and Their Fuckin’ Costume Institute
If there is but one cornerstone of “Punk” as fashion, it is what Dame Vivienne Westwood dubbed “confrontation dressing.” Swastikas, tampons, spray-painted swears, safety pins — these were the tools with which this particular postmodern machine of resistance, youth, and style were forged. The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s spring costume exhibition, Punk: From Chaos to Couture, hovered over the essence of this defensive dress, but skirted the issues of subculture to champion superficial style.