The Met’s “Camp: Notes on Fashion” Exhibit Is Extremely Fun - Vox.com

---

The Met’s “Camp: Notes on Fashion” Exhibit Is Extremely Fun - Vox.com Posted: 06 May 2019 04:06 PM PDT In 2018, the Metropolitan Museum of Art opened what would go on to become the most popular exhibit in its 149-year history: a show all about Catholicism's heavy influence on fashion, featuring haute couture confections as well as church vestments on loan from the Vatican. The theme guaranteed gaudiness and spectacle, and just as importantly, it was familiar to people from many walks of spiritual life. Fashion gets a bad rap for being too exclusive, too alienating, but "Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination" elided style with one of the most visible and powerful religious organizations in the world. Its status as the museum's preeminent moneymaker secured, the Met's Costume Institute has promptly zagged in the opposite direction. Its big fashion exhibit for 2019, the opening of which will be celebrated tonight at the celebrity-packed Met Gala, focuses on camp — quite possibly the most slippery, hard-to-define concept the curatorial team could have chosen. "Camp: Notes on Fashion" derives its name from Susan Sontag's 1964 essay "Notes on Camp," which unfolds in list form because "jottings … seemed more appropriate for getting down something of this particular fugitive sensibility." Camp, Sontag writes, is all about artifice, exaggeration, and superficial style over content, and yet it's "dead serious." Though she only references two examples of fashion in her essay — "women's clothes of the twenties," and "a dress made of three million feathers" — Sontag notes that clothes are frequently the vehicle for a camp sensibility. A Celine mink heel on display. A Jean-Paul Gaultier outfit, complete with crotch-height logo chain. Broken hearts on a skirt set by Rainbow Was Born. Two leotards (left: Walter Van Beirendonck, right: Vivienne Westwood), two very different effects. Sontag knew that camp was a hard idea to pin down, and so does Andrew Bolton, head curator of the Costume Institute. In his remarks at the exhibit's press preview, Bolton quoted the cultural historian Andy Medhurst: "Trying to define camp is like attempting to sit in the corner of a circular room." This show, Bolton said, is an attempt to sit in the corner of a circular room. To a viewer, Bolton's admission of inevitable failure should be freeing — it's an invitation to form one's own conclusions and to delight in the fantastic fashions that designers have dreamed up, many of them historic or elaborate couture pieces that most of us would otherwise never have the opportunity to see in person. At the preview, a former colleague dragged me through one room to show me a Jean Paul Gaultier top hat made entirely of glossy black human hair. She nearly keeled over in delight. At the barest minimum, joy in the aesthetic is the point. As Bolton said, "In the end, the ultimate purpose of camp is to put a smile on our faces and a warm glow in our hearts." The final gallery in "Camp: Notes on Fashion" features two levels of clothing from every designer imaginable, and a display of accessories like platform Balenciaga Crocs. You don't have to fully understand camp to enjoy the show, but it's worth trying Bolton has divided the show into two parts: the historic origins of camp and its influence on fashion. The former, set in a pink-painted gallery (somewhere between Pepto Bismol, Glossier, and a perfume bottle by Gucci, the exhibit's corporate sponsor) and filled with sculptures, paintings, and letters, grounds camp in 17th century European queer culture. "Louis XIV's Versailles has been designated — retroactively — as an idealized 'camp Eden,'" reads the wall text next to a copy of the 1671 Molière play in which the French phrase "se camper" ("to flaunt" or "to posture") appears for the first time. This starting point is a signal of what is to come: Throughout the show, the influence of people of color on camp does not receive the same air time. Bolton wanted this narrow gallery to feel claustrophobic, to emphasize camp's role as a "secret language among gay men" in the build-up to the 19th century. Here, Bolton has highlighted Frederick "Fanny" Park and Ernest "Stella" Boulton, who were lovers and female impersonators eventually tried for "conspiracy to seduce men by wearing women's clothing." (They were cleared of these charges.) Alexander McQueen designer Sarah Burton modeled this cloak's peacocks on drawings by Aubrey Beardsley. Park and Boulton's letters and photographs are mounted next to a matching set of elegantly ruffled Erdem dresses that designer Erdem Moralioglu based on their drag wardrobes. (Posed with their arms around each other, the Met's mannequins mimic a photo of the two.) The exhibit is filled with surprising fashion education moments like this, highlighting the thoughtful ways that designers investigate culture and history in their collections. A later section on Oscar Wilde, who was jailed for two years for "gross indecency" and for whom Sontag wrote her 1964 essay, includes several ensembles inspired by or resembling the writer's style: a black velvet jacket and breeches from Yves Saint Laurent, a Gucci smoking jacket, an Alexander McQueen cape embroidered with two gold peacocks based on illustrations by Wilde's contemporary Aubrey Beardsley. After navigating this winding pink corridor, visitors