It’s probably the only time you’ll ever hear Nicolas Ghesquière and Stan Lee mentioned in the same breath: The Metropolitan Museum of Art makes the case for an unlikely but fruitful link between haute couture and comic books with the Costume Institute’s new exhibit, Superheroes: Fashion and Fantasy.
The exhibit, which opened on May 7, 2008, divides the Marvel and DC stables into eight “bodies” — The Graphic Body (Superman and Spider-Man), The Patriotic Body (Wonder Woman and Captain America), The Armored Body (Batman and Iron Man), etc. — with a selection of couture outfits and movie costumes representing each category. Visitors are invited to consider the official thesis that “[t]he fashionable body and the superhero body are [both] sites upon which we can project our fantasies,” and the most part the show builds a surprisingly convincing argument.
The fashion pieces are interesting in their own right, especially if names like John Galliano, Alexander McQueen, and Jean Paul Gautlier mean anything to you. Anyone who’s ever encountered an issue of Vogue can attest to the fact that true high fashion is strange, and to this unpracticed eye the outfits had an outlandish wonder about them. My favorite was Thierry Mugler’s “Chimera” dress from The Mutant Body (X-Men) section, which combined fish scales and bird feathers into one otherwordly work of pure color and shine.
But you’re geeks [of doom, no less], so I’m guessing you’re really here for the “Superhero” part. I’m happy to report that the exhibit delivers on that front. Costumes from this summer’s Iron Man (the silver one, before he paints it red) and The Dark Knight are present, along with several older costumes including Christopher Reeve’s costume from the 1978 Superman. Interestingly, the fashion side has a way of normalizing the superhero costumes. Next to the bizarreness of, say, Balenciaga’s gold metal leggings, what’s so weird about wearing your underwear on the outside a la Superman?
Some of the connections suggested by the exhibition were more tenuous than others. I can certainly see the link between Batman and Iron Man’s armor and our “defensive paranoia” about the frailty of the human body, but I fail to see Spider-Man’s suit as being so iconic that any spiderweb pattern “cannot help but [invoke]” the character. The beautiful webbed gowns looked to me like they took their inspiration from Mother Nature, not Steve Ditko. Overall, however, the show provides good food for thought, finding connections where neither geeks nor fashionistas have probably thought to look. And, well, you can’t argue with the awesomeness of seeing these legendary costumes in the flesh.
Superheroes: Fashion and Fantasy will run at The Met through September 1, 2008.
