The Devil's Revenge
It was an all-fashion weekend. On Friday, I escaped the heat by taking in The Devil Wears Prada. I'm happy to report that the filmmakers have exacted delicious revenge on whiny book author, Lauren Weisberger, by making the bitchy boss (a thinly veiled stand-in for Anna Wintour) the heroine of the story. I blogged this wretched bitch session of a book here. Unlike the book, the movie was an intriguing study not only of the fashion industry but of the interpersonal power dynamics of the professional world. And when that world is almost devoid of men, as the offices of Runway (read: American Vogue) apparently are, you're basically dealing with office politics in the land of Amazonia. What fun! What emotional turmoil! What style!I love writing about fashion because it's a subject that polarizes people. We're not supposed to love fashion. It's shallow, elitest, crass, status-centered, materialistic, and pro-anorexia. If you do love fashion, you're supposed to admit that it's a kind of weakness and something you'd never take too seriously, something about which you have a sense of humor for crying out loud. What I loved about The Devil Wears Prada (the movie, not the book) was that it cogently presented the point of view of people for whom fashion is serious stuff. In a brilliant smack down of the holier-than-thou anti-fashion pose the Lauren Weisberger character affects, the Anna Wintour character, played by the wonderful Meryl Streep, describes the circuitous route by which her assistant's hideously frumpy discount bin sweater acquired its cerulean blue color. It's a show stopper. The audience cheered.So that was Saturday. On Sunday I took the advice of my pal, Deb, and checked out the AngloMania exhibit at the Met, which showcased British fashion from 1976 to 2006. Using the English period rooms, the curators staged weirdly wonderful tableaux contrasting English fashion from the past with some of the wildest experimentalists of the modern era. In "The Deathbed" tableaux, for example, a dress originally worn by Queen Victoria stood in stark contrast to a black canvas dress flicked with glitter and embraced by an aluminum spinal column and ribcage, courtesy of Alexander McQueen. Check it out:
This tableaux, like the others, revealed the conversation modern designers like McQueen are having with England's past. Throughout the exhibit, designers like McQueen, Vivien Westwood, John Galliano, and Hussein Chalayan reacted to, transformed, satirized and glorified many familiar trappings of English culture. Class, royalty, empire, gender, all fell under the often whimsical probe of England's most innovative designers. The whole show was a brilliantly conceived and gorgeously executed example of why fashion is (or can be at least) such a vibrant art form. And unlike everything else at the Met, these things can be worn by actual people. Not that I'm going to strap on an aluminum spinal column and ribcage any time soon but the next jacket I buy is going to be a white tuxedo coat inspired by "The Gentlemen's Club" tableaux.Which brings me to why this weekend was so inspirational. I'm only tangentially related to the fashion industry by marriage. Before Woofy introduced me to it, I had the same negative opinions of fashion that a lot of people have. But I think those negative attitudes stem from a simple misconception about fashion--the assumption that fashion designers and magazine editors are motivated by a desire to tell you what you "should" wear. In truth, designers and editors are merely the leading edge of a broader cultural phenomenon in which everyone participates to varying degrees. Designers respond to what they see on "the street," transform it and send it back down the runway. From there, it's photographed, written about, criticized, praised, knocked off, and modified by "the street." And so on, and so on. Whether you shop at Barney's or the Salvation Army, you are a part of this process. Hooray for that.