Two Chairs, newsletter #1: About Time: An understatement!

This is the first in a series that will revolve around the question “why?” After quarantining for several months at Two Chairs headquarters in South Windham, Vermont, we returned to New York last fall. One of the first exhibitions we saw was About Time: Fashion and Duration at the Metropolitan Museum Costume Institute. This exhibition haunted us and so we decided to explore the reasons why.

We got there at 10:00AM and there were about 50 people queued up outside, socially distanced–but that number, when dispersed throughout the museum, quickly dissolved among the various galleries so that very often you could find yourself alone. Making our way to the exhibition we felt a bit like the kids in From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E Frankenweiler by E. L. Konigsburg. After months of bumping against each other and facing the same few walls day after day it was delightful to be alone with Rembrandt’s self-portrait at 54 or the engaging church interior by de Witte with an abundance of curious details: a fresh grave in the foreground, kids writing on walls and a fetching dog peeing on a column. When we finally made it to the Costume Institute, the first garment on display was an American “mourning dress” dated 1870 that was paired with an Elsa Schiaparelli dress from 1939 that suggested the same silhouette. The mourning dress was embellished with “lace covered white satin bands” and a “scalloped hemline outlined with white satin piping” that signaled the wearer was at the point of “half-mourning.”[i] We almost cried. It was difficult not to think of a seamstress with strained eyes and hands working on this dress or the wearer–whom had she lost? And how can we measure levels of mourning now, during a pandemic, when mourning has lost the family and community-based rituals that make this passage more bearable? For us it was the object itself–the dress–that prompted this emotional reaction and not the exhibition’s overwrought soundscape–featuring Nicole Kidman and Meryl Streep reading from Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, with music by Phillip Glass and a ticking pendulum reminding us of the passage of time.

Moving through the exhibition there were several dresses by Charles James–one gorgeous gown from 1932 that we could imagine Barbara Stanwyck wearing at the summit of her social climb in the 1933 depression era film Baby Face. But most of the James gowns in After Time date from much later–around 1951 when the designer was pursued by wealthy socialites in need of extreme attention. A ball gown from 1951 made of “ivory silk satin” with “crescent-shaped puffs supported by an excess of fabric draped at the front and back of the hips” made us stand at attention–a precursor for his famous “clover leaf” ball gown. Charles James’ work is both breathtakingly beautiful and hilarious. The sculptural features of his ball gowns overwhelm their function as garments as well as presumably the bodies of their owners due to the weight of all that excess fabric. When we see “crescent-shaped puffs” we think of Judy Chicago’s frilly Emily Dickinson place setting from The Dinner Party[ii]. More recently, in 2020, Bat-Ami Rivlin conjures similar shapes out of an inflatable kayak constricted with zip ties[iii], a sculpture that recalls the bodice of the Charles James ball gown and the presumed discomfort of the wearer.  

Janelle Monáe appropriates this iconic shape, taking it to another level altogether fusing music, fashion, art and feminism in her 2018 queer femme music video Pynk.  Monáe and several others including Tessa Thompson perform a dance sequence in frilly “crescent-shaped” pants in bright pink hues. Pussy Power! in neon pops up in the video and really what more can be said?

Monáe’s pants and Chicago’s Emily Dickinson plate share a similar frilly shape but Monáe’s pants are incorporated into a buoyant celebration of black women and pussy power while the Dickinson plate is more like a cenotaph in porcelain, lace and satin. Fittingly, this month we visited a crisply curated group exhibition entitled Everybody Dies!, at Carriage Trade[iv] that deftly combined contemporary art with archival materials to create a documentary feel in an exhibition format. On a wall near the entry were four framed ads dating from around 1870 of “mourning prints” featuring images of available fabric swatches: mostly black but with variations of ghostly white patterns in stripes, dots, and flowers. If widows were expected to mourn for up to two years, they would need several dresses and as with the 1870 mourning dress in About Time they would also need to symbolically incorporate lighter colors as they moved out of deepest mourning. Emily Dickinson would have well understood these traditions; death and grief were her main preoccupations as disease and early death were an everyday event. Businesses had to keep up. The speed at which this pandemic has reaped untimely death upon untimely death, as bodies piled up in refrigerated trucks across the US, how will we be able to cope with the grief and move on at the pace required of us?

The catalogue accompanying About Time includes references to time from many of our most cherished cultural and intellectual icons–figures including Walter Benjamin, Elizabeth Freeman, Gilles Deleuze, Frederic Jameson, Lauren Berlant and  Jonathan Crary. This creates a strange rabbit hole where the problematic relationship of fashion to gender inequality, to class, to colonialism and to racial inequality is wholly sucked into the spectacle, silencing all counter arguments. From consumers to garment workers to models, women are prey to the fashion industry and central to it. From the 19th century to the present the precarity of garment workers has been a constant. During this pandemic garment workers in over 9 countries are facing destitution due to the cancellation of orders by international fashion brands resulting in layoffs and reduced hours. [v]

But the pieces in About Time are high end commodities comparable to high value art objects and their markets. Sadly–if accommodations and arguments for political and social value can be made in support of artworks in the 5, 6 or 7 figure price range why not for dresses?

[i] Bolton, Andrew. Essay. In About Time - Fashion and Duration, LX. Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2020.

[ii] Judy Chicago, The Dinner Party, Elizabeth Sackler Center for Feminist Art, The Brooklyn Museum

[iii] Bat-Ami Rivlin, No Can Do, M23, 24 Henry St. through March 21, 2021. https://www.m23.co/batami-rivlin-no-can-do  Discussing her process of assembling works Rivlin says: There is an interesting mutual relationship between materials that are assembled together. It mimics the functions of the human body and its relationship to objects that are around us. I’m interested in this tension created with the just-right amount of support or pressure to sustain comfort or shape. https://www.backyardghost.org/bat-ami-rivlin

[iv]http://carriagetrade.org/everybody-dies

[v]For more information: https://www.fashionrevolution.org/key-organisations/