New York: The
Metropolitan Museum of Art - The Costume Institute - China: Through the Looking Glass. Located in
the Chinese Galleries and the Anna Wintour Costume Center of The Costume Institute the exhibition China: Through the Looking Glass, until August 16, is
curated by Andrew Bolton. The exhibition explores the impact of Chinese
aesthetics on Western fashion and how China has fueled the fashionable
imagination for centuries. In this collaboration between The Costume Institute
and the Department of Asian Art, high fashion is juxtaposed with Chinese
costumes, paintings, porcelains, and other art, including films, to reveal
enchanting reflections of Chinese imagery.
The exhibition takes its name from Lewis Carroll's
Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There (1871), the heroine
enters an imaginary, alternative universe by climbing through a mirror in her
house. In this world, a reflected version of her home, everything is
topsy-turvy and back-to-front. Like Alice's make-believe world, the China
mirrored in the fashions in this exhibition is wrapped in invention and
imagination. Stylistically, they belong to the practice of Orientalism, which
since the publication of Edward Said's seminal treatise on the subject in 1978
has taken on negative connotations of Western supremacy and segregation. At its
core, Said interprets Orientalism as a Eurocentric worldview that essentializes
Eastern peoples and cultures as a monolithic other.
Video: The Metropolitan Museum of Art – Gallery Views
- The Costume Institute - Spring 2015 Exhibition, "China: Through the
Looking Glass," is narrated by exhibition curator Andrew Bolton.
Above - Manchu Road. When Western designers are
inspired by China's long and rich history, they invariably gravitate toward the
Qing dynasty (1644–1911), the Republic of China (1912–49), and the People's
Republic of China (1949–present), and respectively, the Manchu robe
Above. Chinese – Formal Robe for the Tongzhi Emperor
– 1862-74 – silk and metallic thread. House of Dior – John Galliano – Dress –
Autumn/Winter 1998-99 – haute couture – yellow silk damask – embroidered with
polychrome silk and gold metallic thread
Above. Jean Paul Gaultier – Socks - Autumn/Winter –
2010-11 - yellow silk satin embroidered with polychrome silk thread.
The Costume Institute - China: Through the Looking Glass. Moon in the Water. The exhibition's subtitle,
"Through the Looking Glass," translates into Chinese as "Moon in
the Water," a phrase that alludes to Buddhism. Like "Flower in the
Mirror," it suggests something that cannot be grasped, and has both
positive and negative connotations. When used to describe a beautiful object,
"moon in the water" can refer to a quality of perfection that is
either so elusive and mysterious that the item becomes transcendent or so
illusory and deceptive that it becomes untrustworthy. The metaphor often
expresses romantic longing, as the eleventh-century poet Huang Tingjian wrote:
"Like picking a blossom in a mirror/Or grabbing at the moon in water/I
stare at you but cannot get near you." It also conveys unrequited love, as
in the song "Hope Betrayed" in Cao Xueqin's mid-eighteenth-century
novel Dream of the Red Chamber: "In vain were all her sighs and tears/In
vain were all his anxious fears:/As moonlight mirrored in the water/Or flowers
reflected in a glass."
Above. House of Dior - John Galliano – Dress –
Spring/Summer 2003 - haute couture – red and polychrome silk brocade, gold lame
and red synthetic crinoline.
The Costume Institute - China Through the Looking Glass - Manchu Road.
In a surrealist act of displacement, the British milliner Stephen Jones,
commissioned by the Museum to create the headpieces in the exhibition and has
relocated these symbols, whose placement on the imperial costumes of the
emperor was governed by strict rules, to the head, where they appear as
three-dimensional sculptural forms.
Above. French – Evening Coat – ca. 1925 – double-sided
pink and blue silk velvet, quilted and inset with gold lame and brown mink fur.
The Costume Institute - China: Through the Looking Glass - People's
Republic of China. The Zhongshan suit, or Mao suit as it is more commonly known
in the West, remains a powerful sartorial signifier of China, despite the fact
that it began disappearing from the wardrobes of most Chinese men and women,
aside from government officials, in the early 1990s. For many Western
designers, the appeal of the Mao suit rests in its principled practicality and
functionalism.
