Exhibit of the week: American Woman: Fashioning a National Identity

Metropolitan Museum of Art

New York Through Aug. 15

Sometimes fashion can “turn whole cultures upside down,” said John Zeaman in the Bergen County, N.J., Record. “At least, that’s the way things look” in the glamorous new exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute, which chronicles the changes in American couture during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Using almost 80 outfits created over five decades, it “follows women through a fascinating series of transformations” that curators have boiled down to six archetypal looks: the Heiress, the athletic “Gibson Girl,” the Bohemian, the Suffragist, the Flapper, and the Screen Siren. No matter the style, women’s choice of clothing in each era made “statements about their independence, sophistication, and sexual attitudes.”

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This is “one of the best and most visually striking” shows in the Costume Institute’s history, said Roberta Smith in The New York Times. The American Woman brings these haute couture clothes to life by displaying them in specially designed half-moon galleries decorated to evoke various eras. “For the bohemians of the 1910s, we get a fabulous re-creation of Louis Comfort Tiffany’s studio; for the flappers in the 1920s, a skyscraper nocturne based on the paintings of Tamara de Lempicka.” Generally, hemlines just keep on rising throughout the period, while the beaded, embroidered motifs of the late 19th century are gradually replaced by simpler, more geometric designs. “The patterns on a French dress from 1925 evoke the Chrysler building, not yet built.” Yet though the exhibit is a visual feast, after a while a feeling of “delirious yet discomforting unreality” sets in. After all, how much can we really learn about “the American woman” of the past, when we’re only studying the “shifting, usually unattainable ideals of femininity of the leisure class”?

Almost nothing, said Katie Roiphe in the Financial Times. The biggest problem with The American Woman is that, in truth, “there is no ‘American Woman,’ only millions of assorted American women: the huddled masses, the poor, the sick, the hungry, and the very, very rich.” Because this exhibition focuses only on the final group, its account of the great cultural shifts of the 20th century seems superficial. Its “seductive, if random-seeming, archetypes”—dreamed up by the curators to give the endeavor an intellectual sheen—are nothing more than reductive stereotypes, which the show itself cynically perpetuates. The American Woman wants to pass itself off as bold feminist history, but “it’s closer to dreams and advertising.”