The practice of highlighting women of style is familiar from the publishing industry: from the photographs of fashionable society women in Emily Burbank’s 1917 book Woman as Decoration, to the spreads of glossy fashion and lifestyle magazines, to “street style” photo-documentation by the late Bill Cunningham of The New York Times and Scott Schuman’s popular
“Sartorialist” blog. Museums have fulfilled their need to collect important clothing with documented provenance by collecting the wardrobes of some of the fashionable women of history. Just recently, exhibitions on the topic have included Nan Kempner: American Chic (Costume Institute 2006–2007);
High Style: Betsy Bloomingdale and the Haute Couture (FIDM Museum 2009);
Daphne Guinness (Museum at FIT 2011); Isabella Blow: Fashion Galore!
(Somerset House, London, 2013–2014); Jacqueline de Ribes: The Art of Style (Costume Institute 2015–2016). The Palais Galliera, Musée de la Mode de la Ville de Paris, displayed the wardrobe of the fashionable aristocrat and muse Comtesse de Greffuhle in 2015–2016, which was redisplayed at the Museum at FIT later in 2016, and prior to that had featured the collection of the Parisian vendeuse of couture Alice Alleaume in Roman d’une garde-robe: Le Chic d’une Parisienne de la Belle Epoque aux Années 30, staged at the Musée Carnavalet in 2013–2014.
While there is a precedent as early as 1928, with the Brooklyn Museum’s exhibition of the Worth-designed couture wardrobe of Mrs W. A. Perry (“Museum Exhibits Solve Fashion Enigmas” 1928: 10), the meteoric rise of this genre is probably traceable back to the 1970s. Cecil Beaton’s 1971 Fashion: An Anthology exhibition featured clothes that he had collected from the wardrobes of women whose style he esteemed. In his exhibition proposal, he wrote, “I would hope to flatter the donors by only asking for specific garments that I had seen and admired; and would be very selective in anything that was merely ‘offered’”
(quoted in de la Haye 2006: 130).20
A similarly socialite wardrobe-based exhibition was held in 1999 at the Fashion Museum in Bath. Women of Style featured six women otherwise unconnected apart from their personal style: Mary Curzon, Mary Endicott, Helen Gardner, Martita Hunt, Dame Margot Fonteyn (see Figure 6.14), and Molly Tondalman.
Label copy focused on the women’s emotional connection to their clothing and their shopping habits: “It is obvious that Mary loved fashion when you see how many pairs of shoes she owned […] Mary frequently bought the same style of shoe in several different colours” (Harden 1999: 4). Both exhibitions included portraits and images of the women featured, though only the Bath exhibition made any attempt to model the mannequins after them; it seems the women themselves were on display, contrary to the statements of curatorial intention to display personal style.
As I have noted elsewhere (Petrov 2014b), there is an undercurrent of sexism present in such presentations. To describe only certain women as
“women of style” suggests that the majority of women have none; likewise, the exclusion of typical clothing from gallery spaces instills a class consciousness in viewers, who are led to believe that only the social elite have consumption habits worth aspiring to (a message reinforced in the fashion media). Cheryl Buckley and Hazel Clark’s recent chapter (2016) on museum collections of fashion in London and New York, for example, contrasted institutional collecting policies and critiqued their lack of engagement with contemporary quotidian clothing, defining representation not as display methods but rather as quantitative presence or absence. This kind of social disciplining has occurred over hundreds of years, as nobles on parade or royal effigies in their splendid regalia21 created a symbolic equivalence between dress and status. Apart from the magnificence on display in armories, waxwork exhibitions such as Madame Tussauds also reinforced the class hierarchy with displays of real royal regalia on look-alike wax bodies.22 Real female consumers, on the other hand, have been moralistically maligned for centuries for their “excessive”
desire for fashion, decried as gluttonous, vain, and unthinking. In recent years, the moral shortcomings of the habit for fast fashion have been explained as environmentally unsound and insensitive to capitalist exploitation. However, as Phoebe Maltz Bovy (2017) has described, the alternative—the high-end capsule wardrobe, which requires both financial and aesthetic asceticism—is merely a different kind of excessive consumption and one that is encouraged almost exclusively for female, not male, consumers. Conveniently, the women whose wardrobes are museum-worthy evade both environmental and capitalist critique: instead of going to a landfill, their discarded clothes are preserved in nonprofit institutions for the benefit of the less privileged public. And yet, even a review of the earliest American display of historical dress noted that fashion is truly populist. Describing the Smithsonian’s First Ladies exhibit (Figure 2.9), Vogue opined,
The United States National Museum at Washington has some very stupid collections which remain unvisited year after year, except possibly, in rare instances, when a professorial person enters in search of more professorial knowledge. It now has something of real interest to offer, something which will appeal to the heart and pride of every woman—the original costumes worn by the mistresses of the White house from the time of the first presidential administration to the present, as well as many other historic dresses; and, in many instances, though hanging in side cases, they throw even more light on the history of dress than the gowns worn by the First Ladies of the Land, which, draped on ivory colored plaster manikins, occupy the central position.
(“Gowns That Have Cut” 1916: 59)
This early journalist recognized that these elite women, though interesting for their association with political history, were not the best representatives of the story of fashion.
Even in exhibitions where specific women were not recognizable, they were portrayed through their appetites: sexual and sartorial. The Costume Institute’s exhibitions The Eighteenth-Century Woman (1981; see above) and Dangerous Liaisons (2004) paired social history with a heavy emphasis on consumerism.
The curatorial message for both exhibitions was that by surrounding themselves with particular kinds of material culture, the eighteenth-century elite fashioned themselves and molded their social interactions accordingly (Bernier 1981;
Koda and Bolton 2006). The lively manner in which the latter exhibition, in particular, was staged served to enable audiences to empathize with the desires and diversions of the people who inhabited such lavish clothing and surroundings and may have tapped into a cultural stereotype of Rococo hedonism. Indeed, the newspaper description of the 1963–1964 exhibition Period Rooms Re-Occupied in Style focused solely on the consumer culture of the time (Figure 2.10):
The street is the museum corridor with the wonderfully preserved 18-century [sic] storefront from Paris, behind which passerby may see the remarkable early porcelains of Sèvres. Two mannequins have been added to the scene, Figure 2.9 Postcard, c. 1965, showing the White House Blue Room furnished vignette of the First Ladies Hall, Museum of History and Technology, Smithsonian Institution.
Author’s collection.
window shoppers of the time of Louis XVI. The fashionable shopping attire that Paris provided one of the shoppers was an open robe worn over a matching petticoat in striped silk with coppery orange iridescence. (“Museum’s Rooms”
1963: 171)
The porcelain was to later provide the exact shade of pink for the walls of Vreeland’s 1981 show (Menkes 1981: 9). By walking through the interiors of the period rooms, or past animated vignettes, viewers also became part of the value hierarchy on display.
Figure 2.10 Postcard, c. 1965, showing installation view of Period Rooms Re-Occupied in Style, with a female and child mannequin by an eighteenth-century shop front.
Author’s collection.