Bolton’s rigorous left-brain exercises of the last two years - the excellent, tech-minded “ Manus × Machina” in 2016 and the body-questioning retrospective of Rei Kawakubo last year - this show is a return, for better and worse, to the high spectacle of “ China: Through the Looking Glass.” It goes heavy on the Catholic drama, with mannequins posed as angels and novitiates, and there’s music throughout. Most of the designers here were or are Catholics, including historical figures like Elsa Schiaparelli, Cristóbal Balenciaga, Christian Lacroix and Yves Saint Laurent, and active designers like Jean Paul Gaultier, John Galliano, Raf Simons and Maria Grazia Chiuri.Īfter Mr. It runs from its dedicated downstairs hall to the Byzantine and medieval galleries and into the Lehman Wing it then continues at the Cloisters, the museum’s serene home for religious art in Upper Manhattan. “Heavenly Bodies” is the largest exhibition ever offered by the Met’s Costume Institute and was organized by its curator, Andrew Bolton. But it takes communion at Fellini’s church rather than Francis’s - a surreal congregation whose parishioners express their devotion through enchanted excess. Sacrilegious? Heavens, no: The show is deeply respectful of the world’s largest Christian denomination, even reverential. Here is papal regalia of unsurpassed intricacy, but also space-age brides, monastic couture, angels in gold lamé, and a choir up in the balcony dressed in head-to-toe Balenciaga.įor the 55 designers exhibited here, Catholicism is both a public spectacle and a private conviction, in which beauty has the force of truth and faith is experienced and articulated through the body. Years in the making, it includes exceptional loans of vestments from the Vatican - some of which have never before left Rome - and more than 150 ensembles of secular clothing from the last century. I wonder what both Francises, saint and pontiff, might make of “Heavenly Bodies,” the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s colossal, hotly debated and richly anointed exhibition on the interweaving of fashion and Roman Catholicism. He was Saint Francis of Assisi, and when the archbishop of Buenos Aires was proclaimed pope in 2013, he gave himself a new name, in honor of a man unembroidered. But when he had his calling he stripped off his fine clothes, pledged his body to God, and spent the rest of his life in a mendicant’s robe. His father was a wealthy cloth merchant, and in his youth he gamboled about Umbria in colorful, dandyish outfits. Once there was a man who wore the finest silks in Italy, but traded them all for sackcloth.
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