Organised by The Costume Institute Curator Harold Koda, with historian Kohle Yohannan as guest co-curator, The Metropolitan Museum’s exhibition The Model as Muse: Embodying Fashion – the event that will open in exactly one month's time with a gala night with Marc Jacobs (who took inspiration from the exhibition for his A/W 09 collection for Louis Vuitton) as Honorary Chair and Kate Moss, Justin Timberlake and Anna Wintour as Co-Chairs – analyses the role of models in fashion during a timeframe that goes from 1947 to 1997.
Starting from the late 40s when Dior’s New Look transformed the face of fashion and with iconic images of models such as Dorian Leigh, Lisa Fonssagrives and Dovima by Richard Avedon, Cecil Beaton and Irving Penn, the exhibition then moves on to explore the 60s through the futuristic work of revolutionary designers such as André Courrèges and Paco Rabanne, the seminal film Qui êtes vous, Polly Maggoo? and images of Peggy Moffit, Twiggy and Veruschka.
The 70s are embodied by Lisa Taylor and Jerry Hall, while the 80s are represented by Cindy Crawford, Christy Turlington, Naomi Campbell and Linda Evangelista and the 90s bring on the scene new modelling icons such as Kate Moss. The exhibition closes with a space dedicated to Richard Prince and Marc Jacobs’s disturbing nurses clad in Louis Vuitton designs.
With around 70 Haute Couture and ready-to-wear designs by Dior, Balenciaga, Yves Saint Laurent, the forgotten king of body-hugging stretch fabrics and champion of the beauty of the female body Giorgio di Sant’Angelo (who died 20 years ago), Versace, Armani and Prada just to mention a few, plus photographs, fashion editorials, adverts and videos, a “cinematic” exhibition space designed by the Academy Award-winning production designer and art director John Myhre and faces, wigs and headdress designed and styled by Julien d’Ys, The Model as Muse is definitely one of the not-to-miss fashion events of the year.
If you are not able to go, don’t despair, the book The Model as Muse: Embodying Fashion by Harold Koda and Kohle Yohannan will soon be published by the Metropolitan Museum of Art and distributed by Yale University Press.
The brief Q&A with Kohle Yohannan that follows is an extract from a longer interview that will be featured in the next issue of Zoot Magazine (Spring/Summer 09 – available in early May).
Question: When did you start working on this project and what originally inspired it? As a co-curator how did you approach the preparation work for this exhibition?
Kohle Yohannan: Prior to collaborating on The Model as Muse, I was working on a book, About Face: A Century of Vogue Models. As a result of being immersed in that project, much of my initial preparatory research sprung from an inquiry into the evolution of the modelling industry, 20th century photographic history and the history of 4-color printing in America. At precisely the same time, the Curator in Charge of The Costume Institute Harold Koda and the Curator Andrew Bolton had been simultaneously reviewing the Met’s vast collection of fashion periodicals and were struck by the fact that within each era, there were only a handful of models who told the entire story of their time. As often occurs among one’s colleagues there began a dialogue between us about the role certain models and photographers played in the history of fashion—the extent to which a truly great model, or one single image could sum up the very essence of an entire era. And so my involvement with the exhibition began.
Q: According to you, which is the most iconic image that is going to be featured in the exhibition?
KY: That’s a hard call: I think that in many ways this exhibition will change the general public's perception of all iconic fashion images giving them a new perspective onto the role models have played in the creation of any fashion image. As a cultural historian, I have learnt to never underestimate the power of the obvious: without Dovima, there would be no “Dovima With Elephants”. And this seemingly simple example illustrates how this exhibition will introduce the general public and the connoisseur alike to an entirely new way of looking at fashion images, recognising and exploring the subtle interaction of a great model’s talent for enlivening a design and the photographer’s means of capturing it for posterity.
Q: Was there an aspect of the “Model as Muse” theme you would have liked to tackle in this exhibition but didn’t manage to and that maybe you will develop one day in book format?
KY: From the outset, the struggle I faced has been to be EX-clusive and not IN-clusive, but I can’t say that the process was not self-refining. One of the advantages of working with Harold Koda is that his knowledge of fashion history extends far beyond the dress, so where I might have developed an intellectual/aesthetic “curatorial crush” on an image or a particular model, Harold has an unerring disciplined talent for bringing the focus back onto the clothes and, in so doing, those models who truly told the story of the look of their era and truly imprinted themselves upon the psyche of their time always rose to the surface. In literary terms, it was a case of “Beauty will out!” Also, while the exhibition covers 1947 to 1997, the catalogue takes a longer view and looks at modelling in the 20th Century.
The Model as Muse: Embodying Fashion is at the Metropolitan Museum’s Costume Institute, New York,from 6th May until 9th August 2009.
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