NY Times- By SUZY MENKES
PARIS — It has been dismissed by opinion makers as “the decade that taste forgot” — the era of bell-bottom pants, glam rock glitter, clammy polyester, shrunken sweaters and a palette of orange, brown and avocado.
Yet suddenly ’70s style is being re-assessed — and not just by women embracing platform shoes as though the love affair were even more intense the second time around.
“The 1970s suffers from being discredited — but the reality is entirely different,” claims Olivier Saillard, the curator of a Paris exhibition that brings to virtual life an era of dancing, prancing models, experimental ready-to-wear fashion and, by the time the decade had segued into the ’80s, almost every trend that marked the final part of the last century.
“An Idealized History of Fashion” is the English translation of the show at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs (until Oct. 10). And Mr. Saillard has done something few museums have the imagination to achieve: multimedia installations to bring each designer’s spirit to screen life.
The display opens with the shock of the old: the ’40s inspired collection that a young Yves Saint Laurent dared to send out in 1971, referencing the war period when collaboration was still an open wound in France.
As jazz plays merrily, the models step out in their short dresses and wide shouldered vests, while the audience is captured on film in disbelief, discomfort and electrified excitement — or just yawning boredom. Another screen shows a television show interpreting the clothes as madness and mayhem.
Next comes the first big surprise: the models are filmed smiling.
Smiling! In contrast with today’s moody waifs, these women are dancing indefatigably on screen, throwing themselves around a stadium in Issey Miyake’s geometric and asymmetric clothes, their lively feet kicking out metaphorically the shapely sobriety of haute couture.
“Miyake was the precursor of designers who don’t work in seasons, but cycles of creativity, says Mr. Saillard, who has just been tapped to head up the Palais Galliera, a Paris fashion museum.
Juxtaposition is one of the curator’s skills, so that a vitrine of soft jersey dresses from the British designer Jean Muir faces off the designs of Madame Grès, who was showing the last of her classic-draped dresses in the ’70s.
All the videos are compelling in their different ways: the famous YSL Russian collection of 1976-77 looks like costume in the display, but is vibrant with energy on a runway filled with model diversity (a revolution at the time). Then there is Claude Montana, coiffed, ginger-blonde head held high, at the end of a parade of exquisitely colored tailoring — not least of which were jackets scissored and woven out of leather.
What fun the collections were back then! Thierry Mugler, a master showman, presented in 1984 an angel-inspired extravaganza in front of 4,000 paying spectators. (Think pregnant model lowered from a lofty height and wings splayed open on the dresses.)
Mr. Saillard has both a vision and a trenchant opinion about which shows marked fashion history. He states each designer’s case in an accompanying book that takes the story up to current times. A second exhibition, going forward from the current 1980s ending, will open at the museum on Nov. 25.
No comments:
Post a Comment