The Model as Muse: Embodying Fashion

Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Through Aug. 9

When—and how—did “Gisele, Naomi, and Tyra” become household names? asked Cathy Horyn in The New York Times. “Sometime in the 1980s, fashion models left the glossy kingdom of Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar and moved in with us.” A new exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art traces the rise of the model from anonymous face in a magazine to full-fledged celebrity. In the 1950s, photo­graphers Irving Penn and Richard Avedon first became known for their close relationships with such models as Dorian Leigh and Suzy Parker. In the 1960s, Twiggy’s face was everywhere, photo­graphed by Bert Stern and others. These graceful images combine “a sense of femininity” with a hint of proto-feminist assertion. Later photographers, including Bruce Weber, helped promote “supermodels” like Naomi Campbell and Kate Moss—and at this point the exhibition becomes little more than “icon-mongering.”

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This “provocative” exhibition mostly provides a depressing history of “how these living mannequins shape a population’s definition of beauty,” said Robin Givhan in The Washington Post. At some point, fashion photography shifted from “selling clothes to selling the body wearing the clothes.” When fashion moved from the high-style frocks worn by Parker to the short skirts of Twiggy, “women’s bodies were freed from the constraints of bullet brassieres and girdles.” But fashionistas’ passion for narrow waists and “perky breasts” remained.

As a result, “to be fashionable, a woman needed to have a particular kind of physique,” rather than just the right outfit. This was great for the modeling careers of women blessed with such impossible bodies—but not for the rest of us.