Fashion Talks Back

...Yohji Yamamoto’s pleated, coralline red dress, for example, may be a swirly takeoff on the mid20th-century styles of Madame Gr?s...

...The fast-changing, self-refl exive, all-consuming surf of the Internet may parallel contemporary haute couture in some ways, but “blog.mode” doesn’t quite seem to know what to do with those parallels...

...Other meta-fashion pieces work much better, though often that’s because they’re talking about fashion and something else...

...But no: It was supposed to look like that...

...Meta-fashion can be frustrating, as the ladies behind me learned...

...Fashion talks back to religion: Simon Costin drew on J.K...

...A second question arises: What’s the difference between fashions that make women look like other things, and fashions that make women look like women...

...But the dress works, in part, because it’s also playing off one of the show’s recurring themes: the identifi cation of woman and ocean...

...Fashion even talks back to death, not only in the A Rebours pieces but in the far less accomplished Miguel Adrover outfi t made from the late Quentin Crisp’s mattress...

...Huysmans’s A Rebours to craft an anti-reliquary with vials of his artist friends’ bodily fl uids, and a “Memento Mori” necklace featuring huge talons, “rotting Victorian jet,” and rabbits’ skulls with hematite eyes...

...Do we like it because it’s estranging...

...These pieces are terrifi c, resentful horror-show art, despite their adolescent dependence on the Church they attempt to demolish...

...The overall effect is very “Barbie’s Dustbuster,” a playful commentary on the clash between techno imagery and the usual nature imagery associated with women...

...Sometimes it works (a lacy bonnet makes a lady look like she’s crowned with fl owers...

...Certainly this approach fi ts the popular image of fashion, an image dominated by gowns and heels and skinny women with aggressive bone structure...

...Why do we like this stuff, instead of fi nding it creepily estranging...

...And of course, fashion talks back to itself: We have Rei Kawakubo’s muddily colored short dress made of interweaving swaths of fabric: It’s bondagey and bandagey...

...The “dress” seemed to have been stitched together with air quotes, displaying its weirdly placed padding and raveled seams...

...Potato Head), but it’s always an odd thing to do to a beautiful woman...

...From the fi rst room, with its 18th- and 19th-century gowns plastered with fl oral colors and shapes, to the fi nal display of a headdress modeled after a Chinese garden, woman is still the hortus conclusus, her fl owery fashions paradoxically displaying a garden while concealing the body that garden symbolizes...

...One of the disgusted ladies had thought, at fi rst, that it was a display meant to educate viewers on how dresses are made, while another had assumed that some of the hanging fabric had simply fallen off the dress by accident...

...The Galliano dress showed one possible road (or cul-de-sac) that self-conscious fashion can take...

...The fi rst kind of fashion is obviously strange...

...blog.mode” is a strangely themeless show...

...Does the distance from natural beauty enhance that beauty, perhaps by refl ecting the universal human condition of exile...

...mode: addressing fashion” show were reacting with outrage and betrayal to a John Galliano dress made for Christian Dior Couture—a dress made to look sort of like a dress form and sort of like a mutant...

...Perhaps the most interesting questions raised concern women and symbolism: Why are women the alphabet of the language of fashion...

...This holey, homeless-chic piece is reminiscent of Walker Percy’s description of a coffee table made from “a stone slab from an old morgue, the blood runnel used as an ash tray,” which he suggests is the result of the modern self feeling itself to be “a voracious nought” that must seek meaning outside itself, yet empties of meaning every object it touches: The morgue slab is intended to be more meaningful than a coffee table, yet it simply becomes less meaningful than a morgue slab...

...Flowers and the sea are the two images that recur throughout the show...

...Eve Tushnet, a writer in Washington, blogs at eve-tushnet.blogspot.com...

...a swoony pink Vivienne Westwood dress is sunset on the ocean) and sometimes it doesn’t (a silvery Yeohlee Teng dress called “Bellows” is, indeed, bellows-shaped, and basically looks like Industrial Mr...

...BY EVE TUSHNET blog.mode: addressing fashion Metropolitan Museum of Art Through April 13 Eventually the Cockettes will use up the past and the future and have to rely on the present for their material...

...But “blog.mode” does prove that our current self-obsessed, wiggily weird period of high fashion can produce clothes that are tart, clothes that are beautiful, and even clothes that are sublime...

...Other times the sea infl uence can be seen in the spilling, wavelike wash of ribbons or fabric, making woman’s form liquid...

...Clay Geerdes “That’s disgusting— that’s just disgusting...

...The three women behind me at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s “blog...

...it’s clearly well done, its draping very balanced and almost fl ag like, but it’s also neither beautiful nor sublime...

...The show features fashion talking back to politics: Yves Saint-Laurent responded to the strident 1970s calls to put political commitment over bourgeois beauty with an adorable, colorful, fl owy hippie-chick dress...

...While menswear may, in fact, be the more innovative side of fashion (as argued by Anne Hollander’s Sex and Suits: The Evolution of Modern Dress), here men are an afterthought, represented by one or two outfi ts...

...This approach seems even weirder, and yet it has persisted over the tidal centuries of fashion...

...Fashion talks back to technology: There’s a fun “Remote Control” dress, a hard shiny pink carapace that opens by remote control to reveal a huge spray of tulle...

...I’m sympathetic to the hope that fashion will eventually work through its self-analysis phase and get back to talking about the permanent things: about men and women, loss and springtime, color and change...

...Nonetheless, the show has some provocative and even stunning pieces, and a few themes do slowly emerge...

...It displays recent acquisitions of the Met’s Costume Institute, covering four centuries...

...It says it’s a dress, but it isn’t...

...Fortunately, most of the rest of the show used its self-consciousness to craft a language of fashion and a poetry of womanhood, technology, and even death, rather than the exhausted muttering of fashion that can only talk about itself...

...And when we’re not making women look like fl owers or insects or shipwrecks, we’re saddling them with bustles and corsets and hip-padding, as if without these fi gure-exaggerating constructions we might not notice that women’s shapes are lovely...

...This identifi cation is sometimes explicit, as in Alexander McQueen’s “Oyster” dress, with its shipwreck-tattered bodice and hugely abundant waves of foam-yellow skirt...

...The show does indeed have a blog, and even a “blog bar” in the gallery where viewers can comment on the exhibit— “This is just darling,” “I don’t get it . . . probably never will”—but it’s not clear what the 1990s Internet fetishism adds to the show...

...Detractors accused the dress of refl ecting misogyny, but the real problem is that it’s drab...