Author | Christiane Nickel | Fashion Editor
Photography by Marie Tomanova
As a young, naive grad student studying the history of fashion, textiles, and material culture I was first confronted with Charles James in a relatively large conservation lab. Fred Dennis, senior Curator of Costume Collections, presented the class with the designer’s ever expansive clover dress as our eyes skimming over the monumental undulating lines of paneled silk satin and iridescent taffeta of the conical skirt. The exhibition designer playfully remarked that the gown doubles as a great bomb shelter (which it probably does). Underneath, crisp layers of netting and horsehair took on a whole other sculptural dimension.
Charles James, was a self-professed artist with a “sculptor’s eye and scientist’s logic.” Exploiting and innovating ideas of volume, James was the cornerstone in American fashion design, challenging notions that American design wasn’t just about streamlined versatile sportswear it was also about a sensationalized elegance.
Born in 1906, James was trained as a milliner but self taught as a designer, which helps to explain his aggressive approach to his monumental confabulations. Salvador Dali, Jean Cocteau, Elsa Schiaparelli as well as Antonio Lopez and Karl Lagerfeld, were some of the many threads of his tightly interlaced bohemian circle that he cultivated and culled inspiration from. From the melting contours of Dali’s “The Face of War” that mimicked the lines of James’ scarf dress (1935) to his explosive bustles expressive of the same energy found in a Kandinsky painting, there was something clearly zeitgeist about James.
Zeitgeist aside, drama and austerity go to head to head in some of James’s sexually evocative works depicting the vagina and phallus. Ironically these rather pronounced creations were worn by celebrated and coveted by society women like Ms. Austine Hearst and Millicent Rogers throughout one of the most sexually repressed eras since the Victorian age, the fifties.
Thanks to the Met’s new $10 million opening of The Anna Wintour Costume Center, the spirit, psyche and aesthetic of James was a celebration – from a conceptual level to its very anatomical, granular beginnings. Collages, letters, and lists of whom he would like to design for exonerated a man notorious for his delusions of grandeur. However, it was the x-ray video cameras that photo mapped, scaled, and displayed the fiber contents of his underskirts on a microscopic level that showed the science behind his volumetric megalomania.
Finished with a healthy amount of label and wall text and a luxurious spatial plan, Charles James: Beyond Fashion counts as one of the most impressive fashion/ art retrospectives I have ever seen. Alone walking through the press preview (which one might expect to be an overdose of aspiring fashionistas and vapid convo) was brimming with fashion dignitaries like: Hamish Bowles, Stephen Jones, Valerie Steele and Teri Agens. Truly honored to be invited, this exhibit counts as game changing event for the city of New York and for the history of fashion.
Thanks to the help of our fabulous photographer Marie Tomanova, we have compiled a slideshow of photos from the press preview.
