Left: The Model as Muse, 2009
money has helped fund the expansion and modernization of the Institute’s storage and curatorial facilities, its study center and, most visibly, its exhibition spaces, including the Tisch Gallery. All will be reopened for the gala and will henceforth be known cumulatively as the Anna Wintour Costume Center. Within the Brooklyn Museum Costume Collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art will be a definitive collection of works by the enigmatic Anglo-American designer Charles James. James worked with a sculptor’s eye for grace and an engineer’s command of structure. He dressed Marlene Dietrich, Babe Paley and Dominique de Menil, among others, for the heady postwar nights of the 1940s, ’50s and ’60s before slipping into illness and a lonely death at the Chelsea Hotel in 1978.
“Anna Wintour, now a Met trustee, and credited with having raised $125 million for the Institute, will also be recognized.”
Digesting the treasures of Brooklyn, though, presented significant institutional and logistical questions for the Met. The acquisition, according to Koda, was “both an opportunity and a challenge.” It placed huge new demands on the Institute’s not-infinite resources, and, ultimately, on its basic capacities for display. Enter philanthropist Lizzie Tisch, who had been swept into the Friends of the Costume Institute by the organization’s lectures and its meetings with up-and-coming designers, now serves as the Institute’s chair. She told me, “I always thought it was a little strange that the Institute was essentially homeless. The clothes just weren’t accessible. It wasn’t like, say, the Egyptian Wing, where things would always be on display.” So, along with her husband Jonathan, Lizzie entered into discussions with Koda’s right hand, Andrew Bolton, and with the curator-in-charge himself. “As time went on, our informal conversations became a bit less informal, she chuckled. “Harold and Andrew began to talk about their ideas, and about a ‘wish list’ for the Institute.” Built with a $10 million gift and the active design and planning input of its benefactors, the Lizzie and Jonathan Tisch Gallery will provide a flexible and dynamic 4,200-square-foot central exhibition space. It’s not meant to be static or staid. “We’ve created a ‘black box’ in a theatrical sense,” Koda told me. The idea is to expand presentational creativity and innovation. For the Tisches, said Lizzie Tisch, “It was never going to be about the space, but about what the space could do.” Anna Wintour, now a Met trustee, and credited with having raised $125 million for the Institute, will also be recognized. The Right: Schiaparelli and Prada: Impossible Conversations, 2012 76 | AVENUE MAGAZINE • MARCH 2014