break through into a larger room dedicated to Sontag's 1964 essay — a spatial representation of the mainstreaming of camp. Bolton has coherently broken down Sontag's theory of camp, pairing a selection of the essay's bullet points with the objects referenced within them (a Tiffany lamp, a flapper dress, a dandy's suit, a Balenciaga dress covered in a delicate layer of feathers), or pieces that help explain them. Below note number 46 ("Camp — dandyism in the age of mass culture — makes no distinction between the unique object and the mass-produced object") is a Warhol Campbell's tomato soup print and a minidress made of the same pattern. Andy Warhol's famous tomato soup print, as a dress. A Cristobal Balenciaga original made of three million feathers (give or take) is very camp. Moschino versus Yves Saint Laurent (at left and right, respectively). Bolton uses Sontag's distinction between naïve camp and deliberate camp as another opportunity to impart visitors with a fashion history lesson, this time on the ways that designers constantly pay homage to one another's work. Here, he matches elaborate couture dresses (naive camp) with their intentionally over-the-top descendants. There's a 1983 Yves Saint Laurent evening dress with an enormous pink bow and a 2017 Moschino dress made to look like a paper doll cutout, with an even more gigantic, two-dimensional trompe l'oeil bow. There's a black 1951 Balenciaga dress that flares elegantly at the bottom to reveal a pink silk lining, next to Thierry Mugler's 1995 "Venus" dress, an archival style memorably revived by Cardi B at the 2019 Grammys that opens upward like an oyster shell. It's a smart way of tracing the lineage of a look while simultaneously illustrating the idea of camp. Following through on the idea of the gallery spaces mimicking the covert or mainstream nature of camp language, the second part of the exhibit lives in one immense, darkened room. Each wall has been transformed into a multi-colored, double-decker display case, with one set of clothing at eye level and another high above. It's overwhelming in the best way, filled with latex dresses resembling cuts of meat, banana skirts, mountainous tulle dresses, and platform Crocs by Balenciaga, to name just a few. Cacophony was the aim: Each item of clothing is paired with a different definition of camp, from Sontag but also writers, designers, and academics like Richard Dyer, Jack Babuscio, Philip Core, and Geoffrey Beene. At the end of the day, camp has an infinite number of definitions. A lot of bows. A flamingo headpiece by the House of Schiaparelli. A trash can, but also a Moschino purse. Earnest feelings and glitter from Ashish. With a series of record-setting exhibits — and its headline-grabbing gala — the Costume Institute has established fashion as a powerful player in the museum world The Costume Institute's achievement last year — putting on the biggest exhibit in the Met's history — signals an important shift within the museum, and the art world more broadly: Often considered a less serious art form than, say, painting or sculpture, fashion has become a reliable moneymaker for museums like the Met, which has faced financial challenges in recent years. The costume department's winning streak began in 2011, with the success of "Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty," which was then surpassed in foot traffic by 2015's "China: Through the Looking Glass" and 2016's "Manus x Machina: Fashion in an Age of Technology." Staging a blockbuster puts a great deal of pressure on the curatorial staff to achieve similar heights in subsequent years — Bolton says as much in The First Monday in May, a documentary about the making of the China exhibit, calling the McQueen show "a bit of an albatross" — but for the institution at large, it's clearly a financial boon. And other museums have followed suit, with New York's Museum of Modern Art putting on its first fashion exhibit in decades two years ago and the Philadelphia Museum of Art mounting its largest fashion show ever in 2018. You can now regularly find fashion exhibits everywhere from London to Dallas. A Giambattista Valli synthetic tulle confection. And a Burberry rainbow cape. One force behind the rise of the Costume Institute is Anna Wintour, the longtime editor in chief of Vogue and a Met trustee. She oversees the Met Gala, going so far as to decide what people wear, and in her time running the show has turned it into not only the biggest night in American fashion, but a major celebrity event in its own right. Last summer, the party served as the staging ground for the central heist in Ocean's 8 — proof that it's transcended the confines of the fashion world. The Met Gala's pop cultural significance fuels the Costume Institute's well-being: In addition to providing abundant publicity for the department's exhibits, the event is, at the end of the day, its annual fundraiser. On the red carpet, camp will be interpreted all over again by the throng of celebrities attending the Met Gala, which typically draws some combination of Kardashian-Jenners, Beyoncé, Lady Gaga, and whoever else is blowing up at the moment. Framed as a pure celebration of fashion, the evening is an opportunity for entertainers to take the biggest sartorial swings imaginable — Rihanna dressed as a sultry pope, or Katy Perry wearing enormous angel wings — and with a theme like camp, there's no way they hold back.

