The Met’s Costume Institute Gala has morphed into one of the year’s biggest celebrity fashion events, partly because the gala uses each year’s theme to inspire the fashion of its guests. We wrote about last year’s Met Gala (“China Through the Looking Glass”), here. While the theme did inspire some truly beautiful looks (think Rihanna’s yellow silk couture by Chinese designer Guo Pei), the exhibit itself was a hodgepodge of problematic Orientalism, dabbling in the same exoticization and fetishism that mark many designers’ relationships with the “mysterious East.”
This year, the Costume Institute turned to a new fashion frontier with its theme “Manus x Machina,” an exploration of the way that fashion and technology intersect. In the past, the line between high and low end fashion fell roughly along the handmade vs machine-made—think painstakingly hand-beaded couture gowns opposite factory-churned fast fashion. But this divide is no longer so clear. New technologies, culled from mass-production, enhance the creation of the most rareified designs (for example, the intersection of thermoplastic film and hand embroidery), forcing us to rethink the relationship between industry and what has traditionally, but perhaps not quite accurately, been classed as pure artistry and craft. Continue reading “Met Gala 2016: Manus x Machina and Red Carpet Looks”
This exhibition, organized by The Costume Institute in collaboration with the Department of Asian Art, will explore the impact of Chinese aesthetics on Western fashion, and how China has fueled the fashionable imagination for centuries. High fashion will be juxtaposed with Chinese costumes, paintings, porcelains, and other art, including films, to reveal enchanting reflections of Chinese imagery.
From the earliest period of European contact with China in the sixteenth century, the West has been enchanted with enigmatic objects and imagery from the East, providing inspiration for fashion designers from Paul Poiret to Yves Saint Laurent, whose fashions are infused at every turn with romance, nostalgia, and make-believe. Through the looking glass of fashion, designers conjoin disparate stylistic references into a pastiche of Chinese aesthetic and cultural traditions.
The theme of this year’s Met Gala, “China Through the Looking Glass” offers fashion’s big names an opportunity to spotlight Chinese designers, celebrities, and aesthetic influence. Unfortunately, “China Through the Looking Glass” uses a myopic lens more often than not. The bolded words above are, obviously, my emphasis. They highlight moments where, even in the official copy, the exhibit and the Gala’s theme treat many centuries of Chinese aesthetic development as a sort of treasure hoard lying in wait for Western designers to discover and pastiche at will.
The exhibit itself does boast undeniably beautiful highlights. Here, Fei Fei Sun is photographed for Vogue in a John Galliano gown from Spring 2009. The inside of the skirt recalls the blue Chinese porcelain that fascinated Europe for centuries.
The root of the problem is the way in which this year’s Met Gala theme collapses all of China into a simple “theme.” The themes of past years have been pretty contained and more specific (“punk,” “superheroes,” “Schiaparelli and Prada,” etc.). Here, all of Chinese fashion history gets flattened into one image repository. This is the classic move of Orientalism (and various kinds of cultural Othering): to convert a vast, diverse culture into a string of marketable motifs. In China’s case, this has meant: dragons, phoenixes, and other visual markers that come to stand for an exotic, “timeless” China that is both outside of history’s flow and always available for Western use as aesthetic inspiration. The use of Chinese motifs as inspiration in European and American design is an interesting consideration, but hardly the whole story.
There were plenty of terribad looks from the Met Gala—Sarah Jessica Parker’s atrocious Philip Treacy headpiece comes to mind, in particular. So does Anna Wintour wearing fucking poppies, the symbol of Britain’s violent exploitation of China through the Opium Wars. Those looks don’t deserve more attention. Instead, below we highlight some of our favorite looks from the night, from those who either actually pulled it off, or wisely chose to eschew a theme that could so easily stray into appropriative territory.
Amal Clooney wears Maison Margiela by John Galliano, with a studded bodice that evokes the doors of the Forbidden City | Photo from Getty Images 2015
FKA Twigs in Christopher Kane | Photo from Getty Images 2015
Fan BingBing won the night in Chris by Christopher Bu. Everyone else can go home (except maybe Rihanna) | Photo from Getty Images 2015
Gong Li in Roberto Cavalli | Photo from Getty Images 2015
Hailee Steinfeld in Michael Kors channels (whether intentionally or not) the red apron tops beloved of children in Chinese cartoons | Photo from Getty Images 2015
Helen Mirren in Dolce Gabbana. Her laser-cut dress reminds me of Chinese papercraft art | Photo from Getty Images 2015
Jessica Hart’s oxblood dress brings to mind traditional lacquered pottery | Photo from Getty Images 2015
Rihanna basically won the Met Gala in this yellow cape-gown by Chinese couturier Guo Pei. RiRi was one of the only celebs to wear an actual Chinese designer on the red carpet. There’s also something amazing about wearing a gown so big and beautiful that it requires three grown men to stoop and scurry along after you, fixing the train as you majestically sail past on the red carpet. | Photo from Getty Images 2015
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