Arts & Manners: Balenciaga at the Met

One of the most original shows in New York this summer has been at the Metropolitan Museum’s Costume Institute, which, in presenting the clothes of the Spanish designer Cristobal Balenciaga, has accomplished the not inconsiderable feat of bridging the gap between art and fashion.

During the 1950s and 1960s it became a critical cliché to deplore the way styles in art were replacing one another “with the capriciousness of fashion,” which, since time immemorial, has pursued newness for newness’ sake, eternally seeking a gimmick to make last year’s wardrobe obsolete. To all but those directly concerned with it, fashion design has always seemed a bit suspect. Seldom have its practitioners received critical attention outside trade publications and women’s magazines; typically, it took half a century for the great French dressmaker, Paul Poiret, to be recognized as a pioneer in the development of Art Nouveau. In short, the word fashion, to art critics and intellectuals generally, is a dirty one, applied pejoratively to anything ephemeral, trivial, short-lived. Thus it is something of a surprise to realize that precisely during the Fifties and Sixties, one fashion designer, Balenciaga, was creating a body of work that in terms of originality, flair, and sheer sensuous beauty, could be compared with the best of what was being done in painting and sculpture during the same period.

RB

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Ruth Berenson

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One of the most original shows in New York this summer has been at the Metropolitan Museum’s Costume Institute, which, in presenting the clothes of the Spanish designer Cristobal Balenciaga, has accomplished the not inconsiderable feat of bridging the gap between art and fashion.

During the 1950s and 1960s it became a critical cliché to deplore the way styles in art were replacing one another “with the capriciousness of fashion,” which, since time immemorial, has pursued newness for newness’ sake, eternally seeking a gimmick to make last year’s wardrobe obsolete. To all but those directly concerned with it, fashion design has always seemed a bit suspect. Seldom have its practitioners received critical attention outside trade publications and women’s magazines; typically, it took half a century for the great French dressmaker, Paul Poiret, to be recognized as a pioneer in the development of Art Nouveau. In short, the word fashion, to art critics and intellectuals generally, is a dirty one, applied pejoratively to anything ephemeral, trivial, short-lived. Thus it is something of a surprise to realize that precisely during the Fifties and Sixties, one fashion designer, Balenciaga, was creating a body of work that in terms of originality, flair, and sheer sensuous beauty, could be compared with the best of what was being done in painting and sculpture during the same period.