James Madison High School’s parental dress code sparked controversy - Vox.com Posted: 07 May 2019 06:00 AM PDT James Madison High School's dress code for parents sparked a huge backlash after it was announced in April, but the principal of the Houston school is standing by the controversial policy. Announced in an April 9 letter, the dress code bars parents from visiting Madison High wearing ripped jeans, leggings, short-shorts, mini dresses, or tops that expose cleavage. A number of other items, including hair bonnets, rollers, and pajama pants, have been banned as well. In a statement to Vox, Principal Carlotta Outley Brown said she was compelled to implement the policy after one parent visited campus in a sheer top that exposed her breasts and a second walked in wearing low-cut jeans that exposed thong underwear. After a third parent arrived to school "in her night shirt and a cloth head wrap with rollers in her hair and flip flops," Brown said that she decided to implement the dress code that had been in place at a previous school she led for 15 years. The policy there never became headline news, and Brown said that it has only attracted media attention now because a parent told the press she had been ousted from campus because of her attire. The principal said that staff tried to help the parent but did not want her walking the halls in a shirt that "you could clearly see through." After this dispute, Brown explained in a schoolwide letter that she was implementing the parent dress code to help children understand the appropriate clothing to wear outside the home. The dress code has been criticized, including by Houston-area officials, for being racist and classist, as obscene clothing does not appear to be the sole focus. Madison High School serves mostly low-income families of color, and some of the items on the banned list, such as hair bonnets, disproportionately target black women's grooming practices. But Brown denied that the policy had any racist or classist intent. "This is not about race, creed, or color and especially not about socio-economic status," she said. "It is about elevating standards for students who will go out into the world in the near future and seek opportunities for themselves. I do not want them to face possible barriers." Critics of the dress code say that the lingering effects of "respectability" politics may be the driving force behind it. These politics suggest that if black people look, speak, or behave in ways that line up with white middle-class values, they can somehow elude racial bigotry. But the new dress code also reveals how out of touch Madison High's administrators may be with current trends in education. After all, the administration is policing how parents and students look during a time when the nation's most progressive school districts have determined that dress codes enforce outdated race, sex, and class norms. It has also likely alienated families when administrators across the country are boosting parent outreach to lower student dropout rates. Madison High's dress code is more of the same institutional oppression The Madison High dress code is sparking debate because it targets parents and students alike. Beyond that, it doesn't particularly stand out for its specific policies; nearly all of the items the school now bans have appeared on dress code lists for decades. The 1965 student handbook from Broward Senior High School in Hollywood, Florida, barred "hair scarves, curlers, clips or other hair setting paraphernalia." The school dress codes of yesteryear also singled out torn clothing, short skirts, and athletic wear as no-nos, which undercuts the idea that students and parents today simply don't know what constitutes appropriate school attire. In the United States, families and schools have clashed over dress since at least the 1800s. And the earliest dress codes served little purpose other than forcing black and Native American students to racially assimilate. More than a century ago, schools with majority black and brown students prohibited ethnic dress, long hair on boys, bright colors, jewelry, and sensuous fabrics, lest their "primitive" nature emerge. Dress codes have also traditionally targeted girls and gender nonconforming students of all backgrounds. With the exception of men's undershirts, nearly every item Madison High School has banned is associated with girls and women, which means the code plays into the historic framing of women's bodies as distractions to men. Black girls and women are particularly vulnerable to such characterizations: According to the National Women's Law Center 2018 "Dress Coded" report, the bodies, hair, and hair accessories of black women are most likely to be scrutinized. Increasingly, parents of black students have fought back against dress code politics. Last year, Nicole Williams publicly objected when school officials duct-taped her seventh-grader's skin to hide the flesh exposed by her ripped jeans, and the parents of twin sisters Mya and Deanna Cook defended their daughters when a Boston-area charter school disciplined them in 2017 for wearing braided hair extensions. Given how often students and parents are appearing in the news to criticize dress codes, one wonders why Madison High decided that policing what entire families wear to school was a good idea. Instead of withdrawing the new policy, however, Principal Brown has doubled down on it. As she explained to Vox, she told radio station 97.9 The Box last week that she implemented the code because parents had shown up to the school dressed indecently. She also noted how her upbringing as the daughter of a teacher and military colonel shaped her views on dress. "My mother told me to never go outside the home looking like you're in the home, like you've gotten out of bed," she said. "You go out and you look presentable." Along with the idea that "as an African American, you have to work twice as hard as anyone else," as former President Barack Obama has told black students, the idea of looking presentable to gain social acceptance is old hat to African Americans, many of whom grow up scrutinized for how they look in ways that white people simply are not. Slain black