Above. Chinese – Ensemble – 1983 – blue polyester
twill. Chinese – Ensemble – 1980s – worn by Tweng Kwong Chi – grey cotton
twill.
The Costume Institute - China: Through the Looking Glass - People's
Republic of China. The Mao Suit – Its uniformity implies, an idealism and
utopianism reflected in its seemingly liberating obfuscation of class and
gender distinctions. During the late 1960s, a time of international political
and cultural upheaval, the Mao suit in the West became a symbol of an anti capitalist proletariat. In Europe, it was embraced enthusiastically by the
left-leaning intelligentsia specifically for a countercultural and
antiestablishment effect.
Above. Vivienne Tam - Mao Suit – Spring/Summer 1995 –
white and black polyester jacquard. House of Dior – John Galliano – Ensemble –
Spring/Summer 1999 – Jacket: green silk shantung with red silk-satin piping and
gold metallic frogging: Skirt: pleated green silk Jacquard.
The Costume Institute - China: Through the Looking Glass
Alexander McQueen – Dress – Autumn/Winter
2006-7 – cream and polychrome silk brocade. Portobello Wallpaper – On electrum
gilded paper by de Gournay
The Costume Institute - China: Through the Looking
Glass. Blue-and-White Porcelain. The story of blue-and-white porcelain
encapsulates centuries of cultural exchange between East and West. Developed in
Jingdezhen during the Yuan dynasty (1271–1368), blue-and-white porcelain was
exported to Europe as early as the sixteenth century. As its popularity
increased in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, in tandem with a growing
taste for chinoiserie, potters in the Netherlands (Delft), Germany (Meissen),
and England (Worcester) began to produce their own imitations.
Above. Li Xiaofeng – The Weight of the Millennium – 2015
– blue and white porcelain shards.
The Costume Institute - China: Through the Looking Glass
Blue-and-White Porcelain Room
The Costume Institute - China: Through the Looking Glass
Blue-and-White Porcelain Room
The Costume Institute - China: Through the Looking Glass –
Chinoiserie. The idea of China reflected in the Haute Couture and avant-garde
ready-to-wear fashions in this gallery is a fictional, fabulous invention,
offering an alternate reality with a dreamlike, almost hallucinatory, illogic.
This fanciful imagery, which combines Eastern and Western stylistic elements
into an incredible pastiche, belongs to the tradition of chinoiserie, a style
that emerged in the late seventeenth century and reached its pinnacle in the
mid-eighteenth century. China was a land outside the reach of most travelers in
the latter century (and, for many others, still an imaginary land called
"Cathay"), and chinoiserie presented a vision of the East as a place
of mystery and romance. Stylistically, its main characteristics include Chinese
figures, pagodas with sweeping roofs, and picturesque landscapes with elaborate
pavilions, exotic birds, and flowering plants. That designers further elide the
already reductive symbols of chinoiserie allows fashion to seductively and
compellingly capture China's infinite complexities.
The Costume Institute - China: Through the Looking Glass
House of Dior – John Galliano – Ensemble –
Spring/Summer 2003 – Haute Couture – Jacket: polychrome-printed silk velvet with
yellow, blue and green silk organdy; Skirt; white and blue printed silk Georgette
The Costume Institute - China Through the Looking Glass – Perfume. Part
of the power of perfume lies in its synesthetic possibilities, and the idea of
China, confected from Western imagination, affords the perfumer a multiplicity
of olfactory opportunities charged with the seductive mysteries of the East.
Paul Poiret, famous for his fashions a la chinoise, was the first designer to
produce a perfume fueled by the romance of China. Called Nuit de Chine, it was
created in 1913 by Maurice Schaller and presented in a flacon inspired by
Chinese snuff bottles designed by Georges Lepape.
Above. Bryenne – G.K. (George Kugelmann) Benda – Chu
Chin Chow Perfume Presentation – 1916 – Flacon: enameled glass with gold
(mercury) leaf; Box: varnished paper with gold metal and yellow silk.
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