A refreshing new fashion exhibit at The Met hands the mic to pioneering women designers who dress women of all shapes and sizes. The exhibition shows how female designers have reclaimed the body—and are reclaiming the message in fashion.
“Women Dressing Women” showcases 80 garments by 70 makers, from couture gowns by well-known designers like Donna Karan to political garments by Katharine Hamnett to plus-size outfits by Ester Manas. The exhibition, curated by The Costume Institute, is on view at the Upper East Side museum from December 7 through March 3, 2024, included with museum admission. It highlights rare pieces from the collection, many of which are on view at The Met for the first time.
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“It’s a show that celebrates the artistic legacy of female fashion designers,” The Met’s Director Max Hollein said. “Fashion was a profession where women were permitted to work and to make their living. So in that sense, fashion was a site of female empowerment, and it was a female emancipation in production as well as consumption.”
The exhibition explores the subject through four sections: anonymity, visibility, agency, and absence/omission. Focusing on the period between the early 1900s and today, the collection offers a snapshot of fashion history and fashion trends.
Though it’s not labeled as such, the show strikes a fiercely feminist chord. That’s a welcome departure from the Costume Institute’s previous show on legendary designer Karl Lagerfeld, who had said things that were fatphobic, racist and misogynistic, as Time detailed.
“Women Dressing Women” was supposed to debut in 2020 to coincide with 100 years of women’s suffrage, but the exhibit was delayed because of the pandemic, Hollein explained. Though it took three years longer than expected, the museum stayed committed to the show because “it’s a major representation of the critical work of women creatives,” he said.
Fashion was a site of female empowerment, and it was a female emancipation.
To ground “Women Dressing Women” in history, the show begins with the recognition that male tailors dominated the garment industry in Europe before the establishment of a dressmakers’ guild in 1675. As America formed, garment making was seen as “women’s work,” though they toiled in anonymity.
During the war period in France, women designers outnumbered their male counterparts in fashion. Women who had worked in secondary roles like model makers, salespeople and workroom heads rose in visibility in leadership positions.
As women began exercising their newfound agency during the 20th century, designers sought to distinguish themselves amid a competitive fashion system. In the U.S., many of the first widely promoted designers were women in the ready-to-wear industry. Designers like Claire McCardell and Bonnie Cashin advocated for professional autonomy while also introducing design elements of ease and freedom that remain a part of our clothing today. Meanwhile, boutique culture flourished, as led by designers such as Betsey Johnson, Vivienne Westwood and Sonia Rykiel; the show includes garments by all three of them.
This section of the exhibition “engages with the ways in which women can utilize fashion to subvert conventional ideals of beauty, and explores how clothing can provide elements of bodily autonomy for the wearer,” said Mellissa Huber, associate curator of The Costume Institute.
Highlights include an upcycled lace bodysuit by Hillary Taymour, which was worn on the runway by Aaron Rose Philip, a model with cerebral palsy who uses a power wheelchair. Taymour has developed strategies to create clothes that are broadly accessible across size, age and gender. Other stand-outs in this section showcase Gee’s Bend quilters, artists using sustainable practices and designs for people with achondroplasia (or dwarfism).
There’s always room for revision in the ongoing evolution of fashion studies.
Finally, the exhibition concludes with an exploration of those who have been omitted from traditional fashion narratives. Perhaps most notable is Ann Lowe, a Black designer who worked during a period of segregation. The exhibition features Lowe’s floor-length cream-colored gown bedecked with her signature fluffy pink carnations along the skirt and a ribbon at the bust. Lowe even sewed the off-the-shoulder, ruffled wedding dress for Jacqueline Kennedy, though she didn’t get any credit at the time.
Lowe’s story is, of course, one of many left out of fashion history, and The Met’s exhibition seeks to correct that.
“We see the absence section as an epilogue of sorts,” Huber said, “indicating that there’s always room for revision in the ongoing evolution of fashion studies, and the ways in which history is both recorded and reassessed.”