Special exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art through August 19.
After the showstopping tragic-rock-star flash of the Alexander McQueen exhibit last summer, the Met's Costume Institute seems to have swung all the way in the opposite direction. This summer's exhibit is a cerebral, fashion-nerd pairing of the work of two designers, Elsa Schiaparelli and Miuccia Prada, with relatively little in common—so little, in fact, that the combination is inscrutable at first. The two women are several generations apart (Schiaparelli was born in 1890, Prada in 1949), with such different attitudes toward and approaches to fashion that the comparisons and contrasts drawn between their work often feel cute but shallow: Schiaparelli emphasized a woman's head and torso, while Prada focuses attention on legs and feet! Okay, then. So?
It turns out the "So?" is where the exhibit comes to life. Inspired, apparently, by a series of "Imaginary Interviews" that ran in Vanity Fair in the 1930s, the curators truly have imagined what a conversation between Schiaparelli (who died in 1973) and today's Prada might sound like. They highlight writings and interviews with the designers, of course, but then, in their most audacious choice, they invited director Baz Luhrmann to create videos in which "Schiaparelli" (a heavily made-up Judy Davis) and Prada converse over a long dining table. And as whimsically bizarre as those videos are, they're not frivolous. They engage with the designers' ideas and philosophies and inspirations—riffing on Schiaparelli's documented thoughts and a probing interview of Prada—and in that, they're fascinating.
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