teenager Trayvon Martin, for example, was implicated in his own killing for wearing a hoodie in the rain. During The Box interview, the principal acknowledged implementing the same dress code at a different school, but she did not accuse the parents there of dressing obscenely. Rather, she expressed her belief that the path to a college education "starts with how we present ourselves." Yet, the research on dropout rates is clear: The more parents are involved in school, the greater the odds their children will graduate. Suggesting that parents must fit a preconceived idea of "presentable" to set foot on campus is unlikely to shore up enough goodwill to incline families to spend any more time at Madison High than necessary, if at all. As it is, schools that serve predominantly low-income families have lower rates of parent engagement since it's tough to turn up to PTA meetings while juggling jobs, transportation, and childcare. With its dress code, Madison High has, perhaps, given its parents another hurdle to cross. But Brown has a different view. She told Vox, "I am not asking them to dress up; just come in a presentable manner and not night clothing or inappropriate clothing." She said that parents can dress how they like in the carpool line, but to step onto school grounds, they need to be dressed appropriately. She added that she wants families to care as much about their children's academic performance as they do about this new dress code. Respectability politics influence dress codes and perceptions of black students Much of what Brown has said about dress codes is wrapped up in old-school respectability politics. African Americans as varied as Booker T. Washington, Madam CJ Walker, Miles Davis, and even Prince believed that how black people carried themselves in public mattered a great deal. Looking good, they believed, challenged white supremacist ideas about black people's character. Appearing well-groomed and well-dressed countered the idea that black people were less capable, less attractive, or even less moral than white people. I ain't here for the "Dropping your kids off in a bonnet is bad parenting" hot takes. Is the child fed, clothed & cared for? Great. That's the priority. Not your randomly applied respectability politics. — ❄Mikki Kendall❄ (@Karnythia) April 24, 2019 A'Lelia Bundles, Madam CJ Walker's biographer and great-great-granddaughter, wrote that when the businesswoman first started her groundbreaking hair company in the early 1900s, black women had little choice but to follow white beauty and apparel standards. "It was an age when the morals of even the most respectable black women were questioned and sullied by racist stereotypes," Bundles wrote. "As a result, middle-class black women in particular placed tremendous pressure on themselves to conform to Victorian behavior and dress." Black men haven't been immune to this pressure. The late jazz trumpeter Davis, born in 1926, dressed in fashionable suits and designer clothes not only because he enjoyed style but also because he wanted to be taken seriously as a musician. "He was conscious that people were looking at him," his bandmate Marcus Miller told the New York Times in 2016. "And the clothes were so important back then, particularly in the '40s and '50s, because this was an era when black artists were fighting to be recognized as more than simple entertainers. It was like, 'We're going to be as sharp as possible and we're going to command respect.'" Looking dapper did not help Davis in 1959, when New York police ordered him off a sidewalk in front of a jazz club where he was rehearsing. Davis tried to explain his role at the club, but the exchange ended with police beating him. He was a well dressed, college-educated black man from an upper-middle-class family, but respectability politics did little good. The idea that dressing a certain way will help African Americans transcend racism has persisted for generations, in spite of the fact that it is just not true. If anything, respectability politics are a form of victim-blaming that hold the marginalized accountable for the ill treatment they receive rather than institutional forms of oppression that devalue some people and exalt others. Given how they unevenly target certain families along class, gender, and racial lines, restrictive dress codes are tools of such oppression. Students and their families shouldn't have to prove themselves worthy of respect Students and parents don't show up to school to prove they're worthy of equal treatment, and neither need to make a point to dress well to receive a public education. Principal Brown suggested that parents need to be examples for children by showing them what's acceptable to wear in a professional setting. But as Lisa Frack, the president of Oregon's National Organization for Women, pointed out to Vox in September, not every child is going to work in a bank or a law office. Some may be artists, auto mechanics, work from home, or end up living in a country like China, where pajamas in public are completely common. In 2015, Oregon NOW devised a "model dress code" to prevent discrimination and disruption. It allows short-shorts, tank tops, leggings, and other items schools have banned. The dress code has been adopted by schools across the country with no reported upticks in misbehavior or other problems. It turns out that what students wear doesn't hinder their ability to learn. Moreover, how parents dress doesn't make them good or bad examples for their children. Instead of applauding adults for taking an active role in their children's education, the school's policies shame them using the very same tactics that have repressed young people and their families for generations. By focusing on appearance, the administration has forgotten what matters most: that students and parents are showing up to school at all. Want more stories from The Goods by Vox? Sign up for our newsletter here.

You are subscribed to email updates from "womens clothing" - Google News. To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now.	Email delivery powered by Google
Google, 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway, Mountain View, CA 94043, United States