New York City, NY | An immersion in history: clothing that tells tales of distant times and eras. This year’s Costume Institute exhibition, at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, celebrates American fashion, as multifaceted and diverse as the United States and the multiple cultures that make it up.
The “In America” show investigates the deeper significance of American fashion. Divided into two parts: “In America: A Lexicon of Fashion” and “In America: An Anthology of Fashion”, the two-part exhibition opened on September 18, 2021, and closed on September 5, 2022.
Part 1 of the exhibition, which opened in September 2021, celebrated the 75 th anniversary of The Costume Institute with a vocabulary of modern American fashion curated by Andrew Bolton, Wendy Yu Curator in Charge of The Costume Institute, in the Anna Wintour Costume Center.. Part 2 opened on May 5, 2022, and is a collaboration between The Costume Institute and the museum’s American Wing. The latest instalment in The Costume Institute’s period room trilogy explores the role of fashion in America.
The exhibition presented garments from the 18 th century to the 1970s, providing an overview of over three centuries of American domestic life and telling a panoply of stories: from personal to political, stylistic to cultural, aesthetic to ideological. The displays reflected on these narratives through a series of ”vignettes” produced in collaboration with major American directors: mises-en-scène that explore the role of apparel in shaping American identity.
Mannequins from Italy’s Bonaveri are breathing life into the narrative, highlighting the clothes and guiding visitors to discover stories and inspiration. The figures from the Bonaveri mannequin collection, most of which are female, feature artistic forms whose personality emerges from the minutest details, from the extent of their gestures, from their profound harmonies.
