Versace drew inspiration from the Met’s 1997 blockbuster, “The Glory of Byzantium,” and these clingy sheaths set the stage for an encounter between religious art and clothes for the (rich and thin) laity. He presented them for fall 1997: a season he never saw, as he was murdered that summer in Miami. More inspired are Gianni Versace’s diaphanous dresses of gold and silver mesh, a signature material that the designer garlanded with crosses. Five evening dresses from a recent collection of Dolce & Gabbana feature hand-sewn paillettes that cohere into icons of Mary and the saints, based on the mosaics of a Sicilian church. The exhibition’s presentation of secular clothing begins on either side of the Met’s central staircase, in the hallways devoted to Byzantine art. Then conclude at the most contemplative, and strongest, third - the gowns evoking orders and sacraments at the Cloisters. You can begin your approach to this trinity of fashion with the showcase of holy vestments in the basement galleries, or you can start upstairs with the grand secular displays inspired by Catholic hierarchy and ceremony (the weakest third). “Heavenly Bodies” is, to use a formula Catholics will find familiar, both one show and three. This intermarriage of religious art and secular fashion feels refreshing in places, silly in some either way, it’s an event. (Playing in the medieval sculpture hall is an intolerable loop of staccato string accompaniment, drawn from a film soundtrack by Michael Nyman, that will make you wish the Costume Institute would take a Cistercian vow of silence.) It also places the clothing amid the Met’s superb collection of Byzantine and medieval art - ivories, tapestries, reliquaries. Bolton’s rigorous left-brain exercises of the last two years - the excellent, tech-minded “ Manus × Machina” in 2016 and the body-questioning retrospective of Rei Kawakubo last year - this show is a return, for better and worse, to the high spectacle of “ China: Through the Looking Glass.” It goes heavy on the Catholic drama, with mannequins posed as angels and novitiates, and there’s music throughout. Bolton’s partner) and Kate and Laura Mulleavy of Rodarte but designers from Latin America, the pope’s old stamping ground, are dismayingly absent.Īfter Mr. Most of the designers here were or are Catholics, including historical figures like Elsa Schiaparelli, Cristóbal Balenciaga, Christian Lacroix and Yves Saint Laurent, and active designers like Jean Paul Gaultier, John Galliano, Raf Simons and Maria Grazia Chiuri.Ĭatholic Europe dominates the United States is represented by Thom Browne ( Mr. It runs from its dedicated downstairs hall to the Byzantine and medieval galleries and into the Lehman Wing it then continues at the Cloisters, the museum’s serene home for religious art in Upper Manhattan. “Heavenly Bodies” is the largest exhibition ever offered by the Met’s Costume Institute and was organized by its curator, Andrew Bolton. But it takes communion at Fellini’s church rather than Francis’s - a surreal congregation whose parishioners express their devotion through enchanted excess. Sacrilegious? Heavens, no: The show is deeply respectful of the world’s largest Christian denomination, even reverential. Here is papal regalia of unsurpassed intricacy, but also space-age brides, monastic couture, angels in gold lamé, and a choir up in the balcony dressed in head-to-toe Balenciaga.įor the 55 designers exhibited here, Catholicism is both a public spectacle and a private conviction, in which beauty has the force of truth and faith is experienced and articulated through the body. Years in the making, it includes exceptional loans of vestments from the Vatican - some of which have never before left Rome - and more than 150 ensembles of secular clothing from the last century. I wonder what both Francises, saint and pontiff, might make of “Heavenly Bodies,” the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s colossal, hotly debated and richly anointed exhibition on the interweaving of fashion and Roman Catholicism. He was Saint Francis of Assisi, and when the archbishop of Buenos Aires was proclaimed pope in 2013, he gave himself a new name, in honor of a man unembroidered. But when he had his calling he stripped off his fine clothes, pledged his body to God, and spent the rest of his life in a mendicant’s robe. His father was a wealthy cloth merchant, and in his youth he gamboled about Umbria in colorful, dandyish outfits. Once there was a man who wore the finest silks in Italy, but traded them all for sackcloth.
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