Puttin' on the Ritz in Gotham

By JAY COCKS

Two exhibits celebrate the giddy heights of fashion

On one point, anyway, there can be no argument. "La Belle Epoque," the new show of period high fashion organized by Diana Vreeland for New York City's Metropolitan Museum of Art and underwritten by Pierre Cardin, is an eyeful and a noseful. The eye is ravished by a theatrical assembly of more than 150 women's, men's and children's costumes, representing thousands of yards of fabric coaxed into stunning shape with a skill and diligence that today cannot be had anywhere outside of major surgery. The olfactory nerve, meantime, gets a good working over from L'Heure Bleue, a Guerlain scent that is sprayed every morning throughout the galleries. The senses reel. They are meant to. This is not art--if clothes may be called art at all--meant to be pondered and absorbed. This is curatorial show business of a particularly shrewd order. With the humble addition of a light show and the sale of Pharmaceuticals at the ticket counter, "La Belle Epoque" could be honestly promoted as a real time trip.

Vreeland's ten previous collaborations with the museum's Costume Institute have been both hot tickets and publicity bonanzas, and "La Belle Epoque" shows every sign of being a smash too. The women's gowns of the era, which by Vreeland's chronology developed in the last half of the 19th century and ended on the eve of the first World War, were opulent and imperial. They may have been the most extravagant fashion since the court of the Sun King. Worth, Doucet, Callot Soeurs, Poiret: the great fashion houses are all represented with gowns and dresses that seem to challenge, in some cases even exceed, the outer limits of craftsmanship. Who would have thought it possible for a bodice to be shaped in such a way, or for silk to fall so unhurriedly, like a dove on a light wind? The clothes of this period were an exercise in sensual extravagance, not only of highflying technical virtuosity but of high-flown social aggression. A gown by Worth was more effective than a quip that silenced a rival. Its beauty seemed inviolate: 19th century social armor.

The sensual suffocation of these grand clothes was modified and ventilated for outdoor wear. The looseness of a mohair duster, the easy lines of a woman's blueserge bicycle suit, even a white wool polo coat from Brooks Brothers, all prefigure a less restrictive notion of sophistication. The summer whites of Newport are as dazzling to a contemporary eye as a violet satin costume brocaded in gold and silver, supposedly worn by Sarah Bernhardt.

There is a grandiose theatricality about the entire exhibition that, ultimately, gives the clothing a secondary role. For all the sensory overload--the perfume, rooms decorated (courtesy of Cardin) to look like Maxim's, the Offenbach piped in like a sound track for an ancient travelogue--"La Belle Epoque" is less an evocation of mood or an exhibition of high style than it is an exaltation of swank, of money, of society. In that sense it is about fashion, not clothes, historical re-creation without historical perspective.

There is no attempt to describe or delineate a house style, to demonstrate how a gown by Worth might be designed or constructed differently from a gown by Paquin. Paul Poiret, one of the first modernist dress designers, is represented in this show by five pieces, but anything that made Poiret daringly innovative is smothered here in the general ambience. In this great age of squeeze, tie and whalebone, Poiret even made dresses to be worn without corsets, but this idea, and all others, goes unremarked by the exhibitors. They busy themselves instead compiling identifications for each garment that list first the fabrics of the dress, then its owner. The designer or the house that made the dress is relegated to smaller type. That is fitting enough, perhaps, for a show so smitten with what used to be called society. Nostalgia may waft through these corridors like L'Heure Bleue, but it is based in longing not for a vanished elegance but for trammeled privilege and status cut on the bias. Remembrance of rank past.

In contrast, "The Genius of Charles James," which opened at the Brooklyn Museum and travels to the Chicago Historical Society at the end of April, is a model--simple, detailed, elegant and a bit fanatic--of what such shows should be. It encompasses the work of one of the very few great designers America has produced. Starting in the late 1920s, James labored in a fine frenzy within the airy precincts of haute couture. He believed himself to be an artist, the equal of anyone who created with paint or plaster, and he died at 72 in 1978, just like the burnt-out creator of so much contemporary myth, broke and broken, working out of a cluttered, crumbling studio at Manhattan's Chelsea Hotel. The show contains some 50 pieces, each a practical study in suspended line, upended gravity and undiluted elegance.

His clientele included Standard Oil Heiress Millicent Rogers, Lily Pons, Gypsy Rose Lee and assorted acolytes of high society, and this show, too, takes undue pains to pat the backs that were once adorned by James. But where Vreeland bows deep, the Brooklyn Museum's curator of costumes and textiles, Elizabeth Ann Coleman, nods briefly and moves on; she keeps the major focus fixed on clothes. James' designs had spiritual roots in the Belle Epoque, but their bold architecture makes them look right up to the minute--or, in the case of some dresses on display, just ahead of it. In 1937 he designed a quilted evening jacket of white satin that he filled with eider down. Salvador Dali called it the first soft sculpture (Was Claes Oldenburg listening?), and James himself thought his design had inspired the U.S. military when they needed heavy-weather gear. Indeed, James frequently thought that he was being knocked off, especially by the vulgarians on Seventh Avenue. Undoubtedly he was. No one, however, could reproduce his 1937 evening mantle made of pre-World War I ribbons or his grand ball gowns.

Like his "Abstract" gown of 1953, they were all fashioned with a mathematical precision and structural daring that made them distinctly contemporary and distinctively James. His signature was as bold as, say, Alexander Calder's.

With his customary calculated hyperbole, James once called himself a "sartorial structural architect," and some of his gowns were constructed on the body like suspension bridges.

His creations could weigh as much as 18 Ibs. Recalls a client: "He was sometimes so entranced by the shape he was 'sculpting' over one's own shape that when the dress arrived finished it was impossible to get into it. It existed on its own."

James conducted a simultaneous flirtation with and excoriation of the mass market, and seemed to be the very model of Hollywood's stereotypical fashion designer: compulsive, effeminate, occasionally hysterical, frequently hectoring, always demand-ling. Franklin Pangborn kissed by the furies. The exemplary catalogue for the show features an excellent introduction to James' life and creations by Curator Coleman, some reminiscences by James' clients and Photographer Bill Cunningham, and a long, detailed grouping of his work, including many pieces not in the exhibit. "The Genius of Charles James" tends to his more extravagant creations. It skimps on his coats, for whose easeful geometry he was particularly renowned, but it does still manage to convey not only the spirit of a great designer but a suggestion of his essence. And anyone who wants to argue that a maker of fashion can be an artist could do no better than to start here. The ground in the vicinity seems particularly firm underfoot.

-- By Jay Cocks This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.