Inside the Met’s New Exhibit Celebrating Women Who Dress Women
This past week, at a preview for the Costume Institute’s new exhibit “Women Dressing Women,” I overheard women talking about the women they were wearing. It was an apt topic given the occasion, but I also sensed an excitement from fashion journalists and fashion fans alike that has been lacking—at least recently, after a series of white men were given highly coveted creative director appointments, leaving many wondering: Where are the women?
While I was standing in front of a mannequin who was dressed in a spring 2023 Simone Rocha dress adorned with porcelain baby teeth and pearl-beaded breast pockets reminiscent of the cups of a nursing bra, a friend excitedly pointed out the Simone Rocha dress on my body. According to the gallery label, the one I was in the midst of admiring was meant to allude to the “spooky, deranged, insomnia” of early motherhood.
The one I was wearing, with its easy billowing frame, soft ruffles in the shape of a favorable harness, and zipper half-way undone down my spine, represented another facet of womanhood. The one where your feet are tired from the daily dance of trying to look put together in a rush, while still feeling beautiful enough to step outside. I gravitate to Rocha’s clothing for that exact reason—her frothy feminine creations are easy to throw on and make me feel like Marie Antoinette (Sofia Coppola’s version). When I asked my friend to help adjust the back zipper I couldn’t entirely get on my own that morning, she obliged before adding, “Just women helping women!”
Melissa Huber, the associate curator of the Costume Institute, did not plan for this exhibit to happen at a time where women’s bodies and those who are deemed worthy enough to dress them, have been of near constant discussion. Actually, “Women Dressing Women” was originally planned for 2020, before the pandemic lockdowns shifted the museum’s exhibit schedule.
And the idea itself first came to Huber many years prior, while reading a photography book. “An author made an offhand comment about the interwar period. It was something along the lines of, ‘Well, because this is the one moment in history when women outnumbered men.’ And it was just so very matter of fact,” she tells me over Zoom. “It really gave me pause.” She noted that the period was filled with “so many important women designers who had a large impact on the history of fashion.”
She brought the idea to the head curator at the Costume Institute, Andrew Bolton, who had also been toying with the idea of an exhibit celebrating women designers for some time. After Karen Van Godtsenhoven, a former associate curator at The Met, came to Bolton separately with a similar idea, he suggested her and Huber team up for what would ultimately open this December.
Given that the over 80 pieces on display have been part of the museum’s permanent collection, it’s strange to think the idea hadn’t come about even sooner. But even the former Costume Institute curator, Diana Vreeland, had to wait nearly 14 years before her Madame Grès retrospective finally took place in 1994. A white evening gown from that exhibit sits atop a column ahead of the Costume Institute’s entrance, alongside a moth-eaten sweater and skirt by Rei Kawakubo, the only other female designer to be given a solo show at The Met.
Celebrating female designers, though, was not the sole objective for the exhibit. “We came up with the idea to consider not only how women have been important to fashion, but also how fashion has been important to women,” Huber makes sure to note.
And I think that concept is best seen not in the four guiding notions the show is built around—anonymity, visibility, agency and absence/omission—but in the sub-themes that emerged as a result, like “Bodily Agency.” The designs in that section emphasize how dress “has served as a site of political and bodily expression” and include the Simone Rocha piece I mentioned earlier, due to the way Rocha incorporates the taboo notions of reproduction in her design.
Alongside it was another section titled, “Reclaiming the Body,” which highlights the way in which women designers subvert conventional gender expectations. It displays a handful of pieces from Rei Kawakubo’s 1997 “Bump” collection for Comme Des Garcons, where she famously stated: “Body meets dress, dress meets body, and they become one.”
While often described as “alien appendages,” the bumps that protruded from her otherwise tight, form-fitting dresses and skirts were meant to mimic everyday objects—a child on an arm or a bag slung over the shoulder. Kawakubo redefined the female silhouette as something that served less as an object of desire and more as a reflection of life itself.
As for Huber’s favorite parts of the exhibit, she mentions the image slideshow projected alongside the gallery wall text for the “Anonymity” section. “I love looking at these images of women and their expressions. I feel like their personalities are exuding from these images,” she says.
It actually recalled a memory from the Lagerfeld show this past Spring, which she supported Bolton on. “We had the great pleasure of bringing many of these women through the exhibition and seeing their reactions to the garments that they've worked on. And their pride in their work and the way that they interacted with each other and just how incredibly committed and connected they are to it was such a beautiful thing to experience and something that I really love about fashion. This idea that the collective nature of design is something that we really hope our visitors will consider.”
Looking around at the preview, with women complimenting each others outfits or pointing to each other's favorite designers on display, it felt clear that Huber's hope was already in motion. Now if only, as I overheard a handful of guests say, some of the big houses with open creative director roles would take note.
"Women Dressing Women" runs through March 3 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 Fifth Ave.
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